LeMars Globe-Post, Nov. 5, 1953
That man who lives for self alone
Lives for the meanest mortal known. ~Joaquin Miller
Former townsman, Carl Schneider, postcards from Edinburgh to tell me he is sailing shortly for New York and will be back at the old home in Hollywood for Thanksgiving.
-o.p.-
Having hit retirement age this summer, Carl has been making a three-month tour of European points as a rest period after 28 years with Los Angeles Bureau of Power & Light. That he remembered me so often with views of interesting places visited pleases me no end.
-o.p.-
Carl’s brother, Lester, with the same Hollywood address, but still active after 15 years with U.S. Rubber Co. here, admits he may be less traveled than brother Carl, but somehow meets up with his share of excitement. Lester was in Iowa this spring during your devastating flood period and promises a couple of booklets picturing damage done at the time.
-o.p.-
Seldom does it happen that a piece done for publication brings reader reaction ahead of my receipt of that issue of The Globe-Post carrying the story. In fact, I am unable to recall that it has ever happened before. However, my recent essay on pocket gophers was so appealing that an old friend sat down and wrote a dandy letter of comment, and which was delivered to me here on Fremont avenue ahead of my newspaper.
-o.p.-
Writing from Route 6, LeMars, M. J. (Mitt) Lancaster of Seney, opens with words so dear to my heart and namely: “We read your columns in The Globe-Post regularly and enjoy them.” With me, nothing could be sweeter, and even for that much I’d have been willing to call it a day. But, there was much more, and all so good.
-o.p.-
As set forth in the newspaper article, my problem had to do with failure to capture the several pocket gophers disturbing my neighbor. Mr. Lancaster handled this like a professional, giving detailed instructions on how to proceed, and with pen and ink illustrations to boot. Moreover, although the Lancasters have in mind a trip to New York, he offers to make a change that will have them visiting California instead, and while here take care of my gopher problem.
-o.p.-
Letters from home are always more enjoyable when made up in great part of little, intimate details. The writer may not consider them of any great import, but they are nevertheless nearly always the very things the absent one is most interested in. A sample of what I mean would be the following quote from the Lancaster letter: “As yet we have not had a frost up here. Mom is picking very fine ripe tomatoes every day and she has given away several bushels. Tonight is rather raw. Cloudy and with a NW wind. Weather report is for 35 degrees tomorrow with clearing and warmer. Plymouth County’s corn crop, I would say, is 75 percent cribbed.”
-o.p.-
I’ll lay all I have in this world there isn’t a former middle-westerner out here on the coast who wouldn’t fairly thrill at receiving a letter such as this. And as for the “fine, ripe tomatoes,” being “given away” by “the bushel”—why, sakes alive, we’re paying 20 cents a pound for that sort of groceries.
