Examples would be something like -
The Reedpoint Happy Campers 4-H club met at David Swenson's house for their monthly meeting and a good time was had by all.
A more detailed version of some local get-together might go something like this,
Sunday afternoon Mildred Flick was joined by her long time friends Joanne Brubaker, Emma Smith, and Constance Noble to celebrate Mildred's birthday. A two tiered white cake with cream frosting made with fresh cream from Mildred's Holstein Milidor II and decorated by Mildred's daughter Collette Smyde nee Flick, was served. The ladies enjoyed tea that Joane Brubaker had purchased on her recent trip to Cornwall England to visit her son James, his wife Esther, and Joane's new baby granddaughter Mary Elizabeth Brubaker age 2 months. Carl Castle joined the ladies, entertaining them with his banjo picking and shadow puppetry skills. A good time was had by all.
In my small Montana town, stories like that were included in the weekly newspaper. My wife tells me Hoople, North Dakota had similar columns. She also tells me there was a radio version of these types of stories that came from Blackduck Minnesota back in the late 50's and early 60's.
I miss reading that kind of simple story sometimes, it brings me back to a different time thinking about it. There was probably a bit of prejudice in some of those stories, since the people mentioned at worst might be the "society" of a small town, thereby ignoring the little people's birthday parties, card games, etc., or at best be the circle of people the local writer was familiar with. I think it tended to be the latter rather than the former, a sort of caste society one might see in a big city, where only the monetarily rich and media famous are worth mention.
Maybe I don't miss that kind of writing so much come to think of it. What I probably miss is having a sly laugh about the goings-on of people and thinking how the story could be rewritten to be startling, surprising and or comical.
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What brought this to mind was a conversation I was having earlier today about the "good old days". The pioneering spirit of people in America who came here from overseas and moved west to homestead land, start and raise families. It is good to look at where we came from, not that we can ever go back, but to help us decide where we want to go.
We might want to take some of those little things from the past and incorporate them in the present to counterbalance some things that need balance. Not to say we need to include a long story about Mildred's 57th birthday in the newspaper (now we can put it in a blog), but consider the possibility of kinder gentler communications to counterbalance the fare provided by media people like Jerry Springer or Howard Stern. I suppose we have that in a good John Wayne movie (or some other good Western), Little House on the Prairie and any number of other stories, TV shows, and movies that show the difference between right and wrong, and the beauty of good simple things that have some semblence to real life.
