I am an impure thinker. I am hurt, swayed, shaken, elated, disillusioned, shocked, comforted, and I have to transmit my mental experiences lest I die. And although I may die. To write a book is not a luxury; it is a means of survival.
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, I Am an Impure Thinker
No man is an island . . . .
Any man’s death diminishes me
because I am involved in mankind.
John Donne
Full Disclosure
With this post, the blog “Not my First Rodeo” sinks below the performance standards of the historical profession. The story told here rests entirely on one person’s memory. No other witnesses were interviewed, and no archives were consulted. Something is awry with the chronology; for instance, one character makes an implausibly instant ascent from Hemmerling Elementary School in Banning, California, to Yale University’s Graduate School in New Haven, Connecticut. Worst of all, sentiment outweighs evidence; readers should be prepared to self-administer substantial doses of skepticism.
An Unquestioned Dedication
I dedicated my first book to my parents and also to the memory of a retired prison guard who I knew to be a racist.
The book was Desert Passages: Encounters with the American Deserts. It came out in 1985. Here is the dedication:
To Patricia and Grant Nelson, and to the memory of Frank Prindle.
Why did I wait more than thirty-five years to answer the question, “Who was Frank Prindle?”
Because not a single person who has read the book has ever asked the question.
Also because answering the question will take a while.
I am going to tell the story because it has relevance—maybe too much relevance—for our troubled times.
And I want you to know why I don’t repent writing that dedication.
The Setting:
A Family of Mixed Class Identity in Banning, California in the 1950s,
With Neighbors Nearby
In college, when I took a course on the Psychology of Social Class, I was not well-prepared. Our first assignment—to write a short paper on our own family’s social class—confounded me. Reading my paper must have confused the professor nearly as much as writing it had confused me.
Here’s the data set.
Data Point #1
My mother worked full-time as a legal secretary.
Mother’s social class: white collar or, in the gendered variation, “pink collar.”
That one was easy.
Data Point #2
My father owned a store that he had built and operated alongside the road between Los Angeles and Palm Springs. At the California Date Shop, he sold dates with various accompaniments—walnut-stuffed, coconut-covered, chocolate-coated. He also sold date shakes. Later in life, I met a number of people who had crossed the Southern California desert in the days before cars had air-conditioning. When they drove into Banning and bought a chilled date shake from my father, they found a secular redemption that never faded in memory.
Father’s social class: small-scale entrepreneur; petty bourgeoisie.
That one was also easy, but now it gets complicated. And stays complicated.
Data Point #3
My father sometimes sought additional income by working on a surveying crew in the resort boomtown of Palm Springs. On the crew, he was not the professional who stood at the transit and did the surveying. Along with other workers (who tutored him in original and colorful forms of multilingual swearing), he carried and set the chain.
Father’s social class: proletariat.
Data Point #4
My father also built apartments in the lot behind our house. He did much of the construction himself (self-employed proletariat?). The tenants in his apartments were often elderly people, many of whom were in a vulnerable state of limited income in retirement, and this made my father reluctant to raise their rent. In a sense, he operated privately subsidized housing for the elderly. I am not sure what this tells us about social class, but I do remember clearly that we gave the tenants boxes of See’s Candy at the holidays, and they did not reciprocate.
Father’s social class: small scale landowner; self-employed construction manager and worker; petty bourgeoisie.
“Identify your family’s social class.”
It was lucky for me that the grading system at UC Santa Cruz was all Pass/Fail, since this assignment posed a test of clarity in which I could not excel.
But at least I knew this: if it was my ambition to be an elitist snob, I had gotten off to a bad start.
The Proximate Apartment
Now we have the setting laid out: apartments with mostly elderly occupants, right behind my childhood home.
But I still have to say a little more about the context of those times. The late 1950s and the early 1960s were the days when we hung around with people who had wildly different points of view from our own, without a single facilitator or moderator or mediator or conflict-resolution professional anywhere in sight. This was not by any measure a golden age, but it was a very interesting age, especially for a child who had taken up what would be a lifelong hobby of eavesdropping.
Frank and Ethel Prindle were the elderly couple who lived closest to us. Since my parents both worked, and my older sisters followed a full round of high school activities, while also working after school in the date shop, I spent a lot of time in the Prindles’ apartment.
(And now, for an irrelevant disclosure. When I was very young, my father’s date shop was my day care center. It was someone’s inspiration to outfit me in Westernwear—a tiny leather fringed jacket and a tiny leather fringed skirt, positioning me as a toddler version of today’s Walmart Greeter. “Where’s the Cowgirl?” regular customers used to ask as they entered the store.)
Ok, back to the story.
While Mr. and Mrs. Prindle were devoted to each other, they rejected each other’s political opinions, and they entirely and completely abhorred each other’s attitudes on race.
Mr. Prindle watched a lot of sports, and he would very often use pejorative racial terms to characterize players when he commented on successfully received passes or on unbroken runs to the goal line. When Mr. Prindle spoke a racial epithet, Mrs. Prindle was out of the room in an instant. Sometimes she departed to the bedroom, and sometimes (this was Southern California, after all) she headed to the outdoors. But it was my custom to remain near the television set with Mr. Prindle, despite the outpouring of unpleasant ethnic terminology, certainly not echoing his word choice but not reprimanding him for it either.
Mr. Prindle also supplied me with reading. My big sister Sunnie had taught me how to read when I was very young, and so my level of literacy gave Mr. Prindle plenty of room to invite me beyond the domain of “age-appropriate” literature. He was an enthusiast for murder mysteries, and when he had finished a book, he often handed it on to me. The prolific writer Erle Stanley Gardner kept both Mr. Prindle and me busy.
I enjoyed reading Gardner’s tales of Perry Mason, Paul Drake, and Della Street. Remember, my mother was a legal secretary, and maybe I thought that tracking Perry Mason’s secretary was giving me a glimpse of my mother’s adventures at work!
I vividly remember wondering what it would be like to read a book and understand every word in it, if such a moment were ever to come. But my premature exposure to Perry Mason’s lingo provided some surprises to my teachers. Once, one of my elementary school teachers was giving our class rather complicated instructions for a project. This inspired me to use wording that I had picked up from my reading, even though I had no idea what it meant.
“Dammit,” I said to my teacher. “Quit beating around the bush.”
Perry Mason had said this to his private detective Paul Drake, and the mystifying hilarity of someone taking a stick and beating around a bush had stuck with me. Given that I lived in a small town, my parents soon learned that Mr. Prindle’s company was giving me a head start in colorful speech.
I offer the books Mr. Prindle installed in my literary canon, and the phrases he installed in my vocabulary, as just one example of the rewards awaiting me when I went out our back door, opened the fence, climbed over the brick wall, and knocked at the Prindles’ kitchen door.
It is only now, as I write, that I fully realize that Ethel and Frank Prindle did not have children or grandchildren.
They had me.
Days Of Yore
I have spent a good share of my time on the planet exclaiming, “Small world!” Everyone I know seems to know everyone else; I rarely get anywhere near the legendary spacing of “six degrees of separation” between any one of us and Kevin Bacon or, for that matter, Francis Bacon or Nathaniel Bacon. Even in the era of distancing and Zoom, I punctuate my days with discoveries that a treasured friend I got to know in the Forest Service went to high school with my dentist, or another pal is married to the stepdaughter of a person whose book I once reviewed with a lot more criticism than praise.
This pattern of improbable convergence set in early in life, when I learned that Mr. Prindle knew the Birdman of Alcatraz.
When he approached the subject of his work as an Alcatraz guard, Mr. Prindle seemed to recall that I was a child, remembering that some restraint on his outspokenness was probably in order. But from the clues he gave me, I had reason to think that he had been a hard master in that regime, doing little to prepare the men to enter post-prison life on more productive terms with themselves or with society. Mr. Prindle, it is my informed guess, made it clear to the prisoners that he controlled every dimension of their lives. It is hard for me to imagine that he treated Black and Mexican prisoners exactly as he treated white prisoners.
Meanwhile, when he was not at work, Mr. Prindle and Mrs. Prindle had been quite a spirited pair. Here is one story, steeped in the ambience of the 1920s, to illustrate that proposition.
During Prohibition, the Prindles frequented speakeasies. On one festive evening, the fun was interrupted when the joint closed earlier than either Ethel or Frank had been expecting. When they headed to their car in the parking lot, she didn’t close the door instantly. Instead, Ethel took off her high-heeled shoe and threw it hard enough to break the window next to the speakeasy’s front door. Before the damage could be assessed, Ethel was back in the car, Frank had the car in gear, and they were gone.
Was this the right story to tell to a child in elementary school?
It certainly was.
Some might be inclined to see this as a cautionary tale, warning the young not to go to speakeasies and to keep one’s shoes in the role of footwear and never projectiles.
The lesson I took was exactly the opposite. From this story, I learned that Mrs. Prindle, who seemed to me to have always been old, had once been much younger. Rather than making a case for the restraint of temper, the moral of the story was this: Better make hay while the sun shines.
The shining of that sun was nothing to count on.
On the day that Mrs. Prindle had a stroke, our house was a scene of people rushing around with the hope of being helpful. In the midst of the bustle, I slammed my foot into a door jamb and broke my little toe. With the crisis that had come upon us, my trivial injury was of no interest to anyone. But my toe did go through a progression of various shades of purple and red and even blue and green, and I learned that a little toe is important for balance and a normal stride. But on the day of Mrs. Prindle’s stroke, I had next-to-nothing in the way of balance anyway, and I had absolutely no occasion to go anywhere with a normal stride. So I limped through that day. When I did get professional attention, I learned that a little toe is impossible to set. So I continued to limp while Mrs. Prindle made her gradual departure from life.
I think I remember that Mrs. Prindle was never able to speak after her stroke. I hope I remember that wrong.
Through his wife’s time in a convalescent hospital and after her death, Mr. Prindle was a rocky island in a sea of despair. At her graveside, he became very angry with the minister, who he felt was speaking while knowing nothing about Ethel. Since neither Ethel nor Frank were churchgoers, it is still hard to blame the minister.
Not Every Black Cat Symbolizes Bad Luck
I cannot think what would have become of the widowed Mr. Prindle if he hadn’t had a cat.
Alabama Governor George Wallace was much in the news in those days, parading his strident and belligerent resistance to desegregation. Almost certainly an admirer of Governor Wallace, Mr. Prindle named his cat—who was coal-black—after the Governor.
Wallace was a cat with a tightly scheduled nightlife that required him to leave the apartment, and enter it again, from dawn to dusk. Wallace’s message alternated between “Let me in!” and “Let me out!” But every hour or so, it was sure to be one or the other.
Whatever the hour, when awakened from sleep, Mr. Prindle always complied with Wallace’s commands.
Meanwhile, I grew up, went to college, and then went to graduate school. I always visited Mr. Prindle when I was in Banning, and I always got reminded of the canyon between his opinions and my own.
On one visit, I happened to arrive when he was contemplating a poll that had just arrived in the mail. Mr. Prindle and I sat at the kitchen table and worked our way through quite a long questionnaire about various political positions and legislative actions. Without one exception, Mr. Prindle and I were 180 degrees apart.
Perhaps thinking that I had already been ruined as a politically sensible person, Mr. Prindle did not reveal anything but enthusiasm for my high-falutin’ education. When I had taken my courses, passed my qualifying exams, and writing a dissertation was the one remaining hurdle on the road to a Ph.D., Mr. Prindle was excited that I was going to get that degree from a famous university. He could not be silenced on the subject.
By contrast, nearly everyone else had learned to stay away from the whole topic.
I was taking forever to write my dissertation. I had come down with what seemed to be a terminal case of dissertation writer’s block, and no one dared to mention it. By a sharply conditioned reflex, everyone knew not to ask me when I would finish.
Except Mr. Prindle.
This was our dialogue for several years:
The prison guard in retirement: “Can I call you ‘Doctor’ yet?”
The graduate student in literary paralysis: “No, you cannot.”
The cat Wallace surely must have taken these tense exchanges as the time to propose that Mr. Prindle open the door and let him out.
“Quit Beating Around The Bush”
When I went to graduate school, the aura of Frank Prindle went with me. He had given me a couple of flannel shirts that proved to be well-suited to winter days in New Haven. Mr. Prindle had been a heavy smoker, and nothing in the repertoire of the dry cleaner could remove the intense smell of tobacco from those shirts. People I knew in graduate school must have had moments of wondering, “What habits is she hiding from us?”
Here is the main habit I was hiding from everyone: my unbreakable habit of sitting at a desk, fitfully writing and discarding sentences, and becoming more and more certain that I was not capable of producing a satisfactory dissertation. But I had one absolutely effective—though also temporary—way of giving that habit a rest.
I could teach.
My days were filled with the company of the talented young. I would start each day by meeting a student for breakfast, setting off a cascade of conversations that continued into the early evening. Even though I was completely paralyzed in writing my dissertation, I was—brace for a major dose of irony—actually doing a very good job of helping students with their writing.
In the midst of my phase of teaching up a storm, a letter arrived from Mr. Prindle.
The letter did not say, “Can I call you ‘Doctor’ yet?”
“Wallace died,” the letter said. “Now I am really alone.”
My Escape from Writer’s Block
Here is the realization that finally set me free to get a Ph.D. (and please pass this on to anyone who needs to hear it):
Dissertations are important hurdles in the process of awarding degrees. But considered as literary art, dissertations are a pretty degraded form of human expression.
Years had swept by as I tried to write a beautiful, elegant, eloquent dissertation. In hindsight, I might as well have tried to write a limerick that would wrestle with the deepest meanings of human existence. But once I downshifted my aspirations, writing a satisfactory dissertation turned into a manageable ambition.
But when I got my Ph.D. in the Spring of 1980, it was too late to tell Mr. Prindle that the time had finally come for him to call me “Doctor.”
This is the last line in the Abstract of Desert Passages, the dissertation I submitted for the degree:
Americans revealed a recognition that elements of life elsewhere taken for granted were, in the desert, occasions for doubt and uncertainty.
You can call me “Doctor” now. But as everyone soon learns, I’d prefer that you call me “Patty.”
The Dedication Takes Its Place
In the early 1980s, I revised my dissertation. In the pattern of academic life, the book held charms and virtues that had kept a lower profile in the dissertation.
When it was time to write the dedication for Desert Passages: Encounters with the American Deserts, the next step was obvious:
To Patricia and Grant Nelson and to the memory of Frank Prindle.
A further thought about Patricia and Grant Nelson.
When my parents set me free to come and go from Frank and Ethel Prindle’s apartment, they surely knew that they were letting me become acquainted with the occupants of a different world. They must have known that I would be exposed to remarks and attitudes that, in a later era of parenting, would have required them to keep me sequestered in protective custody.
My parents never adopted the phrasing, “It takes a village to raise a child.” But the apartments they owned and rented were a key sector of my village.
If my parents chose not to offer platitudes about villages uniting to raise children, they were even less likely to borrow the term “fictive kin” from the anthropologists. Your Dictionary, a website that seems to know me personally, offers a very relevant definition of “fictive kin”: “Someone who, though unrelated by birth or marriage, has such a close emotional relationship with another that they may be considered part of the family.”
Not narrowing my world with a well-intentioned excess of protectiveness, my parents made it possible for a tough-as-nails Alcatraz prison guard, with disgraceful attitudes toward Black Americans, to become my fictive kin.
Frank Prindle was a key figure in my upbringing, and I will not be undertaking a campaign to remove his name from the dedication page of Desert Passages.
The people with whom a person spends her formative years do not necessarily predetermine or warp her future beliefs or actions. When Desert Passages was moving toward publication, I had begun writing a second book that had, as its principal purpose, the recognition of people of color—Indian people, Black Americans, Mexican Americans, Asian Americans—as central figures in Western American history.
Even though Mr. Prindle did nothing to set the intellectual agenda of my life, he did a lot to encourage and to keep me steady so that I could pursue a vision of this nation that was a world apart from the vision he held.
If I had lacked the grace to place him in the dedication of my first book, you’d have to worry about me.
You can still worry about me, but for different reasons.
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