Brian’s Column: Up on the Farm

Posted on September 3, 2017 by Brian Wright

9: Fields of the grandparents: Splendid icing on childhood’s cake
Brian R. Wright

Note: These columns are a series I am making into a volume of my memoirs, working title: Volume 1: Overland Park Ways. You may follow the links at top and bottom of page to go to preceding or succeeding episodes. The series starts here. {If the [Link to Episode <next>] at the bottom of the column does not show an active hyperlink, then the <next> column has yet to be written.}

Note: Image showing my brother, Forrest (L), then Grandpa Fobian, then me (R) with barn in the background. This was a fully working family farm of roughly 500 acres, near Centerville, Iowa.

In the 1950s and very early 1960s my brother Forrest and I would go with Mom and Dad to my grandmother’s farm in Iowa. These were annual golden interludes, usually of a long weekend, sometimes longer, in my childhood… most of the photos of this chapter are from the week our family was at the farm in the summer with my mother’s sister June’s family—Forrest and I had four cousins who lived in Battle Creek, Michigan: Jim and Karen, twins, two years older than I, Marie, one year older, and Marsha, one year younger, close to Forrest’s age. This visit was much like a rare family reunion; even my aunt Donna, single, a public health nurse, came down from wherever she was at the time… might have been Des Moines.

What a great week. Fun and games for us city kids: catching tadpoles in the pond behind the house, jumping around on the hay in the barn, warily watching Big Hog Tommy in his pen, making the rounds of the chicken coop and machinery garages, riding on the tractor with the men—Grandpa Al Fobian had three sons: Kenny and Lee, lithe and strong-backed 20-22 year-olds about to spread their wings, who did the lion’s share of the farmhand work… then Darrell, maybe 16, still in high school. Continue reading →

Movie Review: Blood Diamond (2006)

Posted on June 21, 2017 by Brian Wright

Exciting old-style action-adventure movie with a lingering message (9/10)

As I was growing up in middle class America in the 1950s and 1960s, I got to see plenty of movies. We lived in Overland Park, Kansas, a post-WW2 suburb of the Kansas City metro area. The little town was something out of a Norman Rockwell painting or a Jean Shepherd—author behind the movie, A Christmas Story—reminiscence.

Written by Charles Leavitt
Directed by Edward Zwick

Leonardo DiCaprio … Danny Archer
Djimon Hounsou … Solomon Vandy
Jennifer Connelly … Maddy Bowen

The small downtown included TG&Y (dime store), two drug stores (a Rexall outlet and locally owned “McDaniels”), A&P Groceries, a Sears catalog-order store, an A&W Root Beer franchise, a couple of restaurants, etc… and the Overland Park Theater. When we were just kids, Mom and Pop would shuttle my brother and me to the matinees on Saturday.

I suppose then they went shopping or something—wink, wink—but we never thought to ask. When you’re a child of nine or even nineteen: the universe revolves around you and your parents do not have lives apart from seeing to your every need or whim. Anyway, sorry to get off track. Continue reading →

Brian’s Column: Life on the Less Unreal Side

Posted on May 21, 2017 by Brian Wright

7. Baseball and neighbors and Cubs, oh my!
Brian R. Wright

[Link to Episode 6]

Note: These columns are a series, I will make into a volume of my memoirs. You may follow the links at top and bottom of page to go to preceding or succeeding episodes. The series starts here. {If the [Link to Episode <next>] at the bottom of the column does not show an active hyperlink, then the <next> column has yet to be written.}

No doubt subconsciously I viewed my entry into the forced socialization program of government schooling as an anomaly, something im- posed on me by higher authority that down deep I resented and never treated seriously. In a word, unreal. [Keep in mind that in the 1950s, the states still held ultimate authority over our culture’s compulsory children’s (prison) schools; the federal Mob didn’t really didn’t start stirring the forced-schooling cauldron—mainly on policy and funding—until the 1960s, with LBJ’s Great Society great overreach.][1]

The above-right photo shows my first- or second-grade era baseball team, managed by my dad and sponsored by the Overland Park Lutheran Church (OPLC). I’m in the back row on the far right. I became hooked on baseball from the glowing first day Dad took us to Kansas City Municipal Stadium to watch the perennially cellar-dwelling Kansas City Athletics of the American League. [The A’s would alternate with the Washington Senators between eighth place and seventh place. But it was still the ‘Show,’ the major leagues of baseball.] The sights, sounds, smells, tastes… watching these giants throw the ball so fast around the horn, hit it so hard. More like gods than men—at play on hallowed ground. Going to the ball park was my first spiritual experience, a church far more moving/reverential than the one in town that my parents had signed us up for. From the age of 5 to 15 I knew what I was going to be when I grew up: a ballplayer. Continue reading →

Brian’s Column: Playtime Overture

Posted on April 16, 2017 by Brian Wright

4: Pregnant days of first memories of (who knows, may yet be) a special life
Brian R. Wright

[Link to Episode 3]

This is truly strange for me, because I rather vividly remember Le Gran Tricycle Launch by my brother, as described in Episode 2. And that was before we moved to the Overland Park digs described in Episode 3.

I calculated that Episode 2 took place when I was 3 to 3 1/2 years old, so the following awareness—which at the time I told to myself that that instant I would subsequently remember as my first self-conscious moment—occurred after- ward, at age 4 to 4 1/2. In Overland Park.

Dawn of the Independents’ Movement?[1]

And it was very simple: I was outside on the grass in the front yard between our home and the neighbor’s home, the Browns. Nothing else. Just 1) nice sunny day, 2) standing on the grass, 3) and taking a view toward the north. That’s it. Plus the fully conscious knowing that this moment was going to be the very first of my special ‘Brian Wright’ self-aware life. Freedom and the joy of being rolled into one. Now, I speculate, was this a foretelling of some kind that I would, indeed, choose psychological independence and maintain it thru all the forces seeking my conformance until today? Continue reading →

Brian’s Column: Boyhood Visits to the Farm in Iowa

Posted on September 20, 2015 by Brian Wright

Reminiscences in response to Cousin Jim for his journey thru Kansas

Bro Forrest (R) and Me (L) with Tuton (Twoton)

[In the 1950s and 1960s my brother Forrest and I would go with Mom and Dad to my grandmother’s farm in Iowa. Cousin Jim and his wife are on a cross-country roadtrip heading ultimately down to New Orleans to visit his daughter. He has been trying to locate Gram’s step children, and now seems to have located them in Western Kansas. So he asks for memories and photos of the time, which I feel sans any real identifications, are appropriate for me to share out as a broader good will gesture to the rest of the human family.]

≅≅≅≅≅≅≅≅

Those were golden years in my childhood… except for the time that you and Forrest ganged up on me, when Aunt Donna slapped me for being sassy, and feeling totally out of it when the men would retire to the parlor after the big meal and talk in ‘man code.’ [It sounded like they were discussing very important matters, especially Grandpa Al. He seemed to lead the discussion, and had a way of sounding authoritative, though I’d have no idea what he was talking about. I expect my dad and Uncle Ted and the other younger men didn’t know what he was talking about either, but respectfully kept their end of it up.] Continue reading →