Dorothy M. Johnson

It started with my finding that this month, Netflix was offering The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.  Naturally, I had to watch it again, despite having seen it enough times to be able to recite the lines with the actors.  How can you not like a John Ford movie with Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne?  

Without a doubt, this is my favorite western, not only because it’s a great movie, but because one of the closing scenes speaks a great truth about history.  In one of the last scenes of the movie, Senator Stoddard (Jimmy Stewart) finally clears up a common misconception by telling the true story about the death of Liberty Valance.  The editor of the newspaper rips up the notes on the story and, deciding not to print, the truth says, “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

We are all shaped by our history, but as the movie illustrates, we are also defined by what we think is our history.  

In any case, rewatching the movie got me to wondering about the source of the movie and about whether the book the movie was taken from was as good as the movie.  I can think of a couple of dozen great books that were turned into horrible movies, so I was hoping that this movie might lead me to a great book.

The movie comes from a story with the same name by the Montana author, Dorothy M. Johnson—someone I knew very little about, having only heard the name in passing because she was a prolific western author.  I checked out as many of her books as I could find from the Enema U library, purchasing the remainder from Abebooks.  

Dorothy Johnson turns out to be a very interesting author.  Originally from Iowa, she moved to Montana at the age of six when her father’s health would no longer allow him to farm.  The family moved to Rainbow Dam in Montana, then a tiny town so remote that drinking water had to be trucked in and so small that there was no school.  As Johnson later wrote about her life there:

“At six, you’re still close to the ground.  You can be fascinated by white pebbles the rain has washed and by the tumbling growth of prickly pear…. Trains went by our front window.”

 As soon as I read that, I was hooked—I had to read everything the woman had written.  Her editors never seemed to use that line to sell her books, but they should have.  Dorothy Johnson turned out to be a writer with a vivid imagination and a gift for description, I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve read and am currently trying to track down a couple of her more obscure works.

While Johnson graduated from the Montana State, a major influence on her writing came from living and working in New York City.  One of her books that I’d like to read is an unpublished manuscript titled “Unbombed”, an account of her life as a New York City air warden during World War II.  It is hard to pin down her writing style exactly, but many of her works remind me of the writing of Craig Johnson who writes the Longmire series.  

What was really surprising about her writing, however, is that the short stories bear almost no resemblance to any of the famous movies made from them.  In one slim volume, you can find The Hanging Tree, A Man Called Horse, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, all stories that were made into blockbuster western movies.

Take the story about Liberty Valance, for example.  It’s a good story, but it’s very short—less than two dozen pages that contain very little in common with John Ford’s masterpiece.  In the story, there is no Dutton Peabody, the crusading editor of the Shinbone Star.  For that matter, the town of Shinbone isn’t there either.  Neither are Link Appleyard, the inept sheriff, the struggle for statehood, a stagecoach, or the scene mentioned above.  And almost all of characters have different names, with the lone exception of Liberty Valance.  

The only name change that makes sense is that Tom Doniphon, played by John Wayne in the movie, was originally called Bert Barricune.  Somehow, I just can’t picture The Duke playing a character named Bert.

Similarly, in the short story titled A Man Called Horse, you won’t find much of the story made famous by Richard Harris.  That a short story barely twenty pages long was turned into a two-hour movie with two sequels tells us more about the imagination of the script writers than the quality of the original story.  Similarly, in the original short story called The Hanging Tree, you won’t find much of the role made famous by Gary Cooper.

That the movies are dramatically different from the Johnson’s stories is perfectly all right…I’m just a little shocked.  After seeing countless great books turned into cinematic garbage, it is a little surprising to see that talented script writers could take an acorn of a great story and nurture it into a mighty oak of a movie.  Both Johnson and the writers who produced the scripts should be commended.

There is at least one story by Dorothy Johnson that has not yet been made into a movie—and it should be.  Buffalo Woman is the story of a Sioux woman, from her childhood to her days as a grandmother joining her tribe’s dangerous winter trek into Canada in search of a refuge.  Of all of her stories, I think it is the best by far and probably would have already been made into a movie if the title role had been written for a man.

Dorothy Johnson lived long enough to see the movies made from her stories.  She returned to Missoula, Montana to teach creative writing in the same university where she had graduated.  Always proud of her independence, she left instructions that her gravestone should simply read, “Paid in Full”.  Someone decided she needed an editor, today the marble slab simply reads, “Paid”.

The Cunning Fox

Depending on the culture, the fox in literature represents cunning, deceit, slyness and/or wickedness.  This means that the most honest part of Fox News is the symbolic connection to its name.

Okay, I know that Fox News got its name because the Murdoch family bought 50% of Twentieth Century Fox and spun off a cable news channel to compete with CNN.  And I will freely admit that I don’t find Fox News too significantly different or more politically biased than MSNBC, CNN, or any of the other flavors of news that cater to an increasingly divided market.  All of the various news organizations deliver the news with about the same level of honesty…which is admittedly a bar set very low.  Among the many things not to survive into the 21st century, we can add journalism and honest news reporting.

For years, I have listened to people on the left berate Fox News while people on the right berate MSNBC and their whole pointless arguments have bored me to tears.  All of the networks have smiling political pundits who are just barely intelligent enough to read the teleprompters while not messing up their perfect hair.

Everyone wants to believe that the network that reinforces their own cherished beliefs is better than the network that disagrees with them.  The networks know this and count on it to create and hold an audience, and this is why we don't have a more balanced and unbiased network.  Even a fox knows that the only thing in the middle of the road is roadkill.

After the last presidential election, however, Fox went way too far and committed an unforgivable sin.  After Donald Trump lost his reelection bid, he began claiming that the election was “stolen from him”’.  Now Trump is entitled to express his opinion, and while I personally believe that giving voice to those unfounded opinions does harm to the country, he is entitled to his opinions and all of the news organizations were justified in reporting that Trump held such beliefs.

In the weeks and months following the election, despite extensive investigations by state and federal election officials, by the FBI, by politicians, by newspapers, and by television news—none of them has found any credible evidence that President Biden did not fairly win that election.  But during those months, news commentators on Fox continued to state that the election “was stolen.” 

Doing so brought Fox additional viewers, particularly those upset that their candidate, Trump, had lost a close election.  Disappointed at the loss, many of these viewers were more than willing to accept the myth that the election was stolen.  The Fox News organization realized the potential to attract more viewers and repeated the myth on most of its evening shows.

One of the key components of the false claim of the stolen election was the oft-repeated story that the widely used Dominion voting machines had been programmed to falsify the voting results, thus tipping the election away from Trump.  Anyone who knows anything about the technology used knows that this is about as likely as hackers breaking into a toaster oven and turning it into a Formula One race car.  Seriously, if the Dominion machines had been programmed to steal the election, pulling it off it would have taken a conspiracy involving thousands and thousands of people—in multiple states and in both political parties.  It would be easier to believe that Elvis was alive and married to Amelia Earhart.

This still would have been acceptable if those commentators—people like Lou Dobbs, Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity—had actually believed they were reporting the truth, but they didn’t.  Carlson and Hannity privately believed that Trump had legitimately lost the election but continued to deliberately spread falsehoods on the air.  That they deliberately misled the American people is no longer a supposition:  we have their sworn testimony from the depositions in the Dominion lawsuit against Fox.  You can read it for yourself here.  

Dominion sued Fox News and just this week, despite its claims that their reporting was protected by the First Amendment, Fox settled out of court for $767 million, which amounts to a rather obvious and expensive admission of guilt.  While the amount seems staggering, it doesn’t even put a small dent in the budget of Fox News, which generates billions of dollars a year in profits.

I deeply believe in the right of free speech, but I also believe that every American has the right to believe that his vote matters and that our elections are fair and honest.  Personally, I have never believed that voter ID was necessary, since the small number of illegal votes cast would be both statistically negligible and spread across both parties.  But, if using voter ID would mean that that more people believe that our elections are free, then go ahead and require identification to vote.  (The United States is, in fact, one of only two countries that do not require an ID, and the requirement doesn’t seem to put an undue burden on voters in the rest of the world.)

Every American needs to be able to have faith in our election process—to be able to believe that our country truly has a government by the people, for the people, and of the people.  What Fox did was to deliberately undermine that faith and to deliberately spread fear just for the sake of ratings.  Fox wanted more viewers and did not care that it was shaking the very foundations of our republic.  Essentially, Fox News was shouting ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater.  

The Dominion settlement was far too little.  Perhaps, a just settlement might have been enough to bankrupt Fox, but it should have been at least enough to ensure that neither Fox nor anyone else behaves so recklessly in the future.

Is NPR State Sponsored Media?

For years, my good friend Jack and I have argued about various pundits on both the left and the right and their extreme political statements.  Besides throwing red meat to their base, do they honestly believe what they are saying or is this just another example of celebrities making sure their names remain in the news?  After many years of spouting semi-nonsense, do they start to believe their own press releases?

A recent example is Elon Musk’s decision for Twitter to label NPR as “state sponsored media” thus provoking an immediate angry denial by both National Public Radio and the Public Broadcast Service (PBS).  I’m not sure who was acting more childish—the billionaire needlessly affixing a label to organizations we are all familiar with or the organizations who evidently don’t know the definition of the very words that make up their names.

“Only one percent of our funding comes from the Federal government,” claims NPR.  “Public Radio is not state sponsored radio.”

Now those are interesting statements and they deserve a little investigation.  To be fair, I should say that I listen regularly to NPR and over the years have given donations that add up into the low five figures.  I will also admit to frequently being very critical of some of NPR’s policies.  At the very least, I can't understand why the folks at Planet Money can't teach Terry Gross at least the basics of economics.

Right off the bat, I can tell you that NPR does indeed receive only about 1% of its current funding directly from the federal government.  I can also tell you that the statement is a masterpiece of political bullshit deliberately crafted to mislead the public.  Let me explain.

Back in the 1960’s, during President Johnson’s Great Society Program, Washington became concerned about the quality—more specifically, the lack of it—available on the public airwaves, particularly in the rural parts of the country where regular commercial broadcasting was unavailable.  As a child growing up in a rural area of Texas, I can remember a time when our family, didn’t own a television and the family radio could pick up relatively few stations.  If you believe what I tell my sons—and I advise against it—we lived in such a remote location we had cable radio.

In response, Washington passed legislation creating the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), a private non-profit corporation established and annually funded by the federal government to provide quality broadcasting for all Americans.  The CPB is still in operation and its current appropriation is just a hair over half a billion dollars annually.

To fulfill its mission, CPB created the National Public Radio network in 1970 by linking together 88 broadcast stations.  Most of them were (and still are) university-run stations, with CPB providing these stations content to broadcast.  Today, the number of stations has grown to over a thousand.  For the first dozen years or so, NPR ran huge deficits and there were frequent, and well-founded, public complaints of reckless spending and political bias in the reporting.  

Fifty years ago, you could reasonably argue that not every American had equal access to quality programming.  By quality programming, I mean Car Talk, Prairie Home Companion, and (most importantly) Sesame Street.  From the way some people talk, you would be forgiven for believing that there is a constitutional right to watch Big Bird for free.  

In response to the growing political pressure to review NPR’s budget, CPB staved off the criticism by decreasing the direct funding to NPR while simultaneously increasing the funding to the member stations to enable them to buy program content from NPR.  Since CPB maintains no broadcast stations of its own, it is not responsible for the content of the broadcasts.

It is true that, today, besides the fees the stations pay to buy content, NPR has many funding sources, including endowments, corporate sponsors and listener pledges, and it is also true that all of the donated money is tax deductible.  It is also true that the stations frequently operate from public universities, often using student labor.  Public radio also pays much smaller royalty fees for playing copyrighted music than do the privately owned stations.  While it is impossible to add up all the tax breaks, free rent, free labor, and reduced licensing fees these stations receive from the government (not to mention the cost of operating totally at taxpayer expense for the first dozen years while the stations established a market position), there is no doubt that these are publicly sponsored stations that enjoy significant advantages over the commercial stations.

But what about Big Bird?  Well, Sesame Street and all the characters are owned by a separate non-profit corporation, Sesame Workshop, whose assets include the royalty rights to enough different toys and merchandise to fill a huge warehouse—Amazon alone has over 10,000 entries if you search for ‘Sesame Street’.  Altogether, the corporation is valued at over $500,000,000 and the president of the corporation is paid just under a million dollars a year.  Even if Public Broadcasting went away, you could still watch Big Bird on HBOMax.

All of the above doesn't really answer whether NPR is actually controlled by the Washington, it just addresses who is paying for them.  In my opinion, Washington probably has little to no direct control of the NPR's editorial content, so Elon Musk is probably wrong to label them as such.  

The question the public should be asking is not whether they are paying for NPR (they are), but whether we even need public broadcasting at all.  Most of the reasons for establishing public media no longer exist.  Even though I live in a relatively remote area of New Mexico, I have a device in  in my pocket that can allow me to listen to any podcast ever made, read any newspaper on the planet, and even watch all 53 seasons of Sesame Street.  You would be hard pressed to find the ‘underserved’ American audience that originally formed the reason to create public media.

Any economist worthy of the name will tell you that the only time that government should intrude into the private market is when there is a market failure—meaning that the market fails to efficiently deliver a product or service competitively to the consumer.  We allow public utilities to deliver electricity and water because history has shown us that the private market has usually failed to deliver those essential services to consumers efficiently.  

We only have NPR because of a market failure in which the private market failed to efficiently provide quality broadcast services to the entire country.  But that was sixty years ago and improved technology has dramatically changed the market.   Since the market failure no longer exists, there is no longer a compelling reason for the federal government to be competing in the free market.  As it happens, even if the government were to continue paying for public radio, the days of radio broadcasts may be soon over.

Today, it is not unreasonable to question whether broadcast radio (and perhaps, broadcast television) will survive much longer.  As the internet grows, the need for thousands of costly broadcast stations becomes increasingly less realistic.  Already, some major automobile companies, including both Ford and Tesla, have announced that future models of their vehicles will no longer come with AM radios: can the death of FM radios be that far behind?  When every consumer is able to choose between an incredible array of commercial-free streaming entertainment—much of it provided free—why would anyone want to listen to a DJ play the same few dozen songs over and over while frequently being interrupted by obnoxious advertisements for the local car dealership?

The internet, with its various music channels, blogs, podcasts, and streaming services has eliminated any need for the taxpayers to continue to fund the production of any media….Even Big Bird.

The Doom Cycle

Let me preface my remarks tonight with a small confession.  I love San Francisco, I’ve been there many times, and I have always enjoyed every visit.  For a poor dumb ol’ Texas boy, to admit that enjoy visiting San Francisco is probably some form of cultural betrayal, but I don’t care.  There are a lot of things to enjoy in San Francisco.

About twenty years ago, I took my sons, What’s-His-Name and The-Other-One, to San Francisco on a vacation and we had a ball.  On Alcatraz, my wide-eyed sons met a former prisoner and listened to his stories about life on ‘the rock.”   There are only a few of those Alcatraz alumni left—the youngest is close to 90 years old.  

I wish San Francisco had stayed that way it was then: I want to visit that place again.  I want to walk through the Embarcadero Center and eat seafood on the wharf.  I want to wander through China Town and order noodles off a menu I can’t read.  Unfortunately, that trip may have to wait a while:  the San Francisco we visited no longer exists.

Sadly, the news today is that San Francisco is in the beginning stages of a doom cycle—meaning that high crime and a declining standard of living are forcing more and more people to leave, hurting  the economy, which triggers more crime that forces more people to move out.  Stores close and displaced employees are forced to move away to find employment.  The number of mass transit riders decreases and the loss in revenue degrades the system.  Rinse and repeat until the last person in the town with a job is the mayor, who promises a miraculous recovery if the populace will just vote for the referendum that will raise property taxes…again.

Nowhere is that downward spiral more evident than in the tech sector that makes up the heart of San Francisco’s Silicon Valley.  The latest information is dire indeed:  63% of the area’s tech firms say they have either downsized their presence in San Francisco or plan to do so in the coming year.  To date, more than 72,000 tech employees have moved out since the start of the pandemic.  While people are still moving to the area, for the first time in decades, 4% more people are moving out than are moving in, and that out vs in ratio for those employed in the tech sector is a staggering negative 35%.

The real estate market is beginning to reflect the exodus, too.  The rent for a one-bedroom apartment didn’t go down during the pandemic—it went up 13%.  The price of homes is still so high that you have to wonder if the people living there actually realize that they could sell their homes, move someplace else and buy a home three times as big and still have enough money left over to put in Olympic-sized pools in their backyards.  (Seriously, folks, what’s keeping you there?  You don’t need a passport to leave that state, you know.)

Currently, there are 17 million square feet of empty office space in Silicon Valley.  That’s a number that has no meaning to most people, so let’s put it another way:  As vast and cavernous as the Pentagon is—it would take a dozen of them to equal the empty office space currently waiting for tenants around the Bay City—and more businesses are moving out than are moving in.

This means there is more empty commercial space than during the worst of the 2008 recession, and the drop in rentals is the worst in more than thirty years…And the trend is accelerating.

The list of companies that have announced that they are downsizing their offices in Silicon Valley includes almost all of the tech companies in the S&P 500 list.  Airbnb, Oracle, Yelp, Ancestry, Brex, Digital Realty, PayPal, Trulia, and Pinterest are just a few of the companies that are downsizing and half of these are leaving the area entirely.  A survey of these company’s management shows that over half of those responding would advise against a new company setting up shop in California.  A third of those responding suggested that in the future, new companies should have a distributed work force that works remotely.

If the current rate of business exodus continues, the city estimates that the property tax base will drop by 35% by the year 2028.  And if the current rate of closure of retail stores within the city continues, the drop in sales tax revenue could be worse.  (Even now, as the revenue from sales tax begins to decline, at least one clueless member of the city council is suggesting that the city should raise the tax rate to make up the deficit in revenue!)

So where are the companies going?  Among the cities listed, Austin was the most popular, with Miami coming in a close second.  If you look at the answers as to why companies are moving, there are common trends:  Companies looking to relocate wanted a state with either low taxes or no income tax, they wanted a right-to-work state and they wanted a location with either a university or a high number of highly-educated people in the tech field.

All of the above was in motion before Bob Lee was murdered this week as he walked through downtown San Francisco.  Lee created the popular payment program known as Cash App and was the chief technology officer for Block.  Lee had already moved out of the Bay Area because of the high crime rate and was only back in the city to visit friends.  He was brutally stabbed and as he lay bleeding in the street begged a passing motorist for assistance—a plea that was ignored.

Following Lee’s murder, a number of tech executives in the area have announced they are going to reconsider their firms’ remaining in Silicon Valley, and it was about this time that we started to read stories about the city being caught in a doom cycle.  

The number of tech workers remaining in San Francisco is still huge and the total population of people working in the computer industry on the West Coast is by far larger than anywhere else in the United States.  The downward trend is reversible and there is hope that San Francisco can still fix the myriad of problems that currently plague the city.  San Francisco is a “survivor”.

It wouldn’t be the first time the city has recovered from adversity.  The town was destroyed by fire in 1851 and again in 1906.  And the list of earthquakes that have damaged the city would be very long.  Each time, the city has bounced back.  Hopefully, it can do so again.

My Favorite Actor

It’s movie trivia time!  What actor appeared in more movies than John Wayne and Cary Grant combined, was in most of Frank Capra’s movies, appeared in The Wizard of Oz, got a gold medal from the Red Cross for entertaining the troops during World War II, and quietly vanished from the public eye in the 1950’s?

No, it was not Marjorie Main, but that’s a great guess, since the woman was in damn near everything.  The correct answer is, “Jimmy the Raven”.  Well…his name might have been, “Jimmy the Crow”, as there is some debate about which species of Corvid he was, but he was definitely Jimmy the Large Black Bird who worked with Jimmy Stuart, Cary Grant, and Katherine Hepburn.

Jimmy, whatever he was, was raised and trained by the famous animal trainer Curly Twiford, who claimed to have found Jimmy in the Mojave Desert, apparently abandoned in the nest.  Twiford raised Jimmy, teaching him more than 50 tricks, such as opening an envelope, bringing objects, lighting a cigarette, using a typewriter, and riding a specially built miniature motorcycle.  According to Twiford, Jimmy was as intelligent as the average 8-year-old human child, and was capable of learning a new trick in less than a week (perhaps a little longer if the verbal command to trigger the trick was two words instead of one).

You can watch Jimmy performing one of those tricks in a wonderful comedy, You Can’t Take it With You (1938), where Jimmy works in the basement and helps make fireworks.  I’d explain that, but it might spoil the movie for you.  Just trust me, it’s a great movie, directed by Frank Capra, starring James Stewart, Lionel Barrymore, and Jean Arthur.  And, of course, Jimmy the Raven—the real star of the movie.  Alternately, you can watch The Wizard of Oz and watch Jimmy torment the Scarecrow.

Unfortunately, Jimmy didn’t get much credit for the movies he starred in, since in almost all of them his name doesn’t appear in the credits.  The only exception I have found, so far, is the somewhat less than exceptional Johnny Weissmuller neo-Tarzan movie, Jungle Jim, and even there, he appears as Caw-Caw the Crow.

Twiford didn’t particularly care what you called his bird as long as you ponied up the $500 a week fee for Jimmy to be on set with a handler.  If you wanted Twiford to be present, in case the director wanted Jimmy to learn a new trick, that was an extra $200.   Twiford had an incredible stable of animals and supplied everything from bears to meadowlarks to the studio.  According to Curly, Jimmy earned enough money to pay for the room and board of the entire menagerie.

There is a great story that the director of a Ritz Brothers movie wanted 300 cats for one scene.  Even Twiford didn’t have that many cats on hand, so he advertised in the newspapers that he would pay 75 cents for a cat, no questions asked.  Since that was good money for a cat, one enterprising young teenager stole a cat from his neighbor, a policeman, and sold the cat to Twiford.  The policeman figured out what had happened  to his pet and was successful at retrieving his cat.  The teenager, figuring that with hundreds of cats on hand Twiford couldn’t tell them apart, promptly stole the cat again and collected another 75 cents.

Supposedly, after the shooting was complete, an agent from the ASPCA showed up, having received dozens of complaints from people who had lost their cats.  The director, George Marshall, gladly gifted all the cats to the agent, since the studio was paying $120 a day just to feed all the critters.  According to Louella Parsons’ column about the event, it took ten policemen to help transport all the cats to the Humane shelter.

No director hired Jimmy the Raven more frequently than Frank Capra.  Capra rewrote scripts just to include parts for the bird.  In his 1946 classic, It’s a Wonderful Life, Capra cast Jimmy as the pet crow of Uncle Billy, to help indicate that Uncle Billy was eccentric.  In Arsenic and Old Lace, Capra had Jimmy hanging out in the cemetery, to help add a somber tone to the comedy.  Strangely, though Capra used the bird in almost all of his pictures after 1934, the director didn’t mention Jimmy in his autobiography.  

We will probably never know just how many movies Jimmy appeared in.  While I’ve made a list of about three dozen movies in which I’m certain Jimmy is an uncredited star, I’ll admit that it is kind of hard to tell one raven from another.  Hell, it’s damn near impossible to tell a raven from a large crow.  The various people who specialize in collecting data on who starred in which movie estimate that Jimmy starred in more than 600 movies and fewer than a thousand.  

The last movie featuring Jimmy may be Ring Circus (1954).  About a year and a half later, Curly Twiford passed away and his menagerie critters were all sent to new homes.  No one knows what became of Jimmy, who by that time would have been more than twenty years old—fairly old for a raven raised in captivity.  

No animal has ever won an Oscar—the Academy rules expressly prohibit nominations for animals.   That is a shame, since I can think of several animal roles that have been portrayed more brilliantly than those of some of the recent winners.  Maybe it is time for a few Lifetime Achievement Awards for a few worthy animals.  Asta in the Thin Man movies, Pyewacket from Bell, Book, and Candle, Lassie, Cheetah, and Tony the Wonder Horse should all receive awards.  And—if for nothing else than the incredible number of movies he appeared in—Jimmy the Raven should definitely get an Oscar.