Blast From the Past: Westerns ... "Star Trek" ... and "As You Like It" ....

Victory Dance, painting by Frederic Remington

In September 1961, the start of my Junior year at CHS, I signed up for Journalism (an elective) under the aegis of our blog friend and periodic contributor Darryl Morris (also our Junior English teacher), who was then a new teacher at CHS. I was absolutely thrilled (really and truly, beyond my hopes or expectations) when Darryl named me Feature Editor of The Corral, our student newspaper, that year. (Them that don't expects, don't get disappointed ... an expression which might have flunked me in Darryl's English class.)

Not too long into the semester, Darryl brought me a couple of columns, "On Campus", written by the great Max Shulman, the creator of Dobie Gillis (who had many loves) and fabulous characters such as Maynard G. Krebs ... WORK?!?! (Contrary to rumor, Glen "Teedle" Sanders did NOT take, or at least keep, Maynard G. Krebs as a role model....) Darryl asked me if I thought I could write something like Shulman's work. I read the columns, loved them, and dutifully told Darryl that I would do my best.

So began almost two years of writing my "humor" column (at least I hoped it was humorous) "As You Like It" ... a title filched from the great William Shakespeare ... who as noted in my comment to Linda Kay under my blogpost "Valentine's Day ... Words of Love ... and "The Butterfly Lovers"... (published February 12, 2008), was not terribly reticent when filching from others. Hey ... at least with Shulman and Shakespeare, I figured I was in great company. (grin) As my darling Yahn says, only steal from the best....

Writing "As You Like It" ... trying to come up with a "new" topic every week ... and then trying to turn the topic into something which might cause at least a few to "grin" while reading (kinda like writing for the blog) ... became my best experience in high school. I must admit (LK and Sheila) that band did run a close second, but of course the "solitary" act of writing didn't have anywhere near the camaraderie we enjoyed on the band bus, despite my lifelong habit of talking to myself ... out loud ... as myself and in another persona.... (See Linda Kay's topic post: "Friday Night Lights: The Sound ... and the Flurries...?", published January 27, 2008.) Writing became a true passion for me ... when it was not total terror as I looked at a blank page and contemplated the full weight of the meaning of "DEADline" ... which would also come to play a HUGE role in my career as a paralegal.... But I digress....

Toward the end of that school year, I was approached by Carol Higley, who with her husband Morris owned and published The Childress Index. Carol asked me if I would like to work during the summer for what was then the "daily" Index, and learn some things about actually working and writing for a real newspaper. (I still do a mean wedding and obit.) Carol and Morris also wanted me to continue to write "As You Like It" once a week. Oh boy!!!! Would I like to??? How much would I have to pay THEM to attain this halcyon dream??? I almost fell off my chair when Carol said they would PAY ME!!!! O brave new world ("borrowing" again)....

Carol even ran a little notice in the Index the day I started: "Jennifer Johnston, popular [me???] columnist for The Corral, Childress High School publication, has joined the staff of The Index for the summer. Among her duties will be to write her column "As You Like It".... It is written especially for young people. But we think adults will enjoy it, too. Miss Johnston will be a Senior in the Childress High School this Fall." Summer 1962 ... 3M summer ... Maris and Mantle and Marilyn.... I had my first "real" job, making the goddessly sum of $50 per week ... which really wasn't all that bad in those days. The Higleys (particularly Carol) were very generous to me in many ways, and I will always think of them with love. And, in my Senior year at CHS, I did realize my dream of becoming Editor-in-Chief of The Corral.

In going through some things recently, I found some of my old columns, and thought you might like to reread them. (I am of course assuming you all waited breathlessly each and every week for a new one, way back when, and therefore this will be a reread ... grin). So, launching another ongoing blog series like "Bobcat Treasure" and "The Times of Our Lives", Nicki and I thought it might be fun to share with you my somewhat jejune scribblings from that time ... teenaged angst to the max, sturm und drang, warts (NEVER!) and all.

Journalistic integrity (there is still some left) requires that I recreate the columns here, exactly as I wrote them, and as they were printed (sans typographical errors, of course ... I hope). I have successfully resisted the temptation to edit, rewrite and edit some more ... to tinker, or tweak, or think "Well, this could be better if I substituted...." Every cringe-worthy attempt at turning a phrase remains intact. Please be kind in judging these columns, dear readers ... I plead youth and idiocy (redundant, I fear).

The first column I've decided to publish here (by special request of our friend Mike Spradley, who assures us he will reappear on the blog soon) is the one about Westerns ... specifically television series Westerns ... not getting into the old cinema classic Westerns like Red River, The Searchers and Rio Bravo. You remember them ... we cut our figurative teeth on Roy Rogers' television show, and Davy Crockett with Fess Parker ... and the TV stalwarts Wagon Train, Gunsmoke, The Lone Ranger (featuring a Native American sidekick, "faithful Indian companion Tonto", played by Jay Silverheels), Zorro (featuring a "Latin" hero played by Guy Williams), Have Gun Will Travel (featuring a mustache attached to Richard Boone), Rawhide (before Clint Eastwood became "the man with no name" in a sub-genre, the "spaghetti" Western, with the "rollin' rollin' rollin'" title song done by Frankie Layne), and so many others.

What a good many of us lacked the maturity to recognize then was that the good TV Westerns arguably reflected our society at the time in microcosm, particularly some of the less than sterling aspects of it (racism, sexism, McCarthyism, etc.). Each week our favorite series presented a morality tale within the boundaries of a half hour or one hour format, giving us not only the stoic, upright heroes who populated them as role models, but food for thought as our nation morphed from one national mindset into something more diverse and sometimes darker in the 1960s. Those old TV Westerns also inarguably influenced popular entertainment in the late 1960s, and beyond. Gene Roddenberry, the creator of the wildly popular (and long-lived) Star Trek series, said that Star Trek (Kirk, Spock and company) was actually conceived to be Wagon Train in outer space. Many of the plots of the TV Westerns, like many plots today, were derivative (not to say filched) of others, so anyone who was paying attention (and watched a lot of television) could not help but be aware of the similarities in many of the plot lines. But again I digress....

So, without further ado (or "much ado about nothing" ... groan) I give you "As You Like It" ... this one written in the summer of 1962 (sometime after Newton Minow's description of television as a "vast wasteland", referring specifically to the increasingly violent Western ouevre) ... when I was 15 years old. If you hate it ... or the things I've written for the blog ... you can blame Morris and Carol Higley and Darryl Morris (there's a certain symmetry in those names) ... they actually encouraged me....


Eric Fleming as Gil Favor and Clint Eastwood as "Rowdy" Yates, in Rawhide


As You Like It
by Jennifer Johnston

To get to the point, my topic for today is television. You know -- that little box that sits in your living room or den -- around which the family gathers every evening, never to be moved. More specifically, the topic is television programs, which will be fully discussed in various articles over the next two or three weeks.

Let's start with Westerns. There are Westerns on every channel, every evening. Now I'm not against Westerns. I just wonder why they all have the same major plot. You know, it all goes something like -- First, we have the stolid older hero; then we have two or three younger heroes. Now these heroes meet up with a kid -- a victim of society, naturally. Everybody's a victim of society these days. Well, it seems that the kid's dear daddy was hanged for being a horse thief. Now everybody else knows that Popsie WAS a horse thief, except for the kid and Momsie. So all these years, Momsie has told her dear sonny-boy that Popsie was a victim of society -- see what I mean? And what is more, the stolid, upright, narrow-minded townspeople won't let Kiddio forget his old man was a horse thief.

So naturally the kid hates the world. And naturally he becomes a gunslinger. And naturally he decides that he's going to rub out the Judge that sentenced dear old Dad.

Now we meet the Judge. As you've already figured out, the Judge is a sweet, lovable old man who thinks of duty first. He CAN'T be a hanging judge because then the audience would understand the kid they're not supposed to understand. So the kid gets a job working for the heroes so he can study the Judge, who naturally is a good friend of the heroes.

However, living among such sweetness and light, the kid decides he's been wrong about the Judge, so he takes a full bullet chamber home to Momsie. Now of course the audience becomes aware of the fact that Momsie is a war-monger -- more specifically, a nut for killing. More specifically, a plain, everyday, tutti-frutti NUT. However, the audience feels sorry for her because they know that she knows her husband WAS a horse thief, and is just a victim of society herself. Anyhow, when "dear boy" comes back empty-Judged, she raises the thatch. She browbeats the kid so much that he heads for town, bent on wiping out the Judge.

Somehow, the heroes hear about this and try to head him off. Of course they never find him until he's right in front of the Judge's house screaming for the Judge to "come out and die like a man!" So the heroes give him the old spiel about "You can't do this." So he decides to wipe out the heroes first.

Now of course the heroes don't draw because they have faith in the kid's better nature. (They also have faith in the fact that they have a two-year contract with the studio.) So, as the kid takes careful aim, a shot rings out -- or rather, a blast crashes through the quiet streets -- the kid bites the gravel, and the heroes wheel around to see Momsie holding a smoking shotgun. She has finally come to her senses and "just couldn't let him do it." Well, then she runs over to the kid, who looks like a sieve. The kid naturally lives long enough for her to tell him that his Dad WAS a horse thief, that she has been wrong, that it was her fault, and that she was sorry. Then the kid tells Momsie it's all right, thanks the heroes for trying to help him, coughs a little and dies, as Momsie goes into hysterics and is gently led away by the heroes.

I don't care if the kid gets shot between the eyes -- he lives long enough to play a good old dramatic-type scene every time.

So, to use an old phrase, tune in for our next episode, all about crime in the big city, brought to you by ME -- who else? Snarf.

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