Tonight, for no useful purpose whatever, I’m going to tell you about a movie I saw almost half a century ago—once. It’s lingered in my mind ever since, and I have no idea what it was called or who acted in it. Maybe you can help.

I must have seen it before 1960, when I was ten years old, because I’m sure I saw it at my grandparents’ old (big) house, rather than their later (smaller) house. I had the idea at the time that it was quite an old film, perhaps an early “talky,” but I could be mistaken. It was a long time ago, and I’m keenly aware how faulty my memories can be. The summary of the plot I’m about to give you is probably wrong in several places. But this is how I remember it.

The movie opens a few years before the Civil War, somewhere in the American Midwest. Very likely Illinois, for reasons that come up later. The hero of the story is first seen as a boy, living on a farm with his loving mother and his legalistic, sadistic preacher father (a character Hollywood would find it convenient to clone and recycle countless times in the years to come). The boy dreams of becoming a doctor, and gets his hands on a collection of medical journals. He keeps them hidden from his father, though, because his father considers them things of the devil. (I’m not sure why. I don’t know of any Christian church that considered medicine evil in those days. Perhaps the old man just disapproved of all printed matter that wasn’t the Bible.)

The father discovers the journals (in the barn, I think), and gives the boy a vicious whipping (in the barn, I’m certain). The violence of the whipping so panics the family’s horse (a white one to which the boy is deeply attached) that it injures itself in its stall. Because of this it gets a noticeable scar on its flank.

Eventually the boy runs away from home (with or without the horse, I’m not sure, though boy and horse part company at some point) and goes to medical school. When the Civil War begins, he becomes a surgeon in the Union Army.

After a particular battle, a general is brought in to the hospital with a horribly injured arm. Informed that the arm will have to be amputated, he begs them to try to save it. He promises a great reward to any doctor who can save his arm.

Our hero notices the general’s white horse, and sees the old familiar scar. It’s his old family horse. So he goes to the general and asks if he can have the horse if he saves the arm. The general agrees, so he goes to work with all his skill, and somehow works a miracle. The arm is saved and he gets the horse.

Later he (along with the horse, I have no doubt) performs an act of conspicuous gallantry, and he wins the Congressional Medal of Honor. He’s sent to Washington, DC to be decorated by President Lincoln, and the president makes time (because the young man is from Illinois, if I remember correctly) to talk with him a while. When Lincoln learns that the young man has not been home since he ran away, he chastises him for neglecting his mother. In his capacity as Commander in Chief, he gives the young man leave and orders him to go home.

After that I can’t remember anything.

Anybody know this movie?

Update: OK, a little more Yahooing turned the film up. It’s called “Of Human Hearts,” and was made in 1938. It starred Walter Huston as the preacher father, and James Stewart as the son, once he’d grown up. Beulah Bondi played Stewart’s mother, the first of several times she did that.

From the synopsis, the film appears to have been a little more sympathetic to the father’s situation than my memory recalls, but all in all my reminiscences don’t seem to be too far off track.

You can stop hunting now.

Update to Update: Thanks to reader Paul Stieg, who e-mailed me with the correct answer at about precisely the time I found it myself. He says that, alas, it’s not yet available on DVD.

I worry about national morning talk show host Laura Ingraham.

I listen to her show every day, and I have a lot of fondness for her. I think I was half in love with her a couple years back, when her show was more fun. Also she recently hired Bryan Preston, the founder of Junk Yard Blog, who was probably the highest profile advocate for my writing career, back when I had a writing career.

But Laura’s gotten shrill, it seems to me, since her major health crisis a couple years back.

This morning, she was taking calls from Republicans in Texas who’d crossed party lines to vote for Hillary, just as spoilers for Obama. She was cheering them on, reveling in their stories.

I don’t like this. It seems to me that if you love this country you’ve got to hold the electoral process in a kind of reverence. The fact that there are cynical people out there who game the system doesn’t justify us, the people who say we believe in moral absolutes, in pretending to belong to a different party so we can sabotage its nomination process. If they did it to us, I’d be angry about it.

Maybe I’m just judgmental.



Think Daylight Saving Time conserves energy? Maybe not.

Q: What is so rare as a day in June?

A: February 29.

(That’s not my gag. Walt Kelly used it in Pogo about eight or nine leap years ago.)

Today, a parable.

Once upon a time there was a land where only children lived. It was a happy land of flowers and sunshine and gentle, playful animals.

The only problem in all of the happy land was the Mean Boys. There weren’t a lot of mean boys, but everybody was afraid of them. The teased. They pushed ahead in line. If they got really mad, sometimes they beat up the smaller kids.

Some of the children went to Maddy, the Smartest Girl. “What are we going to do about the Mean Boys?” the asked, crying.

Maddy said, “This isn’t as big a problem as you think. The Mean Boys aren’t all that powerful.”

“But they’re big!” said one little boy. “And when you try to stand up for yourself, they just laugh at you and take your stuff.”

“Yes, they’re big,” said Maddy. “But you know what? They may be bigger than you are, but they’re not bigger than all of us are.”

“What does that mean?” asked a girl.

“It means that if we all work together, we can beat them. They aren’t strong enough to fight all of us.”

“You mean we gang up on them?”

“Yes,” said Maddy. “When they get mean, we all have to fight them together. Soon they’ll learn that they can’t beat the power of all of us working together.”

“But we can’t be together all the time,” said the little boy. “What if they catch one of us alone?”

“We have to make sure we’re never alone,” said Maddy. “From now on we all stay in groups all the time. I’ll organize the groups, and you’ll have to stay with your group all day and all night. Never leave the group.”

“Sometimes I like to be alone,” said a Smart Boy (not smarter than Maddy, but pretty smart).

“You want to get beat up?” asked Maddy.

The Smart Boy was about to say something, but then decided not to.

And so it was done. All the children organized into groups, and they stayed together all the time, and whenever the Mean Boys picked on someone, the whole group gathered around them and beat them up.

And after the Mean Boys had stopped beating kids up, Maddy announced that the Mean Boys wouldn’t be allowed to tease anyone anymore either. And the Mean Boys had to go along with it.

And everyone agreed that Maddy should be the queen, because she’d figured out how to make life perfect for everyone. And everybody did what Maddy said.

And Maddy got to have the nicest room, and the nicest toys, and nobody disagreed with her, because all the others would beat them up.

And sometimes Maddy teased the Mean Boys, or even kids who weren’t actually mean or boys, if she didn’t like them. And everybody agreed that that was OK, because Maddy had done so much for all of them.

And sometimes, when Maddy got really angry with somebody, she’d tell the group to beat them up. And of course they did that, too.

But all in all things went very well in the happy land.

Until one day some cars came over the hill.

Teenagers got out of the cars.

And they had guns.

(Now that I’ve written this out, it isn’t as profound as I thought it was. But it’s written, and I’m not going to find another subject tonight. Have a good weekend.)

Late and short tonight, for I have fared through perils and straits that have left me a shadow of my Former’s elf. (I don’t know what that means, but it’s a pun, which counts as humor in some quarters.)

I told you recently about my trip to my tax preparer’s new location, and my problems finding the place in the trackless wilderness of Maple Grove, Minnesota. Tonight I went to pick up the forms (and incidentally to pay for them), and I found the place just fine. Tonight, the problem was the weather.

We got about an inch of snow today. That’s not a big deal, especially for hardy arctic types like we’ve all become by now. But the snow fell at just that temperature, right around freezing, where it does the most effective possible job of turning the road surfaces to Teflon.

I was about half way there when I admitted to myself that it would have been better to wait till tomorrow night. But by then I was (to paraphrase Shakespeare’s Macbeth), in snow stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er.

So I made the full trip, carefully making allowances for the limitations of my car (which are many), and I got home safe and sound.

So how shall I think about this? Shall I consider myself a brilliant driver, because I made it home without a fender-bender? Or shall I consider myself an idiot for making the trip at all on a night like this?

Yeah, like I have a choice about that.

Dale Nelson sent me this link to a London Telegraph list of “50 Crime Writers You Should Read Before You Die.” It’s been linked at other blogs, but I think it belongs here too. Without doing the actual math (which would tire out my brain muscle), I think I’ve read something by about half these authors. I’m not sure I’m all that keen to check out most of the remainder. They seem rather dark and nihilistic and “significant” to me.

In regard to the title of this post, OK, I never actually met William F. Buckley. Or corresponded with him. Or with anybody who ever met him, as far as I know.

I can’t even say he brought me into conservatism. To be honest, although I’ve ready many of his essays, the only books of his I’ve read have been some of his novels. (Which are very good.)

But he was part of my pilgrimage.

I first became aware of him in Green Bay, Wisconsin, one evening around 1970 when I was making a brief visit to the home of a friend. As is my wont, I was checking out the bookshelves, and I saw a book entitled Up From Liberalism, by William F. Buckley.

What a great title, I thought.* So I pulled it off the shelf.

You must understand that I was a Democrat in those days. My dad had always been a Democrat, and a few years of college had managed to convince me that if you were a serious Christian, you had to be a Democrat, because the Democratic Party was the party of compassion (this was before they nudged all the pro-lifers out). So sneaking a peak at a politically conservative book had something of the same shameful thrill as sneaking a look at a copy of Playboy.

I was amazed by the back of the book jacket. You know how most books have a series of quotations from favorable reviews on the back?

For this book, Buckley chose to list a selection of the nastiest things that had been written about his previous books by liberal reviewers.

I realized that I was looking at sheer, unalloyed brilliance.

In a conservative. There was a little cognitive dissonance there.

But that impression and that memory remained with me over the succeeding years, as I slowly realized that the Democratic Party was no longer tolerating my beliefs, and that some of my political beliefs were fatheaded anyway.

Rest in peace, Mr. Buckley.



*For those of you who suffer from a contemporary education, and therefore know nothing of American history, Up From Liberalism was a take-off on Up From Slavery, the autobiography of Booker T. Washington, whom you probably heard about during Black History Month.

I’m getting another cold. This winter has been essentially wall-to-wall colds. I don’t recall such a bad string since I was a kid, and had adenoids.

For some reason I woke up this morning when my renter got up (about 5:00 a.m.). I never do that.

Then I checked my alarm clock. In the dark, instead of hitting the light bar, I knocked the thing clear off the bedside table. When I found it again, I discovered that it had decided that the year was 1997 (it’s one of those atomic clocks, with a brain of sorts), and that I wanted to get up at 2:00 a.m. I spent about fifteen minutes getting the thing re-set.

And then I forget to turn the alarm on.

When I got to work (I made it on time), I found that the atomic clock I keep on my desk (love those things. What could be better than having an Unseen Servant automatically re-set your clock every night?) had suddenly decided that it was in a different time zone.

And the cash register neglected to figure sales tax on a purchase.

I think my machines are conspiring against me.

Speaking of the sales tax, our honorable state legislators just voted to raise ours. The governor vetoed it, but they overrode him.

In the last election they regained control of both houses, running on the promise that they’d “give a break to the middle class. Make those rich folks pay their fair share.”

So they raised the sales tax. Because—you know. The middle class doesn’t buy—you know… stuff.

And they raised our vehicle registration fees. Because the middle class doesn’t own cars.

And they raised the gas tax. Because those middle class folks never buy gas.

This will be a wonderful opportunity for the Republicans in Minnesota this fall, if they have any brains.

Which, this being Minnesota, is problematic.