Masculinities absorbed

Today, as I turn 71 years of age, I choose to look in my life’s rear-view mirror. In particular, I have been thinking about my boyhood in the black and white 1950s.Television shows were in black and white; photographs were black and white – perhaps dreams were too. The 50s were and remain for me enigmatic, mysterious, and compelling all at the same time. Immediately, I think of Edwin Brock’s marvellous poem, Five Ways to Kill a Man…

There are many cumbersome ways to kill a man.
You can make him carry a plank of wood
to the top of a hill and nail him to it.
To do this properly you require a crowd of people
wearing sandals, a cock that crows, a cloak
to dissect, a sponge, some vinegar and one
man to hammer the nails home.

Or you can take a length of steel,
shaped and chased in a traditional way,
and attempt to pierce the metal cage he wears.
But for this you need white horses,
English trees, men with bows and arrows,
at least two flags, a prince, and a
castle to hold your banquet in.

Dispensing with nobility, you may, if the wind
allows, blow gas at him. But then you need
a mile of mud sliced through with ditches,
not to mention black boots, bomb craters,
more mud, a plague of rats, a dozen songs
and some round hats made of steel.

In an age of aeroplanes, you may fly
miles above your victim and dispose of him by
pressing one small switch. All you then
require is an ocean to separate you, two
systems of government, a nation’s scientists,
several factories, a psychopath and
land that no-one needs for several years.

These are, as I began, cumbersome ways to kill a man.
Simpler, direct, and much more neat is to see
that he is living somewhere in the middle
of the twentieth century, and leave him there.

I love the subtleties of the examples of cumbersome ways to kill a man in the first four stanzas – crucifiction, lanced in a jousting contest, gassed in World War I, decimated by an atomic bomb. They are unsettling and suggestive and still prompt ‘hmmphs’ from me when I read them. However, the last 3 lines stung me when I first saw them in my early 40s and they stir me now as well. Born in 1949, I came alive literally in the middle of the 20th century and was left there. While it didn’t kill me – and I don’t think Brock meant ‘kill’ literally – I am a product of my mid-20th century environment. And, I don’t agree that being set down and left there is comparative to the horrific ways to kill a man listed by Brock. Nor do I feel being left here killed me; it most certainly shaped me. As a boy, I was heavily impacted  by so many elements, people, concepts, images, and portrayals of what a man ‘should’ be, or, at least held up to youth in North America as a masculine ideal. In this blog, I want to wander back to the 1950s and look at some of the images, projections (literally and figuratively) and ideals I soaked up almost osmotically in mid-century – to ponder and reflect on those concepts now as I try to make sense of their impact on me as a young boy learning to be and do during the 1950s. Why this topic in COVID-19 times of 2020? Who knows…it is where my soul settled today.

What comes first to my mind’s eye is the Lone Ranger – “HiYo Silver Away,” I remember hearing Clayton Moore cry at the end of every episode of the Lone Ranger – the hero spurring and urging his horse, Silver to leave whatever feat of derring-do they completed and ride off into the proverbial sunset…

Masked, magnificent, sparkling, immaculate are the adjectives I envision now that inspired me then. Purveyor and dispenser of justice, the legend embedded was of a former Texas Ranger who, while riding with his fellow rangers, was ambushed by outlaws and left for dead. The Lone Ranger did not die but adopted the mask to protect his identity in the pursuit of the bad guys, the latter in abundance every week the television show aired. Canadian-born Jay Silverheels, a full-blooded Mohawk Native, was the Lone Ranger’s faithful companion, Tonto:

Muttering incomplete quasi-sentences, Tonto was rendered to stereotypes of the times and I/we thought nothing of it. Sometime in the 1980s or 1990s, a Toronto columnist wrote a scathing attack on what was reified about the lone ranger concept. I can’t find the article but the gist of it was how many boys were “lone rangered” out of our feelings. Tonto was, as I recall from the piece, monosyllabic and the Lone Ranger never stayed anywhere long enough to experience, let alone sustain a serious relationship, female or male. The columnist made great efforts to show how indelible this alone-ness was imprinted on young boys’ psyches during the 1950s. And very likely it was, my own psyche included. Via the televised Lone Ranger, I watched justice meted out from guns; dramatic chases on horseback; heroic deeds saving whomever needed rescuing.

To be clear, the black-and-white of my Lone Ranger did morph into colours, some as radiant and alluring as this 1956 Lone Ranger movie poster:

He was a man – clean, white like me, righteous, and so power-ful and heroic. And the mask – hard not to think of Covid as i type ‘mask’ – captivated me just as it did with another of my boyhood televised and absorbed delights, Zorro:

Guy Williams was this masked, swashbuckling, sword-wielding crusader for justice. Zorro was the alter ego of nobleman Don Diego de la Vega. Zorro’s companion was Bernardo (Gene Sheldon), his mute servant, the vocal incompleteness so reflective of the Tonto character in the Lone Ranger even though Zorro seemed to interpret Bernardo’s sign language perfectly. The 1957-1959 series had a clown (don’t all good stories/dramas have clowns – Shakespeare taught us this), a buffoon, the bumbling, so clearly overweiht Seargent Garcia, always outwitted by Zorro, often with the latter’s sword-carved ‘Z’ etched into Garcia’s clothing. Caped, Zorro perpetually seemed to be jumping off buildings, vaulting roof structures, cape and sword always flared…

Guy Williams / Zorro was so handsome, so captivatingly cool under any kind of pressure. And it always seemed to be night when Zorro bolted from his cavernous lair beneath his mansion on his black stallion. Tornado (tor-NAH-do, not tor-Nay-do) was Zorros’ steed

The blackness of Zorro, his garb, his horse, and the night rides were counterpoint to the Lone Ranger’s whiteness…literally, for me, the black and white of the 50s. Every tv episode began and ended with the Zorro theme song and my heart raced every time I heard the Mellowmen sing it against the backdrop of Zorro riding, carving, smiling…so heroic, so emboldened and emboldening. . .

So, I became Zorro, home-made, adapted mask, cowboy-brimmed hat and all…

Me in my Zorro costume, modified mask, brimmed hat (circa 1958 in Trenton), nefariously nestled behind my sister Marnie and our housekeepter, the incomparable Nelly Geedie, my grandmother’s friend.

As I look back now, I remember the Don Diego aspect of Zorro being as alluring or perhaps magnetic in other ways. Guy Williams was incredibly handsome, played a guitar, and attended parties and even talked with women though he too never sustained a relationship either in the tv series or the two Zorro movies that came out in that era, the most prominent of which was the Disney production, The Sign of Zorro:

The suggestiveness of a love-life was certainly resplendent in the movie posters but my memory of the movie was of Zorro’s battles, his athleticism, his fights, and his triumphs over what was clearly evil in the world.

Tarzan of the jungle – not masked and certainly less clothed than the Lone Ranger or Zorro – fit my fifties mold of the male hero. I remember seeing the original Tarzan, Johnny Weissmuller, at movie theatres, I suspect. Embossed in my memory bank is an image of Olympian (1924 Games) swimmer Weismuller carving through often alligator-infested jungle rivers with his perfect, water-slicing crawl stroke, a human Evinrude-like motor:

In learning to swim during that era, I often thought of myself as Tarzan, emulating his stroke. Most assuredly, I longed to swing from vines – a tree-branch, knotted dangling rope with a tied-tire over the river in Exeter was the best I could do. And who among my boyhood friends and me did not try our best to mimic Weissmuller’s famous Tarzan-yell.

Apparently, so endemic of the Tarzan image was Weissmuller’s call-to-the-junlge-wild that it was dubbed in most Tarzan movies and tv shows in the 50s and for decades beyond. Highly stylized, as I see it now, one very skilled editor created a video called The Tarzan Song as a Golden Record of the 1950s. Embellished with all kinds of Tarzan representations from later decades, it does, in my view, portray the chest-thumping power of this “ape-man” and the legend he became. Significantly, Tarzan had a mate, Jane. Who can forget, from that time period, “me Tarzan, you Jane.” And Tarzan wandered his domain, hand-in-hand or co-swinging through the trees with Kala, the ape, presumably the one who raised Tarzan, according to the original novel – Tarzan of the Apes – by Edgar Rice Burroughs. As the Lone Ranger did with Tonto, as Zorro did with Bernardo, Tarzan communicated with Kala, endearingly. With Tarzan, I remember more than television- or movie-versions of Tarzan stories the Dell comics I devoured as readily as I could buy them:

Men then could live in the jungle, save lives, love animals, be powerful (with heart-stirring yell and all), and have a significant other.

In my mind then and now, there was no kinder or gentler 1950s cowboy than Roy Rogers and his beloved, Dale Evans:

Then and now, “happy trails to you,’ the Roy Rogers’ show theme song was just so idyllic:

Some trails are happy ones,
Others are blue.

 

It’s the way you ride the trail that counts,
Here’s a happy one for you.

 

Happy trails to you,
Until we meet again.
Happy trails to you,
Keep smiling until then.

 

Who cares about the clouds when we’re together?
Just sing a song, and bring the sunny weather.

 

Happy trails to you,
Until we meet again.

 

Sung on every show, I think, we oozed respect for the niceness of Roy astide his horse, Trigger, and Dale on Buttermilk. You could be, I learned, gun-slinging, heroic, lyrical, animal-loving, married, and be a man:

I adored Roy Rogers and probably sang or hummed along to Happy Trails on every episode. Later in life, one of my favourite jokes typified these two ‘softer’ heroes of mine. The story went that Roy bought some new, very expensive cowboy boots; they were his treasured possession. Every evening, out of respect for his ranch-home, Roy took them off and left them on the porch by the front door, trustingly, carefully placing them side-by-side. One morning, Dale rushed to get Roy and showed him his boots, all chewed to bits. Roy vowed to get the animal, likely a cougar who had destroyed his prized boots. He saddled up Trigger and headed for the backcountry. Three days passed. On the fourth morning. Dale peered out the kitchen window and saw Roy guiding Trigger, ambling toward the ranch. She went out on the porch to wait. As Roy rode up, she could see a dead cougar tied to the back of Roy’s saddle. And as Roy silently dismounted, Dale demurely asked, “Pardon me Roy, is that the cat that chewed your new shoes” (my apologies to Glenn Miller and his song’s line, ‘pardon me boy is that the Chattanooga Choo Choo’).

 

In the late 1950s The Rifleman made its televsion debut. Chuck Connors played Lucas McCain and Johnny Crawford his son Mark McCain:

Starting in 1958 and running for 5 full seasons, Chuck Connors played the widowed rancher in The Rifleman. Though I am tempted now to compare Lucas McCain’s widowed status to that of my father, I’m not sure I made the connection at the time. Nevertheless, Lucas lived for his ‘boy’ and wielded his modified Winchester rifle with the big ring lever (in picture above) that allowed him to cock the gun by spinning the ring lever thereby shooting rapid-fire. For a short time, inclusive of its launch, the show was run by famed director, Sam Peckinpah. The square-jawed, homesteading Rifleman with kind of sardonic eyes was a no-nonsense defender of all that was good and right. More peacekeeper than lawman in the 1880s old West, it seemed like everything he did, everyone he shot was in the intersts of fair play, justice, and just being a good person-man:

I remember the show as compelling but then most westerns in the 50s and 60s were alluring to me. Heroes and men, I learned, could be fathers too, meting out justice from a rifle when needed. In the same rifle-vein, how could a pilot’s son not watch Sky King:

More guns and rifles and bad guys and feats of masculine derring-do and dramatic flying rescues, the latter like this colourized – the series was in black and white – episode. The show as I remember its allure is best described by a Wikipedia description:

Later episodes of the television show were notable for the dramatic opening with an air-to-air shot of the sleek, second Songbird banking sharply away from the camera and its engines roaring, while the announcer proclaimed, “From out of the clear blue of the Western sky comes Sky King!” The short credit roll which followed was equally dramatic, with the Songbird swooping at the camera across El Mirage Lake,  California, then pulling up into a steep climb as it departed. The end title featured a musical theme, with the credits superimposed over an air-to-air shot of the Songbird, cruising at altitude for several moments, then banking away to the left.

Though in no way connected, I always conflate Eric Burden and the Animals ‘Sky King‘ (1968) song with the same-named TV show from my boyhood. As for the announcer’s epithet, “From out of the clear blue sky…” surely an echo of a more famous 1950s TV series, The Adventures of Superman: