Gene Autry and me
by Joe Palmer
[ places - june 06 ]
The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way. - John Stuart Mill (1806-73)
In a typical, small town in Indiana, where people knew everyone's business, long before the virtual world of television, corporations, and the internet turned our discordant, intimate community into a McTown - an ideal, homogenized market where everything is as seen on TV - I grew up. I can even remember when the brands of bread, candy, beer, and clothing were remarkably different in other states, folks bought their groceries at the neighborhood store, and many of them spoke immigrant languages at home. Today, the entire United States is one of a kind, homogenized like a carton of milk, and different in total from all other nations in the world. Before long, however, such is the power of modern television that the entire world will be just like Los Angeles, with gangs fighting over their turf.
The American Experiment was still going on then when I was a boy. Different sorts of people with their old, traditional ways lived together as Americans, more or less mutually respectful of each other, having strong, patriotic reasons to pay attention to each other much of the time. The essence of human nature that we cannot easily give up is freedom from interference, so Americans choose not to interfere with each other. That is the charm of America, but such liberty sometimes leads to death when we do not recognize its limits, something Patrick Henry did not declare. When we think about it, it seems we have the positive freedom to do very little, like invading other countries, without heavy consequences.
In 1950 at the age of 16 I had to register for the military draft. The United States was sending high school athletes off to Korea as second lieutenants to meet the Chinese. I had to prove how old I was, even if I was half blind and didn't want to go. My cousin Donnie had already left for training, and so had 'Ace' Edwards, my girlfriend Margie's brother. Ace came back from Korea in a box. They paid me $10 every time I got hired to play taps on the cornet at military funerals. The Korean War was good business for General Motors and me.
My birth certificate was a triangular scrap of brown paper bag signed by Old Doc Hoover with the words in pencil "To Granville Harold Palmer and Edith Lenore Miley, baby boy Darwin November 16, 1934, Decker. It became a certificate in the Knox County clerk's office, later filed with the draft board after I legally added my first name to it.
I had been called 'Joey' all my life. Darwin, my middle name, is my grandfather's middle name. His brothers were named Luther and Gilbert, after Martin Luther and Sir Humphrey Gilbert, 'Sir' after he helped put down the Irish.
I had met my grandfather only once, on the day that Gene Autry and Smiley Burnett came to Vincennes to sing and clown around at the Coliseum, the civic arena and basketball tabernacle. I have a photograph of me in my band uniform and Gene in his cowboy shirt and white hat on the steps inside the JC Penney store on Main St, with Smiley making a funny face behind me. It was a photo opportunity for the store, Gene Autry, and the Lincoln High School Band, whose director, Oscar L. Dunn, had a fund-raising deal with Mr Autry. I was president of the band, so I had to be there in uniform.
I asked Gene Autry, "How's Trigger?"
"Fine, fine," he answered. Trigger was the name of Roy Rogers' horse, and Gene Autry wasn't paying any attention to me. Grandma always said my humor was oblique, like my Uncle Don's.
My dad had brought his dad to JC Penney's to meet me. My grandfather was just passing through town. He was there dressed as a retired gambler in a camelhair coat, tattersall vest, and homburg. He had worked for the Earl Shelton Gang out of Herrin, Illinois, over in Little Egypt, and he had passed through Vincennes once before, in 1931, when he gave "a lot of money" to my dad, Granville Palmer, known as 'Granny'. My dad's grandmother, Sarah Jane Cox Heacock, had raised my dad, just as my dad's mother, Delta Heacock Cargal, had helped raise me. Such country ways are the result of poverty and tradition. People do what they have to do in order to get by, no matter how uncouth they are in some people's eyes. For example, my teachers mostly could speak only one way, and that was in the South Midland dialect, which sounds crude to some people. Their spelling, on the other hand, was often original.
I had to add my name to my birth certificate when I went to see the judge to have it approved. I was called Joey after my grandmother's husband Joseph Cargal, a coal miner not by choice. Nobody digs coal because they want to. Grandma had the habit of marrying her lovers. Joe Cargal was her fourth husband and my acting grandfather, not by blood. I was named after him. He was Joe, and I was Joey. The judge, Mrs Thorndyke, who was also the town clerk, asked me "Is this correct: Joseph Darwin?"
Now, I had got the notion that Joseph was a sissified Roman Catholic name just as Joey, I learned to my embarrassment, was a girl's name, like Joy or Joie, and if there was one thing anathema to me it was Catlickers. Grandma, who helped raise me, had taught me to hate and fear them. We were Nazarenes. When the Catholics took over the United States they would rip open the bellies of Protestant women and kill their babies. They were going to build a new Vatican City in Cincinnati, all those Micks, Spics, Frogs, Krauts, Hunkies, Wops, Pollaks, and Dagos, those mackerel-snappers. Grandma was a minor dragon in the Ku Klux Klan. Her robe was pink because that was the color of the cloth remnant she had bought at JC Penney & Co.
The wealthy folks in Vincennes, and most of them were Catholics, gave us poor people their attention when they had to, if we tried to become friendly with their daughters, for example, or they wanted to get elected to some office. The prejudice against working class people extended as it always does to the public schools. I had skipped the fourth grade, and so in seventh and eighth grades I was placed in the top class of streamed students, but when I went across Sixth St to Lincoln High School, I was cast out to drown in the general stream for proletarian children, not in the academic classes for those bound for college and university. No Latin or Trig for me. It was assumed that I, whose father drove a truck for a living, would not want to do anything different, I suppose. No one asked me, so I spent much of my time in school reading books from the Carnegie Library instead of doing my lessons. I was graduated next-to-last, not last, in my class of 132 students, not last because I got As in French and geometry. The teachers of those subjects, David Jackson and 'Whitey' Couts, had a lot to say to me.
Catholics in Vincennes were the others, the ones to be distrusted, the rich people who could afford to send their kids to parochial, private schools, and did so because they thought they were better than us, they told me we thought.
The enmity I felt for Catholics was the same fear the Unionist Party members in Ulster felt, but I did not know it, nor did the family and friends who gave me my prejudices. We were hicks, yokels, bumpkins, hayseeds, hillbillies, field hands, sharecroppers, clodhoppers, pea-pickers, white trash, good old boys, and rednecks, and proud of it. We had our niggers too, just like the rich people, but our niggers were black people. They lived in Niggertown off Hart St. We gave them the bony, trash fish we caught, like gar and carp, and leftover produce from the fields. They would eat anything, my dad said. We treated them like our betters treated us, with selfish care and satisfying disdain. Of course, we had something they didn't have, and vice versa.
In fact, it was a black man who held our town together. 'Cap' Embry, a distinguished and nobly handsome Negro, was the umpire at all important baseball games, and playing souzaphone in the First Regiment Band, he kept the music at the band shell in Greg Park from carrying us away.
So it is that antipedobaptists perpetuate ignorance. With no educated person, a priest, for example, to guide them, those who do not baptize babies, but choose to baptize adults, or children at the age of responsibility (Bar Mitzvah), choose any names they please. So we hear the names Billy Bob, Shaquille, Tammi Faye... Just look at the first names of the athletes on television to see examples of a practice that certain literate commentators like Dr [Bill] William Cosby decry.
Down in the country we often don't even know the Christian names of our friends. I was astonished to learn that my cousin Buzz was really Adrian. Grandmother's given name was Della, a new and popular name during the 1870s, and she changed it to Delta after the birth of her first son, whom she named Nile. My mother had an uncle named Admiral Dewey, no kin to Major Major or Sargeant Shriver. One of my male cousins was named Geraldine, but he was no sissy. A deputy shot him when he tried to rob the bank in Monroe City. He bled out on the front porch at home.
The giving of nicknames for the nonce freely and whimsically, as President Bush does, is an exercise of positive freedom, of living without prohibition, as if every man were his own boss, that is, there is a correlation between naming and freedom. Some people are positively free to choose any name that others can recognize as a name. Others, on the other hand, like the buyers of Model-T Fords, are negatively free to choose the only color available. A serious question is whether such freedom to make up a name is better than the negative freedom of having to choose among a list of approved names, as the French until recently had to do by law. President Truman's middle name was 'S' Ima Hogg was the daughter of a governor of Texas.
A name formerly signified that the bearer lived up to the honor and dignity of his ancestors. It was a sacred part of his identity. When a murderous Arab asks his name, Lieutenant Lawrence (of Arabia) replies, "My name is for my friends. My friends are not murderers."
My people are at heart libertarians; they would rather have freedom than food. That's something politicians of both parties do not seem to understand. "Don't tread on me," is still their motto. Their pride in liberty is to die for. If you agree, you'll find no better friends than us Red-State Americans, even though we want to be let alone. Our basic values come from our Scots-Irish ancestors, like our traditional music and our in-born distrust of authority in any form.
In spite of my name and the familiarity it implies, I seem not to have lost anything by it. Luckily for me, descriptive and familiar nicknames are common, like that of my dear friend Jimmy-Gene Harris, not James-Eugene, the world's greatest phonetician. He's from Arkansas, another Red State like Indiana, home of Richard 'Red' Skelton, Grandma Delta's next-door neighbor in Vincennes.
Orvon Gene Autry, the singing cowboy (1907-1998), whose father Delbert was a Methodist minister in Texas, was never Eugene. Gene is not to be confused with Jean, a form of John or Jan, or Ian, nor with jean, as in "blue jeans", from jean fustian, which is from Middle English Gene meaning from Genoa, Italy. Eugene is from the Greek eugenios, meaning "well-born," {eu, good + genes, born}.
Another "Jimmy" is President Carter, whose legal name is James Earl Carter Jr. He was careful not to use that name after James Earl Ray was accused of killing Dr Martin Luther King Jr (1929-1968). Doctor King Jr was named Michael when he was born in 1929, but after his father had visited Germany in 1934, he changed his son's name to Martin Luther King Junior. He was then known as 'ML' and 'Tweed'.
They gave the Gene Autry Show there in the Coliseum on Sixth St, with Gene riding Champ onto the basketball court with burlap gunnysacks tied onto the horse's hooves with baling wire. Gene and his band played and sang my favorite songs – 'Mule Train', 'Marie Elena', 'Boots and Saddle', 'I'm Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes', 'I'm in the Jailhouse Now', 'My Blue Heaven', and 'Deep in the Heart of Texas'. Gene had a fine tenor voice, and could he yodel!
I said right then and there that Gene Autry was my favorite singer, after Mario Lanza, or maybe Al Jolson.
That was the year I met Dr Alice Preston, who taught French at Vincennes University. She was an old gal and foreign acting. I delivered her groceries that summer, riding a bicycle with a big basket and a small front wheel, from Bay's Grocery across from the Courthouse. Dr Preston had studied with Wanda Landowska at her Ecole de Musique Ancienne in Paris before the war and in Connecticut with her afterwards. They were such good friends that they lived together. Wanda, or 'Vonda', as Dr Preston pronounced her name, had rescued the harpsichord as a musical instrument when nobody was playing it anymore. After work I used to stop by Dr Preston's apartment on Busseron St, and she played phonograph records of the most beautiful harpsichord music for me. Fugues fascinated me, and I found that I had pretty good relative pitch, so she arranged for me to take lessons in music theory from her friend Sister Cecile at the Sacred Heart Academy, where I learned about the cycle of fifths, the works of Palestrina and JS Bach, how to sight-read solfège, and what the Eucharist means. Sister always gave me a piece of fudge at the end of each session, which was free, by the way. I wasn't so lucky with girls my own age.
