Myself When Young: Growing Up in the 1890’s by Arthur Krock
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Overview: In Myself When Young, Arthur Krock returns to a way of life only briefly explored in his Memoirs, to a time and a place long past, yet here richly and fully recaptured. From 1887 to 1910, Krock grew up in the fields and streets of rural and urban Kentucky, learning about the world around him, and eventually, about the particular world of newspaper journalism. With a keen eye and a clear prose, Krock brings back those days — the lazy summer afternoons and sense of community of rural Glasgow, the bustling excitement and activity of Louisville.
He recreates the big brick house he lived in, surrounded by uncles and aunts and ruled by the strict but gentle hand of his grandfather; the rituals of country courting and of melon-patch raiding in August; the pleasures of a very infor- mal type of fox-hunting, in which the hounds and handlers went chasing while the "hunters" sat on a hill and drank bourbon. He recalls fiery camp meetings, led by Negro preachers and filled with spirituals; tumultuous Saturday nights, when normally peaceable citizens displayed a "special inclination to violence under the influence of alcohol"; breezy stagecoach rides to near-by villages; and the exciting process of learning the "three useful things" — how to ride, shoot, and draw a bow.
And then he moves to Louisville and the picture changes to the rough-and-tumble world of newspaper reporting with its legendary figures like editor Henry Watterson, with his one blazing blue eye, and cartoonist Fontaine Fox, creator of the Toonerville Trolley. He creates a penetrating portrait of the fierce newspaper competition in 1907 and of Louisville in general: its atmosphere, social life, and entertainments, its prominent personalities and characters, like Mother Savage, the proprietress of Louisville’s famed theatrical boarding house. And Krock talks about his initiation into politics, his stories resounding with the likes of William Jennings Bryan, William Taft, William Randolph Hearst, and local figures like the "mountain of a man," Senator Ollie James.
The book ends with Krock’s triumphant arrival in Washington, D.C., in 1910, the beginning for him of a "new and awesome phase of national journalism that was to post me twice in Washington: for the Haldeman papers (1910-1915) and for the New York Times (1932-1966)."
This is a warmly nostalgic memoir of another age, a book both entertaining and informative about the details of Arthur Krock’s personal life — and about the whole way of life of the simpler American society that preceded World War I. "There have been localities in a span of history in which the conditions of living seem to have overbalanced the human bent for destruction and the day-to-day problems were minimal in comparison with the pleasure of existence. This was true of the region where one individual, myself, grew to young manhood."
Genre: Non-Fiction > Biographies & Memoirs
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