Annotation: Imagery   Reading Jack Kerouac’s On The Road is exhausting. The seemingly never-ending physical and emotional settings of road trip adventures and life-bending experiences feature the alter ego personas of Sal Paradise (Jack Kerouac), the narrator, and his buddy Dean Moriarity (Neal Cassady). The book relates the mindset of the author’s “Beat” generation protagonists in the post-World War II 1950s; the era of folks like Allen Ginsberg (Carlo Marx in the book) – think acid trips and poetry, and William S. Burroughs – think heroin-addled, creative person, prolifically writing paranoid fiction that profoundly influenced the 1960s counterculture. As the[...]

"We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope." Martin Luther King, Jr. For several hundred years, tragedies of historical significance against brown-skinned people found no print in history books, were seldom mentioned in newspapers, and were hushed by white community leaders and the Chamber of Commerce—labeled as bad for business. As I probed resources ten years ago while crafting bits in 2010 for Tulsa’s literary newspaper, This Land Press, I happened on horrifying accounts of the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. This new awareness penetrated my soul. Are you kidding? Why did this happen? I have lived in[...]

My weathered Minnetonka moccasin hammers my car's throttle, leaving Tulsa, Oklahoma, rolling north in August 2008. I am precisely fifty-nine-years-old. The summer heat shimmers off the Highway 75 asphalt as I steer towards the colder Scandinavian region of my youth and my parent’s cabin on Lake Blanche in West Central Minnesota. I relish this annual vacation that takes me eight hundred miles over two-lane ribbons of familiar roads. As the stress of Tulsa fades, lake memories flood my consciousness. When Dad drove us to the cabin from northwest Iowa, we always stopped at the Dairy Queen in Pipestone, Minnesota; we[...]

(A braided essay) At dawn on a Saturday morning in July of 1958, our nuclear family loaded up for a trip to spend the day with Mom's uncle, Albin Matson. We lived on the Missouri River in Sioux City in northwest Iowa. Uncle Albin lived on the other side of the Missouri in southeast South Dakota, fifty miles away, down two-lane roads through rich, black dirt fields. Uncle Albin's dwelling was the same farmhouse his family built when they immigrated from Sweden in the early 1900s. With sleepy eyes, we piled into the Chevy. Dad always bought Chevy station wagons.[...]

People say I'm crazy doing what I'm doing Well, they give me all kinds of warnings to save me from ruin I'm just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round I really love to watch them roll No longer riding on the merry-go-round I just had to let it go Watching the Wheels, John Lennon, 1981 (posthumous)      Homelessness in America is a simmering cauldron of thousands fending for themselves. Some are not old enough to receive social security checks. Some don’t know how to apply or are mentally ill or addicted to chemicals that rob them[...]

     Sometimes, friends talk about their earliest memories, perhaps the first memory. Over the years, I have always responded with the same answer. How could I know this happened, they'd ask. "Really? Oh, come on now!" they'd remark. "No, honest, I can still see it." I stand my ground.      My parents brought me home from the hospital to a two-bedroom house on Garretson Avenue in the enclave known as Morningside within the city limits of Sioux City, Iowa. When I return for class reunions, I often take a tour of the three homes of my upbringing. On[...]

Lawrence Welk was quite popular with the viewing public during his show's original run and continues to have a nostalgic fan base even today. The Lawrence Welk show was a smash hit for the older demographic of Americans who tuned in each week to hear Welk’s big band in the 50s and 60s on the new home appliance called a television. It was a splashy LA production featuring easy-listening music of polkas and tunes suited for his dancers to glide around in front of the band, wearing sailor suits or the like, smiling and whipping their heads around to face[...]

There wasn't much racial tension in my Northwest Iowa upbringing—maybe a skirmish between a few Angus and Herefords from time to time, but nothing to make front-page news. Blacks, Whites, and Natives co-existed without life-threatening prejudice in my hometown of Sioux City, along the Missouri River at the juncture of Iowa, Nebraska, and South Dakota. Was that because the Whites accounted for nearly 90% of the population in the 1950s and 60s? In comparison, the Blacks and American Indians tallied about 6% combined. My high school had a handful of minority students, and until then, I’d had no non-White interactions[...]

"Buy the ticket, take the ride."   Hunter Stockton Thompson loved to shock his readers. His raw, personalized writing initially alarmed and confused and eventually humored generations in the 60s and 70s. His timing to enter the writing fray with his unorthodox, new journalism style was perfect — just weird enough to be rebellious and just knowledgeable enough to be well-received. Some say he was the only twentieth-century equivalent of Mark Twain. Others say the timing of Thompson's point of entry into the publishing world was karma; still others may declare God's will. Thompson intertwined his writing and personal life,[...]