Sometimes it is good to acknowledge your influences and the people whose work has changed your life into what it now appears to be. Such a person, a profound influence on my story-telling habits, is Garrison Keillor.
“GKpress” by Prairie Home Productions. Licensed under Attribution via Wikimedia Commons – http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GKpress.jpg#/media/File:GKpress.jpg
This man in the picture who looks like one of my relatives, is the story-teller, writer, and radio personality Garrison Keillor.
The only way to accurately explain this whole honorarium-business is to tell you a story… You see, Great Grandma Hinckley, when she was reaching the tarnished end of her golden years, the latter part of her 90’s, the nearly-a-century mark, always called me “Donny”. Apparently “Michael” was too hard a name to actually remember. To be fair, though, it was my Uncle’s name, and I did look in the 1970’s very much like Uncle Don when he was a youth in the 1950’s. And though Great Grandma had more great grandchildren to keep track of than “Carter had little liver pills,” she always knew that I was one of the smart ones. When I graduated from high school I earned a full four-year scholarship from my dad’s company due to my high grades and test scores. She was very proud of that fact. She told all of her friends at the nursing home that of all of the awards presented at the senior awards assembly, I had won most of them. This was not even remotely true, except when viewed through the smoky, rose-colored lens of great grandmother-hood, but it led to all the people at the home saying things like, “You must be Donny! Congratulations on your great big brain!” Some of them even knew already that my name was Michael. Only now that I am getting old do I begin to understand old-people humor a bit better.
So, Great Grandma wanted to give me a really good graduation present. She gave most of her obligatory grandkid presents as hand-crocheted Afghans in bright neon colors that were wildly mismatched because she was color blind. But me, she gave me her radio. Yes, a portable radio roughly the size of a large school lunchbox. It was an RCA… that’s a brand of radio for you young whippersnappers who don’t know anything about what was irreplacebly good in the mid-20th Century. It was one of the most valuable things she still owned, and the TV set was too big to take to college (thank goodness). So I took that ultra-valuable old radio along to college to listen to music while I studied. Dad had hooked me on classical music, so I listened to the Public Broadcasting channel KLYF in Des Moines.
That is how I came to be a fan of Garrison Keillor. Every Saturday night, along about 7 p.m., KLYF broadcast another episode of A Prairie Home Companion. I would listen to the gospel music and ads for Powdermilk Biscuits and gossip from the Chatterbox Cafe in Lake Wobegone, Minnesota. And Garrison Keillor, old G.K., would tell stories about the doings in Lake Wobegone, his old (fictional) home town “Where all the women are strong, the men are good-looking, and the children are above average.” It was there that I learned that every good story may ramble on a bit and have a long pause or two, or twenty, but always came to the point in the end. I learned that from Garrison Keillor. But I may owe a bit of that to Great Grandma Hinckley too.
Catch a Falling Star 
The Cowboy Code
When I was a boy playing cowboys and Indians with cap pistols and rubber tomahawks, we all knew that cowboys had a code. The guy in the white hat always shoots straight. He knows right from wrong. He only shoots the bad guy. He even shoots the gun out of the bad guy’s hand if he can. Westerns are about right and wrong, good and bad, and the unyieldingly good knights of plains.
And boys believe what they see on TV and in the movie theaters. People who make television shows never lie, do they? In fact, Wyatt Earp was based on a real guy who really lived and really shot the bad guys at the gosh-darn real OK Corral.
Daniel Boone was a real guy too. He faced the opening up of new lands full of deadly dangers. And when Fess Parker played him in 1964, wearing Davy Crockett’s coonskin hat, he walked the earth like a guardian angel, making everyone safe by the end of the episode. He even knew which Indians were good and which were bad. Mingo was always on Daniel’s side. And when they spoke to each other about the dangers they faced, it was never about killing the people they feared. It was about doing what is was right, about helping the community at Boonesboro to survive. Being encouraging… looking forward to a more settled future created by following the cowboy frontier code.
So, I am left wondering what ever happened to the cowboy code? I listen to Republican presidential candidates talking about dipping bullets in pig’s blood to kill Muslims, and building walls against Mexican immigrants, and why our right to carry assault rifles is sacred, and I wonder what happened. Didn’t they experience the same education from the television versions of the Great American Mythology? Didn’t they learn the code too?
I am old enough now to know that cap guns are not real guns and you cannot solve problems by shooting somebody. But that was never the point of the cowboy code. We need straight-shooters again in our lives, not to shoot people, but to tell the unvarnished truth. We need wise people who can tell who are the good Indians and who are the bad We need them to shoot the weapons out of the bad guys’ hands. And I know that’s asking for leaders to be larger than life and be more perfect than a man can actually be. But Daniel Boone was a real man. Myths and legends start with a fundamental truth.
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Tagged as arizona, autobiography, childhood beliefs, cowboy code, Daniel Boone, humor, politics, Red Ryder, Roy Rogers, satire, writing, Wyatt Earp