The Laura Ingalls Wilder Pageant

This message comes from Capital One. Capital One offers checking accounts with no fees or minimums. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See Capital One dot com slash bankguy for details. Capital One NA member FDIC When she was seven, when she would visit her grandmother, Alexa would look through the books that her grandfather had owned, back when he was alive. What she liked especially was finding the books where he'd made little notes in the margins. So that was the part that was really , you know, compelling. Because they were hints about who he was. Exactly. And they were a lot of times they were really critical. They would he would just like he would write, I I uh I steadfastly disagree or something like that or um or he would he would write ah if he really liked something as a kid over the course of about a year she systematically divided the books into two pil es, the ones with markings and the ones without. And then she tried to read all the ones with markings. Her grandfather was a playwright and a teacher, and the books were creaky old books from the 1930s about theater and about how to write plays. It was thrilling. And when she was 11, she wrote her very first play, using the rules in the books, Rules from Another Generation. These were archaic rules, um, like start your play with lots of exposition um which was really you know in vogue at the time so I started mine with a a butler whose name I believe was Manson picking up a phone saying stuff like no, the lady and gentlemen are not home right now. Why at a fancy charity ball? Yes, he's still drinking too much, and she's having an affair with the gardener. Whom shall I say is calling? I'm not kidding. You were eleven. By the time I got to college and I started to actually take writing classes, it it was brought to my attention that, you know, stage directions shouldn't be things like there follows a mighty howling of wind. And uh and one of the things my teacher, who was not a young man by any means said was was he like, sweetheart, we don't use soda voce anymore to mean he whispers. We just write whispers . But of all the books on her grandfather's shelves, there was one book that affected her more than the others. It had lots of her grandfather's writing in the margins. And he was very um critical, so there was it was very rare that he would write ah exclam ation point. And there were more ah s in um Moss Hart's autobiography, um which is called Act One, than I think almost any of the other books that he had. Moss Hart was a Broadway playwright, the man who directed My Fair Lady with Julie Andrews and Rex Harrison, who was married to another then luminary named Kitty Carlisle, who people these days mostly remember as a game show panelist back in the nineteen sixties. The book details how he started as a kid in the Bronx, found something he just loved to do, which was to make plays. Reading it as a child, Alexa had that experience that you have sometimes as a kid. She did not understand everything in the book, but she understood enough to note that she really really, liked it. Like I knew what was going on in this book was fun . It drove him so powerfully and it made it seemed to make him so happy. She read Act One by Moss Hart over and over. She memorized long stretches. She tried to memorize the entire book. Even today she recalls where specific ah s were penciled into her grandfather's copy. Because it felt like I was recognizing an old friend. It felt like a familiarity of oh I found a home. This guy likes the same home I want. Yeah. So these are my people. Yeah, yeah. You don't meet many people who tell you that a book changed their lives. The idea of that is appealing, I think. Because it's nice to think that our lives could be changed by the vision of the world that happens between the pages of a book. Instead of what our lives are usually changed by. You know, dumb luck. Tragedies. Coincidences . Today on our radio program, we have stories of people whose lives were changed by books. Really changed. From WB Easy Chicago , this is American Life, I'm Ira Glass. Our program today in four acts. Act one is called well, Act One, where somebody gets clues about how to live their life from notes scribbled by their dead grandfather in the margins of the book. Act two, the family that reads together. In that act, the story of how when David Sederis was a boy, he stumbled upon a dirty book in the woods. It made his sisters view all adults with newfound suspicion and send him to the dictionary . Fact three, Roger and Me and Lewis and Clark. The story of a construction worker. And this question: Can your life be changed by a book that you have never seen and have not read ? Act four, little sod houses for you and me. This one is the old old story, my friend. New York girl leaves the big city, heads out to a small town on the prairie with a dream and a bonnet. Stay with us. This message comes from NPR sponsor Carvana. Carvana believes selling your car should be refreshingly simple. Enter your license plate or VIN, get a real offer down to the penny and schedule a pickup on your time. No surprises. Sell your car today at Carvana.com. Pickup fees may apply. Today's show is a rerun. Act one , act one . So Alexa Young says that she never meant for Moss Hart's autobiography, Act One, to be a blueprint for her life. Welling back on the events of what happened over decades. Aaron Powell Basically what I did was like he did in his life story, I moved to New York. I think I kind of followed him there. Aaron Ross Powell Really you consciously followed him there? I don't think it was conscious, but there are so many things that I did that he did. Um I wasn't as good a I mean he was more sort of he could fake it better than I can, but but you know, I he he wrote he went he he had to get money at a certain point. He was like, I need money. So he thought, who's the richest person I know? And he wrote um he wrote a letter to this woman I think and then showed up on her doorstep and said, I'm Mothard and I have a play and if you give me money we'll put it on and she did. And um I wrote Isn't that amazing? And I wrote letters to strangers and said, I'm Alexa and I have a play and if you fund my play you can be proud And did that work? It did one time, yeah. At some point uh d did you start to get a crush on him ? Yeah. Um it it definitely turned from um kind of a mentor a make-believe mentor to a pretend husband to be kind of situation . Um yeah, somehow I think I t I decided that um time had completely screwed up and sent Moss to Key Carlisle and that if he hadn't if he just hadn't died two years before I was born, then you know me and Moss might really have had a chance how would this thought manifest itself in daily life? Like would you be out on dates and just think mm, not moss? Really? Yeah. Yeah. Um well it would be like there'd be something missing, you know. It just wasn't it wasn't quite what you'd want and it's like why can't I find some guy and and we'll work on this play together and we'll be like in out of town tryouts in Philadelphia and and we'll be up for forty-ighte hours trying to fix our play, and then we'll crack it, and then we'll order room service . So how far did the whole thing go? Um Um well I think maybe right before the end of college, Kitty Carlyle spoke um one one evening and um at your college? That's right. Um she was very active in the New York arts scene and she was extremely um a huge advocate of the arts in in in our country. And so she was talking about that I think and I I stood in line after she spoke to um meet her and there were all these people around me and they were they were like you were really good on that game show and I was just like disgusted like oh please she was in a night at the opera she's like a singer she's not just a game show lady . Um and but by the time I got to the front of the line, um I I and I went up to talk to her. I said what I wanted to say sort of which was, y you know, m Mahas changed my life and I moved to New York to be a playwright like him and I think I said something along the lines of, your husband meant so much to me . And um she just looked at me and she was so she's so elegant and so classy and she just said, I I don't understand, darling. Did you know him ? Yeah. I said your husband meant so much to me, um, as if I knew him. So I think it was confusing since she probably could figure out that he probably was dead before I was born. But it was disturbing and I felt terrible and it made me realize how well you know, just far from reality this thing had taken me and and you know it was just scary to scare her because you know she's the person that he loved. But my friend that was with me was really nice because we walked home afterward and he was like, uh, don't worry about her. You're much better for Moss than she was. He knew the whole story too. And Moss was just spending time with her because she happened to be alive. You know, you talked about how you felt fated for him in some way and drawn to him in some way. Have you thought about um what is the line that divides that kind of dreamy healthy feeling, I think Yeah, sure. Because the truth is really the way he functioned in my life was like as a comfort. And and I knew I mean I wasn't really broke w it wasn't a break from reality, but it was the sense that you know, when you read a book and something speaks to you and you feel like you feel understood and so it makes the world a less lonely place . Well exha how much of of of your feeling about Moss i is connected to uh your feeling about your grandfather, who who you didn't really know? I think they're uh intimately connected. I really do. Um , I think that because I didn't know my grandfather, I couldn't talk to him about what his life in the theater was like. And so this book gave me four hundred and forty four pages of what it would be like to want to be in the theater and how you might try to make that happen. And and so it was like he was the sort of stand-in for my grandfather in a lot of ways. And and the other part about it is that the way people talk about him, um, because I've then of course went and read every single book I could get my hands on about him or that even had any mention of him in it is with such love and appreciation and affection it's just stagger ing. It's I think that that was how people spoke about my grandfather and I recognized it. That same enthusiasm and sort of the way their eyes would light up . Today before I interview you you faxed over to our offices here at WB E Z. Hey um I'm gonna pull it out here a letter that your your grandfather wrote in nineteen sixty nine. Um obviously as he as he was quite quite ill. And um it does have this quality of just um it's a it's a it's one of the most beautiful beautifully written things I've ever read. It's really something He he spends I should say most of this uh thing he starts off uh this is to a student I know about my present situation, and thereby, of course, to let you know what the prospects are for the future of the work we've begun together. In planning this letter in my mind, I've been pulled this way and that by very conflicting impulses. I prefer to consider any of my own sickness, any deep trouble, is a very personal matter, possibly to be shared with close members of our family, but never to be inflicted on anyone else. At the same time I detest mysteries, and those of you who have called have, I hope, been told the truth insofar as we knew it And then he has this really pretty paragraph he says, besides, though some of you are relatively recent friends, some of our common ties go years back. And old friends are new, the depth of my feeling for you obliges me to be entirely honest with you. And so I'm going to put the next several paragraphs in parentheses, and I'm asking Donald not to read them aloud. Each of Each of you who wishes to could read it for himself. Anyone who dislikes these semi clinical details can avoid them, and then there are a couple paragraphs that basically describe the state of his illness. And then he talks about um the prognosis which is not uh very good and th and through another few paragraphs and then then to this last paragraph. Um w which one why don't you read that sure um uh doubtless all of that sounds very gloomy. I do admit I could think of happier matters. For one thing, I don't at all approve of my own extinction. I don't like the idea of it one bit, though reason assures me that the world can get along very nicely I can't quite believe that it will. Still, there are a few small compensations. For one thing, I had always hoped that I could face my own death with some equanimity, but it's a bit of a satisfaction to find that I can . And he talks about my mom and my grandmother. And it says and that's really what I'm finally wanting to say. I think you're a great bunch, and in case there isn't a chance to say it again , thanks for your concern, your calls, your note, but above all for your love. You've had my love and I've had yours, and I'm a damn fortunate man. So thanks and good luck Marvin Borrowski and so this to you feels very much like heart uh too, mus hart. Yeah, yeah, yeah . Like guys who said, you know, I'm a damn fortunate man. You're a swell kid. Yeah . After spending her 20s in New York, Alexa Young moved to Los Angeles, as her grandfather did, to write screenplays for Hollywood. She's written on shows like Friends, The West Wing, Big Love, Grace and Frankie, and lots more. Act two, the family that reads together. Sometimes a book can change your life, but just in a small temporary way, and not for the better. We have this cautionary tale of how a book infected an entire family from writer David Sederis. Quick warning to listeners before we begin, some of the content of this book I found the book hidden in the woods beneath a sheet of plywood. It's cover torn away and the pages damp with mildew . I read Brock and Bonnie River stood in their driveway, waving goodbye to the Reverend Hasselback. Goodbye, they said, waving. Goodbye, the Reverend responded. Tell those two teens of yours, Josh and Sandy, that they'll make an excellent addition to our young person's ministry. They're fine kids, he said with a wink. Almost as fine and foxy as their parents. The rivers chuckled, raising their hands in another wave. When the Reverend's car finally left the driveway, they stood for a moment in the bright sunshine before descending into the basement dungeon to unshackle the children. The theme of the book was that people are not always what they seem. Highly respected in their upper middle class community, the Rivers family practiced the literal interpretation of the phrase, love thy neighbor. Limburg's gymnasts, these people were both shameless and insatiable. Father and daughter, brother and sister, mother and son. After exhausting every possible combination, they widened their circle to include horny sea captains and door-to-door knife salesmen. Yes, these people were naughty, but at the age of 13 I couldn't help but admire their infectious energy and spirited enjoyment of life. The first few times I read the book, I came away shocked, not by the character's behavior, but by the innumerable typos. Had nobody bothered to proofread this book before sending it to print? In the opening chapter, the daughter is caught fondling her brother's keck in the dinning room. On page 33, the son has sex with his mother who, we are told, possesses a fond power of tot s . I showed the book to my sister Lisa, who tore it from my hand, saying, Let me hold on to this for a while. She and I And hot oils . We know you , our looks would say as the parents checked on their sleeping children . We know all about you . The book went from Lisa to our 11-year-old sister Gretchen, who interpreted it as a startling nonfiction expose on the American middle class. I'm pretty sure this exact same thing is going on right here in North Hills, she whispered, tucking the book beneath the artificial grass of her Easter basket. Take the Sherman family for example. Just last week I saw Heidi sticking her hands down Steve Jr.'s pants . The guy has two broken arms, I said. She was probably just tucking in his shirt. Would you ask one of us to tuck in your shirt? she asked. She had a point . A careful study suggested that the Shermans were not the people they pretended to be. The father was often seen tugging at his crotch, and the wife had a disturbing habit of looking you straight in the eye while sniffing her fing ers. A veil had been lifted, especially for Gretchen, who now saw the world as a steaming pit of unbridled sexuality . Seated on a lounge chair at the country club, she would narrow her I felt uneasy implicating our parents, but Gretchen provided a wealth of frightening evidence. She noted the way our mother applied lipstick at the approach of the potato chip delivery man, whom she addressed by first name and often invited in to use the bathroom. Our father referred to the bank tellers as Dal and Sweetheart, and their responses suggested that he had taken advantage of them one time too many. The Greek Orthodox Church, the gaily dressed couples at the country club, even our elderly collie Duchess, they were all in on it, according to Gretchen , who took to piling furniture against her bedroom door before going to sleep at night. The book wound up in the hands of our ten-year-old sister Amy, who used it as a textbook in the make-believe class she held after school each day. I'm very sorry, Candace, but I'm going to have to fail you, she'd say, addressing one of the empty folding chairs arranged before her. The problem is not that you don't try. The problem is that you're stupid. Very, very stupid. Isn't Candace stupid, Class? She's ugly too, am I wrong? Very well, Candace. You can sit back down now. And for God's sakes, please stop crying . Okay, class, now I'm going to read to you from this week's new book. It's a story about a California family and it's called Next of Kin. If Amy had read the book, then surely it had been seen by eight year old Tiffany who shared her bedroom, and possibly by her brother Paul, who at the age of two might have sucked on the binding, which was even more dangerous in reading it . Clearly, this had to stop before it got out of hand. Even our ancient Greek grandmother was arriving at the breakfast table with suspicious looking circles beneath her eyes. Gretchen took the book and hid it under the carpet of her bedroom, where it was discovered by our housekeeper Lena, who eventually handed it over to our mother. I'll make sure this is proper ly disposed of, my mother said, hurrying down the hallway to her bedroom. Panetration, she laughed, reading out loud from a randomly selected page. Oh, this oughta be good . Weeks later, Gretchen and I found the book hidden between the mattress and box springs of my parents' bed. The discovery seemed to validate all of Gretchen's suspicions. They'll be coming for us any day now, she warned. Be prepared, my friend, because this time they'll be playing for keeps . We waited. I'd always made it a point to kiss my mother before going to bed, but not anymore. The feel of her hand on my shoulder now made my flesh crawl. She was hemming a pair of my pants one afternoon, when, standing before her on a kitchen chair, I felt her hands graze my butt . I just want to be friends , I stammered. Nothing more, nothing less. She took the pins out of her mouth and studied me for a moment before sighing . Damn and here you been leading me on all this time. I thought I might throw the book away or maybe even burn it, but like a perfectly good outgrown sweater, it seemed a shame to destroy it when the world was full of people who might get some use out of it. With this in mind, I carried the book to the grocery store parking lot and tossed it into the back of a shining new pickup truck. I then took up my post beside the store's outdoor vending mach ines, waiting until the truck's owner returned, pushing a cart full of groceries. He was a wiry man with fashionable mutton shop sidebarns and a half-cast on his arm. As he placed his bags into the back of the truck, his eyes narrowed upon the book. I watched as he picked it up and leafed through the first few pages before raising his head to search the parking lot . He took a cigarette from his pocket and tapped it against the roof of the truck before lighting it. Then he slipped the book into his pocket and drove away. David Seder is, this story appears in his book Naked. His latest book is called The Land and Its People. Coming up, The Frontier, then and then that's in a minute in Chicago Bubble Radio when our program continues Support for this American life comes from Squarespace, the all-in-one platform for cre ating a fully custom on-brand website. Choose from a wide range of professionally designed award-winning templates with options for every user category. Showcase your offerings with a website designed to grow your business and manage payments seamlessly with branded invoices and online payments. Visit squarespace.com slash American to get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. This message comes from Sattva. How you sleep shapes how you live. Restorative sleep can sharpen focus, stabilize mood, and support long-term health. Voted Best Luxury Mattress by Sleep Foundation, Sattva's handcrafted luxury mattress es are designed to help people sleep more deeply and recover more fully at prices below traditional retail. Save up to six hundred twenty-five dollars this memorial day at sattva.com slash npr . We've arrived at Act Three of our show. Act three , Roger and me, Lewis and Clark. There's book as literature, there's book as filth, and then there's book as pure physical object. This is the story of somebody for whom a book changed his life, though it is almost random that it happened at all that he got to know this book in the first place. Jeremy Goldstein tells the story. Roger was thirty-four, working in construction and looking for things to do in his spare time. And one day he noticed this plate he'd been given by his grandmother, a plate from a nineteen oh five fair celebrating the centennial of Lewis and Clark's expedition to explore the western frontier. If there was anything else left from the fair still around, it turned out there was a lot, and he started buying it up. It was a fun hobby collecting the various memorabilia from that fair, but when you reach a point where I had about eleven hundred items,, uh one of the larger collections known. Um it was, you know, the end of the treasure hunt, and I couldn't find anything I didn't have. And somebody mentioned, well, why don't you uh collect books about Lewis and Clark. I thought, well, that might be kind of fun to do . So in 1984, he went to a book dealer in Vancouver and picked out an 80-year-old set of books that chronicled Lewis and Clark 's expedition. The price? $695 I had a difficult time writing out that check, because at that time, in fact, I really didn't know much about books. Um I proceeded to take that set of books downtown in Portland to an established book dealer whose name was Prest McMahon . And I showed him the set. I said, well, that's that's it, isn't it? That's all the journals. And he he kind of chuckled. He said, No, there's there's a lot more public ations than that about the journals of Lewis and Clark. And uh so I went ahead and said, Well, I tell you what, I said, You give me about five years, I'm gonna have every book published about Lewis and Clark. And he he laughed so hard he about laughed himself out of his chair. He was a a heavy set gentleman in his late sixties at the time . And uh he said there's there's people that have spent lifetimes looking for every book of Lewis and Clark and have never succeeded. Well, I told him, well , maybe I won't have every book, but I'll have the best library of anybody in the United States. And he laughed harder. Strange as it may sound, this is all it took to send Roger on his path of amassing, in just 14 years, what did become the largest known private collection of Lewis and Clark books in the United States. And all this time he kept working in construction, excavating landscapes, laying pipes for sewers, and paving roads. A decent living, but it was never enough. house payment and basic expenses for living would would go toward buying books. I would have to work ten to twelve hours a day. Normally six days a week. Some summers I wouldn't take a day off just so that I could work and have a little better check so maybe I could get that next book or make that other credit card payment. Because I was now beyond my means. And then of course I had a house I could refinance, which I did three times. There was a book out there that I didn't have, I would find the means to acquire it . When you get something in the eighteenth, nineteenth century . You open up the book and you look at the color, the discoloration of the pages, and the smell. And that's when you really feel the true energy of history . Not not not what you would read, but you've got more senses than just just just your eyes. You can smell, you can feel, you can touch . This actually points to one of the strangest things about Roger's relationship with his collection. He knew all about the different Lewis and Clark books: marbled end papers, obscure hand-tinted plates, and the value of original boards. But Roger never became an expert on what was inside the books. He didn't collect books to read them, he just wanted to own them . It turns out that your life can be changed by books you didn't even read. In fact, Roger had never been a reader of books. He didn't read books as a kid, he didn't go to college, and his reading habits didn't change as an adult when his house was full of books. As a collector, Roger was undeterred and he was methodical, but after ten years, one book still eluded him. It's the cornerstone of any serious Lewis and Clark collection, a first edition copy of the first official account of the expedition. It's a two volume set, published in eighteen fourteen. Fewer than fifteen hundred copies were ever printed. But the price tag, often around ten thousand dollars, had always scared Roger off. Then in nineteen ninety four he took a forty nine dollar flight to Los Angeles for the LA Book Fair. That particular day I got there early . And then there was somewhat of a race when they opened up the gate. uh they would actually have to stand slow down, slow down, don't run. It was like kids running running for the opening of a carnival. I sauntered just casually, I didn't run, to William Reese's booth And introduced myself. Oh yeah, I Roger and and uh I says, Did you bring anything about Lewis and Clark with you? And he turned and looked toward the glass case. And there sets a two-volume set of 18-14 Lewis and Clark journals. And this set was beautiful . And I was just oh, I was shaking. I yeah, I wanted this set so bad. And I looked at him and I I said, what what what do you what what's the price Bill said well twelve thousand five hundred . I was crushed. I knew it was beyond me. You know, so I as I kind of backed away and started to walk away from the booth, just knowing shaking my head to myself, I can't afford them, there's no way I can get the I've got to have this set of books. Somehow I've got it. I can't afford these books. I can't. There's no way. I gotta have this set of books. How the hell can I do it? Jeez, I better go to the bar. I walked to the bar and got a shot of Scotch. I walked back to the booth with my scotch in hand , and I can I look at those again? And Bill , yeah, sure. And took them off the shelf, set them on the counter. He says, well, Roger, what what can you afford? I says, I don't know. I says we're not working. This is a slow time of the year. I I might be able to do a thousand a month, but Bill, I you know, we're not working now. I I don't know. Maybe maybe in May or June, you know, when we start working overtime. And he said , Well , do you want them? And I said, Yeah, but gosh, I can't. And before I could finish the conversation , Mr. Reese had turned around and took these books, put them in the bag, wrapped them up, turned around, put out his hand and shook my hand, and said, that sounds good enough to me. The eighteen fourteen became Rogers calling cart. It established him as an expert in all things written about Lewis and Clark. And then something happened. Roger started to read his books. Before this he'd occasionally pull out a book and read a random passage, but now he started to plough through whole books front to back Now it's my time to study the books. Let's look at this book that's in front of me. I've got it open to just by chance, a passage that uh brings a lot of uh The passage comes about halfway through the expedition. After eighteen months of looking for a route to the ocean, they finally reach the Pacific. And here they finally we are in view of the ocean, this great Pacific Ocean, which we have so long anxious to see. The roaring and the noise made by the waves breaking on the rocky shores may be heard distinctly. Ocean in view. Oh the joy. So in this passage, place yourself on the banks of the Columbia River looking out toward the ocean. You know, I mean Right. You know, I'd be jumping up and down screaming, where is where's that where's that gill of whiskey? Which they didn't have at that time. Unfortunately. Unfortunately. I mean they would have taken a gallon and all chugged it and they'd have just been sl oshed on the banks and just partying forever. I mean it's it's great. What a what a feeling of of success . It it just brings a great pleasure myself . Ocean and View, oh the joy Last week Roger made a pilgrimage of sorts to see for the first time the original handwritten journals that Lewis and Clark kept during their expedition. They're the books that everything Roger ever bought are descended from. Most of the journals are stored at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. They are in remarkable condition. As a librarian turned the book's crisp pages for Roger, flipping past detailed maps and intricate drawings of animals. Roger barely moved or spok e. This is Clark's map of Great Falls of the Columbia. You're seeing it upside down. Okay. Great Falls of the Columbia. At one point Roger asked, could he touch them? He was told no . And after less than an hour with the journals, we wandered back into the library's main reading room. The book has has altered my life from being a manual laborer to being a a scholar of knowledge from the interior of the book Stephen Beckham uh professor at uh Lewis and Clark once said that uh well Roger you can't put yourself down for being a construction foreman. He said that's a school of another type. He says, you know, I love school and I love education. And he says, and now that you're entering that field with us, he says, uh he says, I have great respect for what you've done and what you know. And makes me feel great. In the years since Roger began collecting, the value of all things Lewis and Clark has soared. Stephen Ambrose wrote a popular book on Daunted courage. Ken Burns did a documentary. These fueled the fire. And last fall, Roger arranged for Lewis and Clark College in Portland to purchase his entire collection for what amounts to a small fortune. He promptly retired from construction at the age of fifty four. I just smiled. I just smiled. I walked in, sat down , leaned back in the chair, and thought , wow, a whole new life . I don't have an alarm clock now. I mean I've got one, but it's not in use. Uh when my body says to get up in the morning, I get up. I stretch, do do some light exercises, have a nice relaxing breakfast. Any of those in construction industry now and listening to this , eat your hearts out . Most of Roger's days are now spent in the library of Lewis and Clark College, where Doug Erickson is the chief archivist. Roger's known him for years. Roger would oftentimes get off of work when he was still working construction and not even clean up and come over to Lewis and Clark and spend time with me and we'd chat and talk about books, go on the internet and look at books on Lewis and Clark and other things. But he was tired . He was very tired and he looked like you know he'd just gone through you know a hard day of labor on a construction site. Now you see Roger, he he strolls in sometime in the morning whenever he feels like it. He he walks in feeling like a king. And then I usually go up to the heritage room and I just sit there and immerse myself into that. And of course I'm surrounded by the books. It's a wonderful feeling being in there. And he goes up there and he works and every couple of oh every hour or two he'll come down all excited Doug you gotta come up here and see this and I'll come upstairs and and he'll show me something and we'll get excited about it and and I I see him in the heritage room for many years to come, writing books and and having people coming and talk to him and just enjoying the rest of his life. That story by Jeremy Goldstein. In 2023, years after we first broadcast this story, Roger Wendwick died. Before he did, he wrote a book called Shotgun on My Chest, Memoirs of a Lewis and Clark Book Collector. Act four, little sod houses for you and me. When you really love a book, what exactly are you supposed to do with that feeling after you finish reading the book? And then perhaps finish reading about the book. If you feel strongly enough about the book, I think there is this imp ulse to somehow get closer to the book, to somehow try and conjure the world of the book right here in the real world somehow. So if you read about a Broadway playwright, maybe you move to New York City, start writing plays. Or if you already live in New York City, but the book takes place somewhere else, you head out there. Megan Dowm has this story. I'm moving to Nebraska. No one understands why. I've lived in New York City for seven years, which is essentially all of my adult life. And a few months ago I started making plans to head out west. Not all the way west to California or Oregon, which people from around here might understand, but to the Great Plains. I wanted to move someplace flat and treeless, someplace that gives off a sense of how big this country used to be before automobiles and the jet age, before you could be cavalier about traveling from one place to another. There are a lot of reasons behind my move, but one of the reasons has to do with a book. With nine books, as a matter of fact. They are the books written by Laura Ingalls Wilder about her childhood as a pioneer girl on the vast Midwestern Prairie in the late 1800s . When I was a little girl, growing up nearly 100 years later in the 1970s, I wanted to be like Laura so much that I made my mother sew me a sunbonnet, which I wore constantly. Like Laura, I wore my hair in braids. Before I knew how to write, I drew picture books featuring the entire Ingalls family. It was always a variation on the same theme. A family moves to a new home, encounters hardships, and through a particular combination of self-reliance and hard work, makes a life for themselves in the new place. A place so remote, so unsettled, so cold, that no civilization, not even most Indians, had ever dared to live there . To me, this kind of uncharted life was the best kind to have, and it was even better that it required a sunbonnet . She taught at three schools. The the first one was the Brewster School and that's where Elmanzel would uh take her down and pick her up. It was about 12 miles to the southwest. I'm in Desmet, South Dakota, riding a horse-drawn wagon around the actual land that the Ingalls lived on. Our tour guide is Tim Sullivan. Tim and his wife, Joan, own the 154 acres of land that Laura's father, Charles Ingalls, claimed in 1880 as part of the Homestead Act. This is an old trapper's cabin that we're gonna fix up. We haven't gotten gotten it done, but that's the only thing we haven't gotten done. A lot of people think the Ingalls are from Walnut Grove, Minnesota, because that's where the television series was set. But in fact they, only lived there for a few years. Laura came to Des met in 1879 when she was 12. It was where she grew up, became a school teacher, and met and married Almanza Wilder . Six of her books are set there. For those who remember, it's the place where Laura and her sister Mary, who was blind, got lost in the tall wet grasses known as the Big Slough. It's the place where the family survived the long winter and it was the place she always considered home. So when she talked about walking through the cool uh ground walking to the Perry School if you see when we're going home it's wet there. That's why it would have been cool . There's a certain kind of town that is defined solely by one industry, like steel towns where at least one member of every family works in the mill. Des met is sort of like that too, except the industry is a series of books. Every year for the past twenty nine years, the townspeople have put on a pageant based on Laura's life. Just about everyone in this town of twelve hundred has participated in the pageant, or at least had one family member who was put on 1880 style clothing at one time or another, and given tours at the museum, or given some hapless tourists directions to the cemetery, where caravans of family cars wind around the grounds looking for the burial sites of Charles, Caroline, Mary, Carrie, and Grace Ingalls. Almost every establishment in Des met, even the local bar, has restrooms labeled Ma and Pa . But even though Des met is, for all intents and purposes, a tourist town , it doesn't feel like one. Instead, it feels like a town with a hobby, a place where a lot of people devote a lot of time to one particular idea. The tourists, though they're greeted in that typically warm Midwest ern way, feel almost incidental to the larger cause of celebrating Laura . I talked to a man who had acted in the pageant for twenty seven years, missing only two performances the whole time, one of them because of a combine accident in which he lost his finger, and his son was impaled and almost died. He was back on stage the next night. and witnessed a pretty gory series of medical procedures performed, by the way, without anesthesia. The night of the accident, her husband had one request of her He says, Well you knew on. I was playing Ma at the time and uh so I I did perform that night and I I think I was probably in shock myself because I it went w fairly well but it was on Sunday night is where I kind of fell apart. I I did it, but I forgot a few lines. But it we we made it Laura's books have a lot to do with the notion of rising to the occasion, and the pageant demands countless hours of volunte er effort, cooperation, and manual labor done without complaint. In a way, this kind of idyllic romantic work ethic is not what I expected when I came to Dismet . Or, I should say, it is what I expected, and that's what took me by surprise. Traditionally, in a story like this, the writer goes to the place she's dreamt of and finds that it's not like what she imagined at all. But the remarkable thing about Desmet is that it really is the little town on the prairie. The people are a bit like the people in Laura's books. They're proud of the land they live on, and in a strange way, it's as if Laura's powers of description have affected the way they talk about the place And it's beautiful out here in the prairie this evening looking at the big slough. Herd of cattle over there. I think it looks just like it did in Laura's day. Not all the buildings on the other side, but the big slough is the same. I like the way the blackbirds swing in the reeds, the way the cattails bloom, the puddles of water. Sometimes ducks and geese come in and land . Marion Kramer is the author of the Laura Ingalls Wilder pageant. We're sitting at a picnic table on the Ingalls homestead. A busy day of tourism is winding down. Visitors are getting back to Tim Sullivan's eight-year-old son, Brian, is assembling his costume for the pageant dress rehearsal. Marion is 65 So how much different was your life from L aura's when you were reading these books? Well, I guess my childhood was before electricity, before running water, and I lived on a working farm and there were chores, there was responsibility. Uh a lot of the same that's why I liked the Laura books so well because Laura had to do the same things. I had to do. We had cattle and hogs and sheep and we grew wheat and corn. It was a wonderful time. Family was very important . Life seemed simpler then because we didn't do so many things and go so much, but I'm not sure that it was do you remember when you first got electricity and water and and what was that like? Well it was just lovely. We had electricity came in 48 and they had been working for a long time putting the lines in and finally the lines were all in and the and they were all hooked up. We were just waiting for the major flow of energy. And then the electricity was on. And it was the first time. And that night as it got dark, I remember my father and my mother and my sister and one of my older brothers we stood there and looked because suddenly it wasn't a black country anymore. We could see our neighbors' lights. Made it seem a lot less lonesome, a lot less isolated. Marion was a music teacher for many years before becoming a pioneer school teacher on the Ingalls homestead. Every day she hangs out in the one-room schoolhouse, which looks exactly the way Laura describes her classroom at the Brewster School in her book These Happy Golden Years. Marion gives brief music and math lessons And then has the class read a quote from Laura off the blackboard. The quote goes something like It's best to be truthful and honest and make the best of what we have. Somehow it sounds revelatory . The prairie is the only place I've been to in my life where you can make the simplest, sweetest, even, I dare say, most cliched statement about the virtues of a simple life, and it sounds like anything but a cliche . It's as if the wind, which barrels through here like a wild animal, just knocks the irony out of everything. After a long day working at the Ingalls homestead, Joan Sullivan, Tim's wife, walks me down to the edge of the big slough . The grass is taller than we are, and it's easy to see how Mary and Laura could have gotten lost here. You know, there's still some honesty in the world, you know, and that's what Laura talked about. You know, it's good to be truthful and honest and to, you know, do what's right. And that's that's I guess what you know, being being here isn't always easy, it's a lot of hard work and you wonder, you know, will the whole thing work out, you know, to be able to keep it running. But but there's something about you know taking those morals um and passing that on to a family. Do you think that has to do with farming or do you think it's something about the time that Laura was living in or a combination of those? Probably a combination of those. You know, trying to make an honest dollar, you know, a trying to you know, uh a farmer works hard, um you know they they feed the world . I'm glad so many of you have come to our little town on the prairie, Indy Smith . This is especially fine country, this prairie . At this time of the year, this is the hour that daylight softens and twilight falls. Oh, please forgive me. Sometimes I get a little carried away. The Laura Ingalls Wilder pageant runs for three weekends each summer. Admission is five dollars. About 700 people come each night. It's held right in the middle of the prairie on land adjacent to the Ingalls homestead. From the pageant site, you can see the five thousand One for each of my girls, he said, meaning Ma and his four daughters. Laura England The dialogue in the pageant has been pre recorded. When the pageant is actually performed, the cast members lip sync the words and pantomime the action. This technique has its benefits and its perils. During the first performance this year, the actor playing Pa missed his cue, and his words came booming down onto the stage even though he wasn't there. The actors playing Mary and Laura and Ma carried on, talking to an invisible Pa like he was the voice of God. Pa , is it on Indian land or land we'll have to move from? Not on Indian land, my pretty girl. This is surveyed land. Just waiting for us to call it home. I want a place that's open where I can run with the wind. Lots of room, Laura. It'll be the Ingalls homestead. Doesn't that sound fine ? I am completely charmed by this page Yes, there are mistakes. Yes, you can hear places on the soundtrack where the tape has been edited, but all I can think as I watch these people on stage, many of them farmers, retired farmers, and their wives and kids. Write these books about it . Some cowboy folk song or a particularly bad line in a romance novel. But it's not. It is simply dusk on the prairie. Little girls in sweaters and pants from the gap are wearing sunbonnets and standing on the benches to get a better look. Fathers with fussy babies stroll around the fields so their wives can watch the pageant undisturbed. An eight-year-old girl in sneakers and jeans runs through the grass, the wind whipping through her hair, her sunbonnet flying out behind her . The pageant is a huge hit. When the show's over, the audience storms the stage to get the autographs of cast members. People are saying it's the best thing they've ever seen, that this trip to Des met is the best vacation they've ever had. It's remarkable, really, that in a time when families can take vacations to Dis ney World or visit Great Adventure or even just stay home and watch TV. People will travel all the way to South Dakota to see a world that's described in a series of books. The Ingalls family managed to make homes for themselves in some of the most unforgiving conditions imaginable, in a cabin in the deep woods, in the banks of a creek, in a shanty surrounded by hundreds of flat, empty acres. But no matter where they lived, Pa played his fiddle, Ma did her sewing, and Laura managed to find delight in the world around her. Maybe that ability to merge the indoors and the outdoors, the familiar and the unfamiliar, is what all these people are responding to. Maybe that's why there's so much romance in the whole notion of a cabin stuck out in the middle of nowhere. People want to find comfort in an inherently uncomfortable place. They want to see if they can make it through the long winter and still see the beauty in the snow. Megan Down. Two weeks after we first aired this story, Megan left New York City for Nebraska. She lived there for several years. She's since written a bunch of books, moved back and forth across the country a few more times, just like Laura Ingalls Wilder. You can find Megan's writing and a link to her podcast, her very interesting podcast, at MeganDown.com . By the way, these days the actors in the pageant about Laura's life on the prairie actually speak their own lines themselves , thanks to the advent of inexpensive wireless microphones, they no longer lip sync to a pre-recorded track. Shadow slowly cre eping down the prairie trail .ell Bergamer is produced today by Julie Snyder and myself with Alex Bloomberg, Susan Burton, Blue Chevony and Nancy Updike. Contributing editors, Paul Tuff, Jack Hitt, Margie Rocka and Elise Spiegel, and Conseiller is Sarah Vow. Production help from Todd Bachman, Sterley Kine and Sylvia Leemus, Musical Help from Marika Partridge and Terry Hecker. Help on today's rerun from Adrian Lilly, Molly Marcello, Stone Nelson and Ryan Rummery. Special thanks to Bob Carlson at KCRW and Larry Josephson at the Radio Foundation, our website, this AmericanLife.org. This American Life is delivered to Public Radio Stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks today to this American Life partner, Sam McVitie and Jordan Goldwarg, Dr. Emily Vierin, and Matt Stoner. I hope that you will consider joining us and becoming a life partner. Basically, that helps us keep making the show. A big chunk of our budget now comes from our life partners. We're counting on that number to grow . There's a thank you. You get to listen ad-free. You get dozens of bonus episodes. You get a special Greatest Hits archive that appears right in your podcast feed. So when you're looking for a show or something to listen to, there they are. Greatest hits right there join at this american life dot org slash life partners that link is also in the show notes thanks as always to our program's co-founder mr torre mal attia who wanders into our workspace, looking at all the new stuff we bought, and asks what what do you what 's the price? I'm Aaron Glass. Back next week with more stories of this American life. Oh, the joy. Tumblin' been my tired little sle ep y to a prairie la p