Front Porch Perspective
Russ Palmer started Front Porch Perspective out of the notion that we are a divided country- because it's a lie. People aren't as hostile towards new ideas and opinions as it might appear. In fact, we're mostly the same. Here, we're looking to recover the value and appreciation of the nuances, the 10%, of other people's perspectives.
So far, it's working...
Front Porch Perspective
Exploring the Worlds of Broadcast and Politics
Have you ever wondered what it's like to navigate the dynamic world of radio? Today, we're speaking with Marvin Granger, a stalwart of Yellowstone Public Radio for 22 years who got his start in the industry as a young announcer at a tender age of 14. His tales of the early radio days, pre-NPR educational radio at the University of Minnesota, and the thrilling journey to creating his successful show, Your Opinion Please, make for an unforgettable oral history of radio.
But Marvin's life isn't all airwaves and soundboards. Join us as we explore the personal side of this radio icon, touching on his two marriages, and the experience of his three daughters attending a desegregated local neighborhood grade school. If you think that's intriguing, wait until we discuss what might have been if Marvin had taken the path of being a Lutheran minister. And let's not forget his fascination with human sexuality and Thomas Jefferson, which adds an unexpected twist to his tale.
Let's not forget there's more to history than personal journey. Our journey ends with a deep dive into the life and legacies of Abraham Lincoln. Do you know what fueled Lincoln's insatiable curiosity? Or his early interest in preachers, science, and literature? And how about his legal career, and his staunch opposition to slavery? All that and more, right here on Front Porch Perspective. Join us for this unique blend of radio history, personal introspections, and a look back at one of the most influential figures in American history.
Welcome to Front Forge Perspective, a podcast dedicated to the stories of this place And the people in it. On this episode we are talking with Marvin Granger. Marvin spent 22 years as a general manager and program director of Yellowstone Public Radio in Billings, montana. During this time he was notably known for his successful show Your Opinion Please. Marvin was raised in rural Michigan by a mother who was an educator and a father who was a businessman. He started on the radio at the young age of 14 before moving on to pre-NPR educational radio in college. Marvin is an honored recipient of the Montana Governors Humanities Award and one of the most well-read people I've met and a wonderful storyteller. Mr Marvin Granger, thank you so much for joining me on My Porch this morning.
Speaker 1:I appreciate the opportunity to talk. I haven't talked for years.
Speaker 2:I used to talk all the time. Yes, you did, and I hope we get to hear some stories about that. You were quite prolific, one might say It's interesting.
Speaker 1:I still get responses to your opinion, please, more than anything I did in 45 years, and I can't understand why. Because Ken and I were just having fun, that's always the best way. Ten years we did that show Man Public radio.
Speaker 2:Take us back to the beginning of that. Take us back. I've read a story that you started very young because you had a radio voice At 14. Yeah, so you were probably getting paid pennies to be on the radio, which any good radio owner loves. Start from there.
Speaker 1:I worked in my hometown, a small city in southern Michigan, hillsdale, famous for its very libertarian college. I worked for the owner of the local radio station, who was the chairman of the prohibition party and a professor at the college, and so I got a weekend job as the announcer, because the regular employees had the weekend off, you know. And so that was my beginning, and I did that while I was in high school And then I went to college and I didn't return to radio until graduate school. At the University of Minnesota I went to work for the University radio station. Those are pre NPR days. This would have been in the 1960s. Npr wasn't founded until 1970.
Speaker 2:So it would have been just referred to as public radio then.
Speaker 1:Educational radio, for the most part Mostly University station, that's right. And there was no live connection. What they called bicycling tapes was how, like, public affairs programs were distributed, like the Cooper Union which we used to carry a weekly program from the Cooper Union in New York That was sent by postal service from station to station to station. So if you can imagine, a public affairs program might be dead in the water by the time it got no kidding Local station. So public affairs. My favorite story about those times is one told many years later by Ted Coppel when he lectured to an NPR meeting and said he started in pre NPR educational radio days And he said doing educational radio was like wetting your pants in a dark suit. It felt good and nobody noticed. A good line.
Speaker 2:That's just like podcasting.
Speaker 1:Anyway, that's how radio was, and in those days my most significant memory was hiring a young graduate student in English from the University of Minnesota named Garrison Keeler to do newscasts. And he did his first comedy bit when he was supposed to have been doing a straight newscast on KUOM, which was the station at the University of Minnesota, and that was the beginning of it all for Garrison and radio.
Speaker 2:What was your response? to hear that? Because this is clearly before the days that you went off script or were a shock jock or anything like that That was a bold statement or a bold thing to do for a young guy. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, he had a deep voice, and that was the beginning.
Speaker 2:If you have a radio voice, you can get away with just about anything. I think you don't work on this.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's true. Yeah, and I didn't realize any potential in Garrison until he did a hot air weather, balloon weather report on the end of one of his newscasts And he had created a tape loop of the wind sound and ran this behind his voice and did a description of what life was like over the freeway, and I mean whether the weather was like over the freeway. And it outraged the station manager who had been in charge of that station for 20 some years and was a very, very stodgy university professor who taught communications, and in those days it was not called communications, i don't remember what it was called. Anyway, he was outraged at what Garrison did and called us into his office and said I don't want to hear anything like that again.
Speaker 1:If I do, you'll both be out of here, you know. So years later we created a Saturday afternoon program with two other staff members I say years later, probably two years later. That was supposed to be a variety show And that allowed Garrison freedom to do his thing And that's where he began to do regular humor bits Again. My most significant memory from that experience was he played the entire Lonely Hearts Club Band album The first week. It came out on that Saturday afternoon show and said this is a landmark in the history of recorded music, which of course it was. Did he get some pushback?
Speaker 2:on that.
Speaker 1:Yes, positive and negative, yeah, and he explained a bit about how this is not just a collection of tunes. This is all related somehow, if you think about it, and of course, that led you to think about it, you know.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So, but I still subscribe to a Writers' Home and Act rated every day on my computer.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and he's still around writing.
Speaker 1:He's still around, although he, like Al Franken, was accused of sexual misconduct at some point. Both of those guys troubled me because neither of them in my mind is a sexual predator And yet they both probably misbehaved. As I have on occasion And I'm sorry that that happened to Garrison, because he I mean Ken Burge used to have him as one of his voices on his documentaries and not anymore.
Speaker 2:That's really sad that we can be that unforgiving It is sad.
Speaker 1:Well, but that's the kind of world we live in. I am totally sympathetic to women behaving toward men the way they do because men again, this takes me as one of my heroes, edward O Wilson. Men behave badly by nature. Men project and women select is the way he put it.
Speaker 2:And that's still true, It is you know, Yeah Yeah, i did like the quote. He said I always wanted to get fired. I just hoped it would have been for something I'd done, that's right, yes. Big fan. I miss him on the radio. I really do. Well, I do too.
Speaker 1:I do too, and I'm glad he does the poetry program, and today I noticed he there's a solicitation for money. I send him money every once in a while for that you know We chaired an office for two years at the University of Minnesota And there are a lot of good memories. My most still startling memory is walking back from lunch and being told by an acquaintance on the sidewalk that John Kennedy had been assassinated. I can picture the exact spot on the campus that way we were at when we were that we were told that everybody remembers.
Speaker 1:Everybody remembers where they were when Kennedy was assassinated, I guess.
Speaker 2:I was a toddler and have memories of the funeral on black and white and memories of people having very deep conversations about this. Yeah, you know, that's some of my earliest memories. As someone who lived in that time you know give the younger listeners kind of a tempo of what was happening, because we tend to be in a time right now Or oh my gosh, it's all going to hell in a hand basket. We're on the verge of losing the democracy. The 60s were not good for a lot of political figures Right. There had to be a tone and tempo of. Are we going to lose this thing?
Speaker 1:I think I saw it fairly early as young children of liberals rebelling against the hypocrisy of their parents, and that's what I still think. It was Kids who had been raised by fairly liberal, often academic, parents rebelling against their parents, toleration of the war and of the chronic inequalities in our society, which is still a complaint mainly from African Americans against white liberals, that they are too tolerant of conditions that they shouldn't tolerate, you know.
Speaker 2:I'm amazed at just, i guess, the time loop It just is coming around again And I, you know, of course we lose President Kennedy, then we lose his brother, we lose, you know, malcolm X, we lose King. It just had to be just like watching a train wreck.
Speaker 1:Right. I remember Garrison and I both supported Eugene McCarthy for president and felt that Bobby Kennedy was sort of an interloper. But McCarthy was not only a politician, he was a poet And that that engaged both Keeler and me with Eugene McCarthy, who is still one of my favorite politicians.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Now, in a conversation that we had over at Joni's place at Harper and Madison, you described yourself as a Roosevelt Democrat And that makes you a conservative today. maybe I don't know, but it was definitely a more conservative time. But tell me about that, that influence that you still carry today.
Speaker 1:More of a centrist. Roosevelt was not a socialist And one of my most recent disagreements with Michael Moore there have been many was he said Roosevelt was a socialist. He was not a socialist, he was a. He believed in private property, he believed in industry, but he also believed in regulated industry And that was the. That was the big difference. Fdr denounced greed as an ethic And greed is still to be denounced as an ethic. We are all in this together. Competition is fine, but competition to the death is not fine, right? And that's where FDR was. Labor unions, he thought encouraged. He and Eleanor both encouraged labor unions because they thought it would be a good balance to industry, and it would be a good balance today if the unions were stronger. But then the unions became corrupt because they were fighting corruption. It's often the case that you become the characteristics of your enemy, you know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the correlation is quite striking.
Speaker 1:Well, i still believe in unions as there's the president, it's always governance. I realized that Republicans would say who's going to govern the governors, who's going to regulate the regulators? And that's a legitimate question. But I still believe in unions when they do their job and that is to represent the interests of working people.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Let's take a step back to your radio days. In those early days there was a young lady you also came across named Terri Gross.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:She's still kicking around and we're hearing her voice.
Speaker 1:She was on one of the late night shows just last week. Yeah, i had never seen her on a late night network television show, but she was on the night show on NBC, talking about the same things that we used to talk about when she was just a kid.
Speaker 2:Yeah, now, you came in contact with her in In 1974.
Speaker 1:In Detroit, no 1974 in Buffalo. In Buffalo Okay Yeah, she was a member of the staff of WBFO in Buffalo, one of the stations that I managed. When I was there as a candidate, i slept on her living room floor because the station couldn't afford a hotel room.
Speaker 2:It couldn't have been a big money maker to be making your career in educational radio or, by that time, public radio ever. No, much less than No.
Speaker 1:No, i never earned $50,000 in my entire life, even after 24 years at Yellowstone Public Radio. I was short of that amount of money.
Speaker 2:You're a well-read individual. You clearly think about the issues that you speak about. What was it about this? well, this medium, like we're still on it, It feels like. to me this feels like a podcast, feel like NPR, a classic public radio. It's why I like the format. What was it that attracted you to that medium?
Speaker 1:Old friends of mine who remembered me way back when I was in my early college days, hoping to be a Lutheran minister. I went to a conservative Lutheran university, planning to go on to the seminary. I was too exposed to the theology of Paul Tillich in those days, who was still one of my intellectual heroes. Paul Tillich was not a conservative Lutheran, he had a Lutheran background but he advocated what he called the Protestant principle. The Protestant principle is that no thing, no book, no person, no institution can claim to speak for God. That impressed the hell out of me when I was in college because I couldn't get it off my mind that God, essentially, is unknowable. If he's real, if he's there, if they or it is the real, i'm a finite person. How the hell can I know the infinite? He introduced that notion into my head and it's still there. That was in the 1950s that he did that.
Speaker 1:He was a professor at the University of Chicago. At the time My advisor at college, which was near Chicago, was doing his graduate work under a faculty member at Chicago and took us into here at Tillich's lectures and then made us read in our classroom, made us read his books. That was an informal indoctrination. I mentioned Edward O Wilson. Wilson is one of my latter-day saints. Tillich was one of my early saints.
Speaker 2:How did this affect your radio career?
Speaker 1:At that same time, being near Chicago, i listened to WFMT, which was one of the great radio experiences of my life. It was a commercial station about which I learned what public radio should be. Studs, turkels, Almanac was on every weekday morning for an hour. Just think about that. Wfmt gradually convinced me. One of their staff announcers was Mike Nichols, who was with the Second City troop in Chicago at the time. They wouldn't accept any jingles for commercials. The commercials all had to be done in the same tone of voice as everything else on the station. I remember one instance in which American Express introduced these horns to accompany their commercials on television and radio. In those days FMT said you can't do that on this station. They were dumped by American Express. They said fine, it's all right, it's the spirit of radio, as it should be.
Speaker 1:It takes me back to the days in the 1920s when radio was new. Broadcasters lobbied to get commercials so that they could support quality programming. Of course it gradually turned around to where the programs were there to serve the commercial needs of the station. We put on the air what will make us money? That gave us great things like Feverer-Gee and Mali and things like that that I treasured, but they were on the air only because they made money for the network. Public radio today has evolved into what will raise money from listeners and it doesn't do what won't. That said, one of the first people I hired when I was hired at Yellowstone Public Radio was Brad Edwards to do jazz. Brad Edwards was fired by one of the most recent managers because they could get that programming from satellite, from someplace else. The value of the local producer, the local announcer, has just gradually faded away. It's too bad. That's the way life is.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, we're certainly seeing it in our commercial world that we live in. I am amazed at what we will give up for convenience and a sense of safety. It's amazing. It's amazing. You spent well, take us through. You were in New York and then Detroit.
Speaker 1:I went from. Let me get all those lined up in a row.
Speaker 2:Give me the timeline. Yeah, thank you. Thank you, i'm stumbling through this.
Speaker 1:I graduated, i left the University of Minnesota without my master's degree. I did all the coursework but didn't write the thesis. I was in the midst of a depression and a divorce at the time and I just couldn't deal with a thesis. I left the University of Minnesota to go to work for Minnesota Public Radio, which was all across town in St Paul. Minnesota Public Radio was a relatively new enterprise. Today it's one of the oldest and richest of the public radio enterprises, but then it was new. I was their first news director and their first program director. I was there for a number of years, from 1963 until excuse me, i'm getting my years mixed up. I left there in 1963, so I was there in the late 50s. no, i'm getting confused now.
Speaker 2:It's all right, take your time.
Speaker 1:I went from Minnesota Public Radio to Buffalo, new York. I was there for five years at the State University of New York at Buffalo, which was a wonderful old Rust Belt city, to Spokane, which was a totally different experience. The Spokane station had been founded by the Junior League, which was upper-class ladies from a South Hill and my son lives in Spokane.
Speaker 2:I know exactly what you're talking about.
Speaker 1:Okay, Yeah, and they founded the station. I always had a degree of tension with them because my idea of what public radio should be and theirs didn't agree very often. But Spokane was an interesting experience. I was there for three, three and a half years. I went from there to Detroit. Detroit was where I was born and near where I was raised. And it's true, you can't go home again. Yeah, i parted Detroit Right downtown, across the street from the Detroit Institute of Arts, great institution, by the way, my ex-wife is from Detroit.
Speaker 2:Oh boy, i've spent some time there.
Speaker 1:One of the great murals of my life is that who was the great Mexican artist who did the mural and did the Detroit Institute of Art. He did an industrial mural of an American factory and his name will come back to me before we're finished. He also did a great mural for the Rockefellers in New York, which they covered over because of the Marxist influence in it. He was a great artist. Anyway, i lived in downtown Detroit where I had to step over bodies on my way to work And I fell in love with a young woman from Buffalo who went to Detroit with me, 16 years younger than I was. We decided at some point we wanted to get married but we didn't want to raise children in downtown Detroit. I understand that. So the first job that paid anything at all that came along was Billings, montana, and we applied and got that job and we both she lives a couple blocks away from me here now remarried somebody else Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I spent 24 years at Yellowstone Public Radio, which was my longest stint anywhere but 45 years altogether at those stations.
Speaker 2:What do you think is the most important takeaway, lessons, wisdom you received from your career in radio?
Speaker 1:Wow, i haven't really thought about that. It seems like there are a lot of lessons in different contexts from that experience. Those experiences, fascination with different places. Just the contrast between Buffalo and Spokane, for example, impressed the dickens out of me, because the contrast was tremendous. The multicultural, multiracial life in Buffalo. I came to appreciate. I moved to Spokane and there wasn't any.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, you had tall people and short people. What You had tall people and short people That's about all the diversity you get in Spokane.
Speaker 1:I was going to say it's interesting because short people take me back to Detroit where there are lots of Armenian Americans And Armenian Americans are short people. Detroit and Buffalo both fascinated me because of the music, everything from symphonic music to jazz, to folk music, which again in Spokane was relatively sparse, although the Spokane Symphony is fine for a small city. But cultural diversity, which I wasn't raised with, that. I was raised in Hillsdale, michigan, population 6,500. And while the local high school had an orchestra, a string orchestra, which was very unusual, probably still is, i gradually over my lifetime became taken with various aspects of cultural diversity And it goals me to hear Wright Winger's denounce that as a national goal. Of course it should be a national goal. Racial diversity is one of my local heroes and I remember to public radio was Joe Sample who just celebrated his 98th birthday. Joe once said over lunch what would this country be culturally without Jews and Negroes? Of course he's right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, it is our story. It is our story.
Speaker 1:But they're both outliers. They still are. There's a biography now of Eleanor Roosevelt, who had an old fashioned upper class fear of Jews. She would come home from a reception saying I've heard all I want to hear about money and jewels. Too many Jews, wow. So it's a And a very liberal woman for the time Not then. She was raised in a very upper class, conservative family. Her liberalism was something that developed out of her loneliness and her isolation, spiritual isolation. Franklin was a gadfly.
Speaker 2:She was a deep thinker, yeah 24 years in Billings, had you know? on the diversity scale, probably a tick below Spokane.
Speaker 1:I had had my education in diversity when I came to Billings So I could experience it by. Curiously, i didn't have to experience it firsthand anymore, although I did. I mean, i was a regular at every jazz concert for years And as manager of the public radio station we sponsored, along with Joe Sample, a lot of jazz musicians in Billings. Over the years Lost money. Joe and I used to argue over lunch over who lost more money on jazz concerts The radio station or Joe. You know.
Speaker 2:That too was the history of America. That's right, that's right.
Speaker 1:But again, bringing cultural diversity to Billings was part of his purpose in life and part of mine, although not all of my board members at Yellowstone Public Radio agreed with that. Yeah, i even sponsored a billboard at Cobb Field And even Joe said what good will that do you? I said it's involvement in the community. Joe, yeah, That.
Speaker 2:hmm, i'm going to pause here for a minute and think how to couch this question, because I guess I'll just be quite frank about it. It seems like that ended with a bit of a witch hunt on your personality and your running of the station.
Speaker 1:Hell yeah.
Speaker 2:As these. You know, when it seems like.
Speaker 1:The chancellor at the time found me to be way too independent.
Speaker 2:Thank you Yeah.
Speaker 1:That bothered him terribly. I found it out various ways. A clergyman from the High Line came into my office one day to talk about the possibility of getting a public radio translator in his community and said I just came from Mullen Hall. They don't like you very much over there.
Speaker 1:So I found out what the chancellor's attitude was toward me, and he finally nailed me on a very technical but real issue, and that is that I had stopped requiring staff members to make out time sheets. Full-time staff members, i felt, were not needed, they didn't have to make out time sheets. Part-timers did, yes, but full-timers no, and that was a rule, and so Were they hourly or were they salaried workers?
Speaker 1:Salaried workers. They were still required to make out time sheets, and I didn't publicly denounce it, i didn't even walk away from it consciously. It just sort of faded away in importance, except in his mind, of course. It became a major issue when he was looking for a reason to deal with me And he He and Joel Guthals, who was on the board, an attorney composed a press release about my sins and gave it to the Gazette, and Ed Kemick wrote a what turned out to be kind of a nasty piece which Ed years later sort of apologized for. And I was I retired. I was old enough to retire anyway, i was in my 60s and had been there long enough. But it didn't end nicely. But in retrospect the experience was a good one.
Speaker 2:You know, now, this is a bit of a selfish question for me. You seem to carry an art of mixing. Whatever station you came in with the demographic of the area.
Speaker 1:Yes, that's right.
Speaker 2:I do Talk to me about that. It's something I'm wildly interested in.
Speaker 1:Well, every place I've been contributed something seriously to my life. Minneapolis-st Paul, where I went to graduate school. Well, even the Lutheran University where I went to undergraduate school, germans rank a lot of beer but they wouldn't let you dance on campus. I mean, everybody contributed something. You know, going from Valparaiso, indiana, into Chicago for cultural things and for again to hear Paul Tillich's lectures or to attend the symphony or to go to jazz concerts I first heard Pete Seeger and Sonny Terry in concert and Orchestra Hall in Chicago while I was in college. So every place I was contributed something major to me. Minneapolis-st Paul were fascinating places to very different cities joined by justa sign in the street saying city limits, you know. But Minneapolis was a thriving metropolis and St Paul was kind of a conservative old town of various ethnic groups, jews and Irish and others. You know, i don't know if it's still that way, probably not. I noticed St Paul now has a young black mare which he never would have happened in those days.
Speaker 1:But to Buffalo was a great place to live and work and Spokane was interesting because of what I had been before that And I can tell you something about my. I've not mentioned anything about my family. I had three daughters from my second marriage, none from my first marriage. My first marriage was to a high school sweetheart and I moved myself in with her family intellectually and spiritually, because my father was an alcoholic and I had to get away from him. And by the time we got married I realized I didn't want to marry her, but we had been sweethearts for so many years I couldn't bear to say so And we were married for five years. no, children.
Speaker 1:I left her falling in love while I was married to her with another woman. I've always left the woman I was with for somebody else and I never lived alone until 1996, after my third divorce, i realized you have never lived by yourself and I've never done anything else since then.
Speaker 2:I've lived alone since 1996.
Speaker 1:But I had children with a second marriage, three daughters, all of whom live in Seattle with their mother in the same neighborhood. Since Volcan I had moved with my wife and three daughters from Buffalo. My youngest daughter was only two at the time. My oldest daughter was in high school, so there's quite a separation in ages there. My oldest daughter was in a. This was during the time when the schools were being integrated, ordered by a federal judge in Buffalo, My wife at the time was put on the Citizens' Commission monitoring desegregation, which meant that we had to send our kids to the local neighborhood grade school, even though it was mostly black Because, being on the commission, she couldn't very well do what other people were doing and sending her kids to white neighborhood schools.
Speaker 2:What year, i'm sorry, what year was that This was in.
Speaker 1:I was in Buffalo from 1974 to 79. My daughter went to a magnet school, which was a wonderful device that the judge created to allow exceptionally bright kids from all races to go to the same school. They admitted kids based on their aptitude tests and their intelligence tests, which was a clever device to integrate a school Based on merit, based on based on potential. You know Well she loved that magnet school, she just thrived there. And I picked her up in 1979 out of that school and moved her to Spokane, washington, to the North Hill, to a school called Shadall High School all white working class And she quit school, never went back Really How old In high school.
Speaker 1:In high school And I've always felt guilty about that She's prospered because, again, she was a very bright kid. She now manages a construction company's office in Seattle and earns more money than I ever built the radio, but she never went back to school. Yeah, and my ex-wife, my second wife, got my other two children into St George's School, which was a private school in Spokane. That where it began. They got a good education and did well.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Do you ever contemplate what your life might have been like if you'd chose to be a Lutheran minister, besides making more money?
Speaker 1:I think, russ, i realized at some point and I told this story to a lot of people I realized at some point, and I don't know when, that the first truly attractive woman who came to me for counseling. I was going to be in deep doo-doo Because that's been my life story.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's incredibly self-reflective.
Speaker 1:Well, it didn't come to me right away. I mean, I gave all kinds of theological and spiritual and other reasons for not being a Lutheran minister.
Speaker 1:But, basically at 83, that's what I think. The real reason was that I couldn't trust myself. Human sexuality interests me tremendously because I mean Thomas Jefferson. No one thinks of him as a great sexual being, but he was. He was fascinated by women all of his life. His wife, who lived only 10 years into their marriage, was pregnant constantly and he fell in love with woman after woman after woman all of his life, although we don't think of him as that person. And he once wrote a wonderful tribute to that problem called the dialogue between my head and my heart, which just reminds me of a Seinfeld episode where he has a penis across his table from a brain debating.
Speaker 2:I think that every man can relate to that at some level. Sure, yeah, let's take this opportunity to slide into literature. Now I have Marvin. I've known you, oh, from afar. you know. we've just recently really started to have conversations, have some conversations, but I guess one would call it a nodding acquaintance. at Harper and Madison I've never seen you without a book And I am fascinated by your understanding of Lincoln. Can we go down that rabbit hole?
Speaker 1:I'm sorry.
Speaker 2:I said, I am fascinated by your understanding of Lincoln.
Speaker 1:Oh, I don't understand, but that's all.
Speaker 2:But you're well read. Yes, lincoln scholar, do I have that? Probably about 12 books on Lincoln. Yeah, yeah, let's go down that rabbit hole. Why Lincoln? Why? Why is he so influential to you?
Speaker 1:My first acquaintance with Lincoln was in high school. My mother, who was an avid reader mostly fiction gave me a book of the month club edition of Charles of Carl Sandberg's Lincoln. In a single volume Carl Sandberg wrote, i think, seven or eight books on Lincoln. The first couple were called the prairie years and then the last ones were called the war years, but it was a major work on Lincoln, one of the first in the 20th century. Sandberg wasn't a historian, he was a folklorist and a poet And his books read like that. He recounted stories about Lincoln, whether they were true or not, just because they were stories.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:That's who Carl Sandberg was. Anyway, the book of the month club published a condensed version of all of those books into one volume And my mother gave me that when I was a junior in high school And that was my first acquaintance with Lincoln was reading that book. Over the years I didn't go back to Lincoln seriously until very near my retirement. I didn't read a lot during most of my public radio years. I don't know why, i just didn't. But since 19, excuse me, since 2007, when I retired I've read all the time. The minimum of three to three or four hours a day every day.
Speaker 1:I'm a reader, but most of my adult life I was not a reader. And I mean I've been a serious news consumer all of my life, going way back to a teenager listening to Edward Armuro on the radio every night, who was one of my early heroes. I became this relates to Lincoln, but I'll tell you I became a young man during the Joseph McCarthy era And the Joseph McCarthy witch hunt the anti-communist witch hunt fascinated me as a youngster young man. I was in college age then. My mother had been a wishy-washy liberal and my father was a wishy-washy conservative, so they had not been a major influence on me, but I became interested in McCarthy because of his determination to find communists under every rock And Edward R Murrow and a few other people resisting that. Murrow was one of his main detractors.
Speaker 1:I was always interested in Abraham Lincoln as a self-made man because, excuse me, a lot of people have claimed to be self-made men. Alexander King, who used to be a regular on the Jack Parr show years ago before Johnny Carson. Alexander King once said how many men does it take to make a self-made man anyway? And that question is a meaningful one to me. Abraham Lincoln was a genuine self-made man. Why is it that some people are blessed with curiosity, an insatiable need to know, and others aren't? Adam Gopnik, one of my favorite New Yorker writers, wrote a book years ago about Lincoln and Darwin, born on the very same day, february 12, 1809, both of whom had insatiable curiosity And both of whom fascinate me for that reason. You can't answer that question. There is no answer to that question. Lincoln was curious from childhood.
Speaker 1:He would listen to preachers and then go and imitate their sermons, standing on a stump preaching to other children, even though he was a skeptic. His curiosity was about their style. Yesterday afternoon I watched Reverend Al preach an old-fashioned black preacher sermon to a funeral in Minnesota And it brought back memories of the young Lincoln mimicking preachers, because there is something about black preachers that is a style of preaching And Reverend Al Sharpton is a current example of that style.
Speaker 1:Lincoln was fascinated by science. He once gave a lecture on science As a lawyer. I should tell the Lincoln story more consistently. From the beginning His father worked him as a child like a slave laborer, farmed him out to people and then kept the money. He didn't let the kid have any of the money. Lincoln once, as an adult, said I once was a slave. He was, but he read constantly. He would read books while he was behind a plow And his father criticized him for plowing uneven rows because of that. But he couldn't put down the books. Eesop's fables, the Bible, shakespeare, all kinds of things, fascinated by them.
Speaker 1:He once said he became a lawyer because it was an escape from hard labor. I told that story once to the Democratic Breakfast Club downtown and two lawyers from the audience were subjected And I said I didn't mean, it isn't hard work, it isn't manual labor. That's what he wanted to get away from And the law was one way to do that. There were no law schools in Illinois, of course. So he became a lawyer by hanging out at law offices and listening to lawyers talk and then going and listening to them in court. That's how you became a lawyer. You learned enough about the law to them pass a test. That was there were no law schools, and that's how Lincoln became a lawyer, and a good lawyer. An example of what a good lawyer he was he once defended a small reaper company in Wisconsin named Davy Reaper Company against an infringement a copyright infringement suit brought by the one big McCormick Reaper Company against Davy for infringing on their copyright. Lincoln represented the Davy Company, got on his back on the ground underneath Reapers both kinds and studied every detail. And when he got into court he ran circles around the lawyers for McCormick because he knew what their difference there was between his company's reaper and theirs, and He learned it on his back. That's the kind of lawyer He was and That's the kind of person he was.
Speaker 1:He first encountered slavery and as a young man 20, 21 years old, commanding a barge down the Mississippi River And running into slaves along the way and then going to a slave market in New Orleans where he took the barge and it's in its Shipment to sell. He always had found slavery repulsive, but that was when he began as a young man To think about slaves as people and not as property. they had always been property In the south. They had always been property. Jefferson's writings about slavery are fascinating because he talks about black people and his notes on the state of Virginia And how different they are from white people and they're clearly natural, naturally inferior to white people. But he said you know, they're not intellectually very gifted, but they're much more gregarious than we are, which is an interesting observation on Jefferson's part. Well, lincoln was fascinated by How different blacks were from white people and he gradually, over the years, evolved a Point of view which ended up in his very last speech a few days before his assassination, made from a window in the White House, and he said you know, maybe it's time to grant suffrage To those blacks who have given their lives, given the possibility of their lives, to the nation in war, to give them the vote, and maybe to very intelligent blacks as well. He had gone that far.
Speaker 1:In Spielberg's film about Lincoln there's one moment in which Lincoln is on the veranda with Elizabeth Keckley, who was A servant of Mary Lincoln. Elizabeth Keckley was a very bright black woman Who eventually wrote her own autobiography. He was on the veranda with her And he said to her I don't know if our people are equal, but that's not the point. Every man and every woman is entitled to the fruit of their own labor. That was the point And that's where that's who Lincoln was. It wasn't. Equality, was not an. You know It's important today because of the different world we live in, but in his time he didn't care about who was equal to who, who was equal to who What, what, and that fascinated even Karl Marx With Abraham Lincoln. Marx was in London at the time And found a couple of Lincoln's speeches To be very interesting, because Lincoln said to White workers in New England when he was up there campaigning for somebody, that everybody was entitled to the fruit of their own labor. And Marx said that's an enlightened man.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:And that that's Abraham Lincoln. That's who he was.
Speaker 2:Seems to still be the challenge today.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:That discussion.
Speaker 1:At pug mahons one night. I used to have wonderful debates with the owner of pug mahons.
Speaker 2:Yes, mac godrest is soul.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Mac and I debated primarily about micro brewers because he thought they didn't have a right to exist As a tavern owner. But I quoted that line from Lincoln Every man and every woman is right, has the right to the fruit of their own labor. And max said to some of it, yes, As an employer. That was his, his voice as an employer to some of it. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And.
Speaker 1:Lincoln would say they have a right to all of it. If they want to bargain it away, that's fine. That's their privilege. But he was much more enlightened than mac was.
Speaker 2:Well, depending on how many whiskies mac had. Dark red wine, mac drink red red wine like water. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I will never forgive mac for not Willing That place to those women who would work there for more than 30 years. Amen, amen, that was his great sin, yeah.
Speaker 2:I. I sat with a friend of mine Whose parents met in that bar when it was stony's tavern Yeah, and wept When it closed.
Speaker 1:Yeah, oh yeah. Yeah why Every st Patrick's day? I think That place should be jumping.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:As fast water would say, the joint should be jumping. Yes, you know, uh, but You know it's. It's still vacant, I'm told, because the city wants too many changes made in the building before they'll allow Anybody else to go in there. And I know that's true because max employees used to tell me what poor shape the building was In.
Speaker 2:Yes, Yes, i've heard this. Yeah, i've heard some people say it's just, it would be More economical to just tear it down and begin again with something?
Speaker 1:Yes, probably true.
Speaker 2:I find it ironic that what's left is the brewery across the street. A very successful brewery. A very successful brewer actually two Yeah.
Speaker 1:I've never been there Because I, in night in 2015, as I became less and less stable on my feet Yeah, i fell down and broke my shoulder because I had had one too many. Most drools, ah, that mac at max bar. Yeah and uh, i have not had another beer since then. Uh but uh, that kept me away from thirsty street. Yes, although I used to be a regular at carters, i still think carter was probably the best. Mike was probably the best brewer in billings. He's very good, wonderful brewer.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Yeah I. I interviewed the owner of thirsty street on the show Shea and That is a Right to your own laborers kind of story, Literally. Him and his wife Jill Built that from an idea right and and and stumbled and failed and made bad beer for a while and but just had good ideas and I talked to Uh marci their head bartender at yeah, at the garage just a couple days ago.
Speaker 1:Yeah, at harperin medicine And she is still there, head bartender.
Speaker 2:Yeah, at the garage, yes, yes. I find this interesting in as much as The ripples of lincoln's words and ideas we're talking about today in a, about a little brewery Or a bar in billings montana. The discussion Is still alive.
Speaker 1:Yes it is. It is. That's why, uh, lincoln Lincoln continues to fascinate me. I'm told By a fellow Customer at harperin medicine that I should read Abe, the latest biography of lincoln, because he said it does have new information. One tense after many years To think there can't be anything new. But right, this man has written David Reynolds is his name has written a cultural biography of lincoln Which puts lincoln in context. So I should read that, although abraham lincoln hated the nickname Abe, which surprises me that this man is named his book Abe.
Speaker 2:I, uh, i find it interesting how we almost uh Deat eyes these figures in american history Particularly around honesty. Um, george washington, of course the national narrative is he never lied. And uh, abraham lincoln has the moniker honest Abe. I'm sure both are not true.
Speaker 1:Right, both are not true. Yeah, but both lied More out of Service to others than out of service to self. That's not always true, but it's mostly true. Washington was a very proud Man who would defend his honor Against any challenger. Lincoln Would tell lies, partly because they were good stories. Lincoln was a great storyteller And uh and uh And his stories were often racist stories. But uh, they weren't hate stories, they were just entertaining stories.
Speaker 2:Yeah and the context of the time. That's right. I don't think that can be Absolutely to point. fine of a point can be put on that, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you and you're you to told me you were a storyteller and that's that's that makes sense, sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, marvin, we're at an hour. I could sit here. You know I say this with everybody. I do my. My listeners have got to be yeah, yeah, yeah, you could talk to him. Well, i really could.
Speaker 1:Uh, i would, we've covered a lot of territory in an hour.
Speaker 2:We've covered a lot of territory in that hour and, uh, i look forward to more conversations with you at harperin madison Good, and more opportunities to have you back here and have more conversations. And uh, what are you reading now?
Speaker 1:Eleanor, a book called Eleanor. It's a biography published a few years ago about Eleanor Roosevelt, our greatest first lady ever and, uh, and a great person in her own right. She would have been a fine president.
Speaker 2:Ah, indeed, indeed, indeed. Well, for those of you out there that are listening to this, i'm going to give a shameless plug to a place we both love, and that's the folks down at harperin madison.
Speaker 2:Yeah and if you roll in and have a cup of coffee and one of their really wonderful baked goods at around 10 in the morning, you'll find Marvin sitting at the bar. Uh, i with a book. I, i recommend you you do what I did you, uh, sit down and ask him what he's reading and have a conversation with this man. Uh, because he's fascinating. And, marvin, thank you so very much for taking the time to come on the porch.
Speaker 1:I appreciate you honor to be asked. Uh, i've been interviewed a few times, but not in a few years, so this has been a nice, of nice pleasure.
Speaker 2:Now, Well, i, it's my honor and it's been my pleasure. Thank you very much for those of you out there, pick up a book, find out about history. The truth lies in a thousand different shadows. Yep and stay with us for next week's edition of front porch perspective and there is a truth to be known.
Speaker 1:We may not know it, but there is a truth to be known.
Speaker 2:And with that, no better words were said. Thank you, and we'll see you next week. You Thank you for listening to front porch perspective. Check out other episodes on front porch perspective. You can find us on spotify or wherever you find your podcasts.