Yesterday?s news still relevant to our changing times

FRANK MIELE

Every day I receive a growing number of e-mails and a dwindling number of letters. Call it the hourglass effect because it definitely is a sign of the passing of time.

The top half of this ?hourglass? contains letters, handwritten and typed, that arrive in the morning mail each day, and the bottom half is filled with electronic mail that comes to my in-box. Eventually, when all the letters have vanished from the top of my imaginary hourglass, and at the same time the bottom half has filled to capacity ? it will be something like the official end of an age.

I?ve already written about my love for the printed page, and my hope and belief that there will always be a place for printed newspapers in people?s lives, but I suppose handwritten letters may be even more endangered than newspapers. Fewer and fewer people seem to have the patience to craft thoughts before applying them to a sheet of paper of finite length and width. Instead, they gush breathlessly ? without punctuation, capitalization, or salutation ? in e-mails that are measured not in lines but in kilobytes, and which for all intents and purposes are of infinite capacity and provide instant gratification.

I am as guilty of this crime against the written word as much as anyone. I have been known to resort to the shorthand of emoticons and the near gibberish of acronyms which may or may not mean what the writer intends them to mean. Is LOL ?lots of laughs? or ?laughing out loud?? And what if you aren?t really laughing out loud? Can you still use it?

Oddly enough, this meditation on the value of the printed word was brought up by a mystery package I received this week from a Mr. Clarence Francis of Billings that actually didn?t contain any letter at all in it. But how I wish it did.

What it contained instead was a three-quarter-inch-thick stack of yellowed newspaper clippings (including many from Kalispell?s own Daily Inter Lake) that dated from the 1940s and ?50s and centered around the construction of Hungry Horse Dam, but also had much information about wars and society at large.

Without a letter inside the envelope, however, there was no word on what I was to do with this treasure trove of history, and there was no phone listing for Mr. Francis and no way to determine who he is.

That absence of information had a double impact on me. First all, it made me wish that Mr. Francis was more of a letter writer. I would love to have known why he sent the package to me, what his connection might have been with the Hungry Horse Dam or with Northwest Montana, and how he had come to settle in Billings. But even more, it freed my imagination to look at this strange collection of history in any way I wished or wanted, and thus allowed me in essence to write a letter to myself about what we can learn about ourselves by studying our past, not just our individual past but our collective past, our written past. How exactly did we get to this place and this time, and can we tell how many wrong turns we have made along the way?

The first thing I realized was that Hungry Horse Dam could never be built today. One Bureau of Reclamation photo from the May 4, 1951, Inter Lake showed an aerial view of the dam site, with a panoramic view of the South Fork of the Flathead and the dam, which was then only half finished. I instantly wondered what kind of Environmental Impact Statement would have to be written by today?s bureaucrats in order to flood thousands of acres of ?grizzly habitat.? How many appeals? How many lawsuits? How many roadblocks would be put in the way of such a project?

Plainly, it would be impossible. The Hungry Horse Dam, which we so admire today, and the Hungry Horse Reservoir, which we so enjoy, could not be conceived by a modern politician, let alone put into effect. Heck, we can?t even manage to build a few windmills in the middle of the Great Plains without offending someone. Fortunately for us, the EIS was not invented till after the great pyramids of Egypt were completed.

Another thing that caught this editor?s eye was the preponderance of stories about fairly minor infractions in the legal system. From time to time, I get a phone call from someone trying to keep his or her name out of the court report on our Records page. They are invariably unsuccessful, but perhaps they could take some comfort in knowing that they generally do not merit a headline and story for their appearance in court. Back in 1951, Merl E. Sagen of Route 1 in Whitefish was not so lucky. He got fined $10 for operating a motor vehicle with faulty brakes and got a nice writeup on the back page of the A section on May 4. Same for Howard Francis Coyle, who got a five-day jail sentence and a $25 fine for reckless driving. And P.D. LaBigne got fined $10 for faulty display of license plates.

My favorite though was Clinton G. Shingledecker, 57, who appeared before Police Judge Tom Stacey on a drunkenness charge. As the story goes on to report, Shingledecker was ?sentenced to leave town within an hour.? No word on whether he made his way down to Kalispell to enjoy one of our fine establishments here, or decided to hop a train instead.

Perhaps the biggest eye-opener, however, was the Inter Lake editorial of May 1, 1953. It suggests that perhaps things haven?t really changed as much as we think, despite the laptops and iPods.

Under the heading ?Silly Entertainment Taboos,? the Inter Lake editor (who at that time was M.D. Glover) wrote about a chambermaids? union picketing in front of a Broadway theater because they did not like the way that a maid was portrayed in a current play set in 1907.

?This points up a trend in American life that seems headed toward ridiculous ends…? the editor sagely predicted. ?Hundreds of sensitive groups of all kinds have made it utterly plain to the writers and actors and producers of today that they want nothing portrayed which will show them in the slightest unfavorable aspect.?

Of course, what we call that today is ?political correctness,? and as you know, it has arrived at ?ridiculous ends.? The latest example of that is the pillorying of Bill O?Reilly for awkwardly making the point on his radio show that white Americans and black Americans are really not that different despite the walls that have grown up between us. Unfortunately, O?Reilly has been accused of racism because he dared to use himself as an example of someone who had a preconception that turned out to be untrue. O?Reilly?s acknowledgment, which was intended to help white people be less afraid of black people, should be something we can all learn from. Instead, people will now be even less willing to acknowledge their own fears and prejudices, thus trapping us more securely in our ?safety zone.?

I don?t know if the Inter Lake?s editor circa 1953 was truly enlightened or not, but he sure hit the nail on the head in this editorial.

?It?s obvious to all of us,? he wrote, ?that we can?t tell the story of American life and American individuals humanly and realistically if we are to be barred from depicting the traits and attitudes which characterize our many and diverse groups…

?Of course, there?s no room in America for bigotry or for mean, calculated assault upon any group that has a rightful place in our society. But to get protection from the bludgeoning of evil men, you need not seek immunity from every pinprick.?

Well put, Mr. Editor. I couldn?t have said it better myself.