MISTER DICK

According to Wikipedia, Ben Hur Lampman (November 27, 1886–March 2, 1954) was a U.S. newspaper editor, essayist, short story writer, and poet. He was a longtime editor of The Oregonian in Portland, Oregon, and he served as poet laureate of Oregon from 1951 until his death.

“He began publishing nature essays in The Oregonian. His stories and essays also appeared in national magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post. Some of his essays about life in Portland were collected in his 1942 book “At the End of the Car Line.” In 1943 he won an O. Henry Award for his short story "Blinker Was a Good Dog", which originally appeared in the Atlantic Monthly. Some of his papers and manuscripts are now in the collection of the library of the University of Oregon. He is buried in Lincoln Memorial Cemetery in Portland.”

This morning I couldn’t find my copy of “At the End of the Car Line,” which is essentailly the same as a “blook,” except that it’s a compilation of columns instead of a blog. The full title of the column was “The Little Old Lady at the End of the Streetcar Line.” When I say “LOL, that’s who I mean -- “little old lady” -- not “lots of laughter” or “lots of luck,” which are the more modern phrases. Lampman used his LOL as a ventriloquist’s puppet to speak the obvious truth that even an out-of-it and impaired person knows, mostly through life experience. She’s a wise little old lady in her rickety rocker on her overgrown porch.

But this blog is not about Ben Hur Lampman or his LOL, well-loved as they were. This is about an old man who lived in Browning across the main street (actually it was two highways on top of each other and only became the main street by default when the perpendicular and original main street withered) from the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife. His name was Mister Dick. He was a retired barber.

Mister Dick’s claim to fame was that when Ben Hur Lampman got married, Mr. Dick prepared him for the wedding. Lampman had been doing labor on the Canadian Plains before he returned to North Dakota and married Lena Sheldon, a New York City resident who had moved to the Dakotas to become a school teacher. Then his family moved to Oregon. Mr. Dick must have done his vital preparation in North Dakota about the time of WWI, maybe just before, in that Edwardian decade when people were optimistically seeking opportunity. The son of a small-town newspaper man marries a school ma’arm from back east. The roots of one classic Western paradigm.

Mister Dick loved to tell about his bathtub room in back of the barbershop and just how he carefully shaved Ben Hur with a straight razor, trimmed up his sideburns a bit, then “braced” his cheeks, dusted his neck, and pomaded his hair. “He was a fine sight,” declared Mister Dick who was evidently never married, himself. It was the high point of Mister Dick’s life as much as it was of Ben Hur Lampman’s.

Once when my mother, visiting Browning from Portland where BHL was quite famous when I was in what would be junior high today, came to the grocery store with me. I introduced her to Mister Dick where I knew she would be safely parked for a half hour. “You did that on purpose!” she accused. My defense was, “But think of the good it did to Mister Dick to find someone who actually knew who Ben Hur Lampman was!”

Mister Dick’s house was no more than a shanty with a shed attached. I rented a house next door to him and though it was modest, it was luxurious compared to that of Mister Dick, which was knocked together of unpainted boards. There were Moccasin Flat cabins that were more weather-tight and convenient. I was never inside but not sure there was running water or electricity. What I did know, from eyewitness accounts, was that there were clotheslines strung all over the single room and on them were pinned violin parts, for Mister Dick’s hobby was making violins. On rare occasions I could hear him scraping out a bit of music, but he never seemed to play publicly. Those who had been inside also claimed that he hoarded newspapers in stacks, so that a person had to sidle between them to cross the room.

But I saw Mister Dick often, because he took a daily walk towards the mountains no matter what the weather might be. To say he walked with a cane would be misleading. He used his cane as a baton, waving and even twirling it, though he never threw it in the air. He brandished it, he celebrated his walk with it. If it were cold, his other equipment was a long plaid wool scarf with ends that flew on the wind like pennants. No one was ever as joyfully alive as Mister Dick on a walk!

Kenny Hofland, also a barber, lived next door on the other side and I thought he might be some relation, but his attitude to the world was far more downbeat. He was a sceptic, a pessimist. Possibly this was because he never prepared a famous man for a wedding, a small memory but a jubilant one and maybe as good a high point as any for a life wherein the rememberer was never married.

When Mister Dick died, he was found standing up, propped up by all his accumulated debris of newsprint and musical instruments. I didn’t see him like that, but I imagine him on this last trip with his jaunty cane and billowing scarf, a sort of human sailboat with an even keel.