I like a good story as much as the next guy, which is why I’m happy to recommend a new book from Northern Lights Press, Bismarck--Pearls of the Prairie: Life in Small Dakota Towns, by Robert G. Cunningham.  Darned good story telling.

If, like me, you grew up in a stolid immigrant farm family, then the life described by Cunningham is not your life, but you knew guys like him.  His was a family of townspeople who scrabbled their way through the Great Depression and decades on either side of it by a series of jobs and homes laid across North Dakota like a tangled string.

Born in 1924 in Grand Rapids, the author moved in 1928 to Oakes where his father went to work for the North American Creamery Company.  Shifting positions with the same company, he moved the family to Lamoure, then Edgeley.  In 1939 the father got into an argument with a supervisor, threw the keys at him and quit.  Briefly the family ran a hotel in Steele.

Clearly the presumptive head of the household was less than dependable, although not without ambition.  In 1934 he bought a new Ford V-8 as a vehicle for what he hoped would be a lucrative bootlegging business.  He rolled it on the first run to Minnesota. We can understand why Cunningham says, “My mother, Myrtle Larson Cunningham, was my inspiration,” and dedicates the book to her.  On the other hand, he avoids the usual writer’s trap of canonizing his mother and demonizing his father.  The reason is, he was just as ornery as his father.

After an interlude operating a family farm in the early 1940s, the boyhood portion of Cunningham’s story concludes.  His parents, after briefly running a store in Marion, moved to Washburn to run a bar and cash in on the trade associated with Garrison Dam construction.  The author joined the Navy, came home, got married, and went to work as a telegrapher for the Northern Pacific Railroad.

Consider, as you read, the sort of boyhood cataloged by Cunningham.  There was a terrific latitude for boys in those days.  When the author and his chums hopped a freight from Edgeley to see the circus in Jamestown and got stranded, his father, unconcerned, picked them up next day.  Boys roamed the country with guns, raced around in cars and punctuated town life with countless acts of delinquency.

The community in general was tolerant of all this.  Three boys in LaMoure took a father’s revolver and held up the gas station for four dollars; the parents and the station owner talked it over and settled without benefit of law.  There also was an underside of social cruelty, whereby boys harassed foreigners such as Lum Hing, throwing a dead cat into his café kitchen in LaMoure.  Still, we are led to consider the virtues of liberty for children.

We also have to think about the high level of community membership reflected in Cunningham’s narrative.  His transient boyhood was followed by a railroad career that bumped him through Steele, Hesper, Temvik, Dodge, Windsor, Pettibone, and Driscoll.  And yet he seems more a part of all these communities than many lifelong residents are today.

Stories, legends of characters and events, are the glue that cements this feeling of community membership.  After reading Pearls of the Prairie, I’ve been snorting for days over how the author’s father weighed the ladies of LaMoure on the cream station scale and celebrated Edgeley Turkey Days by throwing live birds from the roof.

I take satisfaction, too, from the story of Gottfried Hammond, the stingiest man in Steele, who got his desserts from Ray Blotsky.  Hammond had brought his own oil to Blotsky’s service station and demanded a change. Blotsky replied by bringing his own hamburger to Hammond’s café and making Hammond fry it up for him.

Father Cahil of LaMoure taught his Irish setter to put his paws on the communion rail and pray for the altar boys.  Somebody needs to set down all such facts.  There are no trivial stories.

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