By Jeff Guy
To Dr. Jay Price
Hi, I'm J. Guy & that's all you need to know. Nobody can change that. Let's say I want admission into a program that deals with history. Let's say I have to write a piece about what history means to me, much like when I was taking Driver's Ed from Misters Calvert & Bennett in Jett, Kan. in the '80s and I wrote an essay entitled, "What Driving Means to Me."
Make a statement, say. What can I say? Talking to fellow historians is better than chocolate mixed with marijuana. History – that's my elixir, the drink that pumps the magic in. It's like talking shop, swapping war stories with fellow journalists like Deb Gruver, Amy Geiszler-Jones or someone of the name dropping like.
It started when I was a little boy. My Grandma & Grandpa Guy gave me a book about the Presidents, but it stopped at FDR because the book was written during the New Deal Era. Even before World War II.
Then the bicentennial era -- 1976. I was in first grade. My dad gave me a new book with colored drawings of the Presidents up to Jerry Ford. On a summer day, a distant relative from out of state was at our house. He looked about 50-years-old. Distinguished. He took my Presidents book & said, "You wanna see who the presidents were when I was in the service?" Then he showed me pictures of FDR and Truman.
Then one summer day, a man came to our house selling World Book Encyclopedias. I was around 6. I remember the lady up the street sent her 13 year-old-son (a kid named Roger who was my hero) to our house to talk to the man. So Mom bought the Encyclopedia set. That was my Google.
The family would be at the house. I'd be sprawled on the floor, looking at pictures of Abraham Lincoln in the Encyclopedia & my grandma would say, "Jeff's studying." But I wasn't the most scholastic kid in the world. Math? Telling time? Challenges, man.
Anyhow, Mom also ordered some set of history books for kids and I read about some Black woman named Rosa Parks refusing to give up her bus seat way the heck back in 1955. My parents took us back East in the bicentennial year of 1976. We saw where the nation was formed. I was in Pennsylvania, city of brotherly love, looking down at a big ass tombstone over Benjamin Franklin's grave and I kept thinking, "Oh cool, Benjamin Franklin's bones are right down there." I almost wanted to dig up the grave.
Then both sets of grandparents told me about the Great Depression years before I'd hear about it in school.
“It was the shits,” Grandpa Mac said.
"The time I had in the Depression, I wouldn't wish it on a rattlesnake," Grandpa Guy said.
Then these years of fog, a shit through the cutting bend of my life. Fucked up by family, school, religion, TV…society.
I found my footing in high school history class, though. Textbook – it wasn't hard-to-understand crap like chemistry or algebra. It was a breeze to read through. Too bad, my American history teacher was a misogynistic, cock and balls Coach Craphead who couldn’t mind his own fucking business. Had to get into my shit. World history teacher? Forget it. Some body-building, predatory bully with a used jock strap for a brain.
But I didn’t need them. I’d been digging history since I was 3. All anyone had to do was toss me a book and I was fine. This was in the ‘80s before there was a formidable effort to ban To Kill a Mockingbird and re-write the history books to say Moses was the first American and slavery taught Blacks some good trade skills.
Anyhow, the high school history textbooks primarily educated me about Presidents & war generals. But it wasn’t so much the main points in the textbooks as the “little” details that resonated with me. Like the paragraph about the African American man who returned home to America from fighting World War I and was lynched while in uniform.
In college, I first heard the term, “social history.”
Here in the Wichita Metropolitan Statistical Area, that means the aircraft industry, but also the area Beat movement that arose to counter the Military Industrial Complex and status quo, the old beatnik coffeehouses and hippie rock clubs, the Civil Rights dissenters, the underground LGBT bars, the palatial movie houses in the city before one or two companies cornered the market.
Wellington, Kan. – the Chisholm trail going through. Arkansas City, Kan. – the Cherokee Strip Run. Newton, Kan. – the Mennonite heritage from Germany and the Ukraine and the Harvey Girls on passenger trains.
Basically, history is all of us.
The first big death in my life was Grandpa Mac when I was 15. From what is known now, one might theorize that he was bipolar, but anyway I didn’t realize yet that the postcards and letters and the sermon, or testimony he wrote out in pencil and delivered in a Baptist Church in 1938, were history.
Like Grandpa Guy’s black and white photographs of dust bowl towns. His grandfather’s death certificate dated 1914. Young Rich Guy would’ve been 6 or 7-years-old. “My granddad was a captain in the Union Army. He was captured and locked up in a Confederate prison. They were gonna hang him, but two weeks later, the war was over.”
I learned that Presidents were the last people to look to when seeking American heroes. The real heroes were the people who took to the streets and put pressure on power in favor of Civil Rights, Women’s Rights, Native American Rights, Labor Rights and such good things.
Journalism was the right career path for me. I’d read that when Winston Churchill was a young man, he ran off and covered the Spanish-American War for the U.S. press. “Now, that’s a way to experience life,” I said.
In 1995, the best thing about being a reporter for northeast Oklahoma’s Daceja American newspaper was interviewing World War II veterans. It was the 50th anniversary since the war ended and there were still several World War II veterans around. They were very educated about history, geography, culture and technical skills. They had seen the world and learned trades at military schools. I talked to them, drank with them and had a blast.
Working at the Worthington News in south central Kansas in 2019 wasn’t the same. The guys were in their early 70s in the 1990s. Now, if they were alive, they were around 95-years-old. I only got to interview four World War II veterans – two of whom I know have since passed away. I’m afraid to find out about the other two.
In news reporting, one story always leads to another story. Historical research works the same way. Opening one door always leads back to another.
Terrorists in Afghanistan leads back to the U.S.-Soviet Union Cold War which leads back to World War II which leads back to World War I which leads back to secret treaties and the Franco-Prussian War and…
Black Lives Matter. George Floyd. The Prison Industrial Complex. Leads back to the Civil Rights Movement which leads back to Jim Crow which leads back to the Civil War which leads back to slavery…
The Me Too Movement. The ERA Movement. Roe v. Wade. The Pill. Rosie the Riveter in World War II. omen gaining the right to vote. The Suffragette Movement. The Seneca Falls Convention…
I’m not going to sing a dumb Billy Joel song, but researching history is a blast. Like someone starting a fire. OK, I’m sorry. There’s excitement with every old newspaper article you uncover, every old letter, every old diary you unearth. The shoe box full of letters and photographs stored away in an attic or garage in Iowa. That’s the game. The high.
“When you were a little boy, you were always asking about the Presidents and the states – and space,” my mother told me one night in 1995. “I used to think, why isn’t he asking about Sesame Street? And I knew then that you weren’t the run-of-the-mill kid.”
I don’t know. Make of my life what you will. It’s open to inquiry, analysis, interpretation. Everyone has their own story.
Including you.