When I was a senior in high school in Franklin, Pennsylvania, avant-garde was still only a murky gleam in some foreigner's eye, and Lady Gregory was considered pretty far out as a playwright. What we wanted for our senior class play was a drawing-room comedy, or at least that's what the English teacher who doubled as our drama coach wanted. The fact that none of us on the play-reading committee had ever seen a drawing room, to our knowledge, was no handicap at all. We had the Samuel French catalogue to guide us, and it not only gave clear plot synopses, but even more vital, it told right off how many characters and which sex-- say, 5 m., 9 f. We had more females than males around-- perhaps a chronic imbalance of all amateur theater groups-- so the more f. the better.

I wasn't in the actual cast-- I had a voice which has since been described as having "the timbre of a cuckoo clock"-- but I took a very active part in the production as left-wing prompter. If it hadn't been for me, the heroine, Olivia Dangerfield, would have wrecked one of the most important lines in the play, when she said to her negro mammy, "Old dear, don't forget to feed my doves." This established her character in a flash, showing as it did that although Olivia might behave like a madcap, underneath she was a romantic, well-born Virginia lady, the sort who kept doves to flutter with. Even her saying "Old dear" proved that her ancestors came straight from England.

On opening night the girl playing Olivia read the line as, "Mandy, remember to feed my pigeons," which is not the same thing at all, as I was quick to point out in a carrying tone from the wings. Thanks to my helpful prompting, she had to go back and say, "I mean, old dear, forget the pigeons and feed the doves." For some reason, the audience took this for wit, and laughed harder than they did at some of the real bon mots in the dialogue, such as, "It's the motor car that makes country life possible-- and the Ford that makes it probable."

-- from "A Stage Full of Legs without Bodies"

She didn't look like an advocate of revolution-- black, red, or even white. She looked more like the kind of woman who would clap for Tinkerbell. She was built like a bean pot, but a soft, melted-down bean pot, with short legs and a flattish lid sprouting gray frizzled hair. She was beaming at Chester so nicely, with such a ladylike air, he decided she was merely barmy. One of those barmy old maids of good family that New Englad overproduced. But the last thing he wanted was to get mixed up with any crackpots, however harmless. His new public relations man had warned him on that. He turned away and made a show of listening to Four Elbows' windup: "...six lessons in teen-age POISE-- or conversational RUSSIAN made EASY." She folded her elbows to subside.

The fixed-versus-floating-zone belligerents were still muttering when the chairman called eagerly, "Ah, Miss Washburn, there you are, just in time." He didn't add, "to create a diversion," but the thought hung in the air.

--from Heat Lightning (1969)

I am less sympathetic with people who search for Freudian undertones in my art work. "Do you know what it symbolized when you painted that large red flower in the lower left-hand corner?" they ask in hushed tones. After I explain that the phone rang while I was holding my brush over the paper and, in leaping up to answer, I dropped a blob of red, which later was expanded into a flower because it looked less messy that way, they still act as if my impromptu posy were a dozen long-stemmed neuroses.

-- from "Look! I'm Framed." (1949)

But like Brady, Mather was no see-the-birdie, smile-please sort of photographer. He advertised "Ambrotypes, Porcelains, Double Position (superior)," but his manner and methods weren't always guaranteed to flatter the subject. When an early customer brought in her small son with a bow tie stretched from ear to ear, she complained, after seeing the photographs Mather took of the boy, "They're homely."

"Well, dammit, ma'am," Mather said. "Look at yourself and your husband. What can you expect of that union?"

--from The Great Olidorado (1959)

She looked at her wrist watch and saw that it was no help-- 4:13-- having stopped at that hour of the night when people often die, or would like to. More than once she had wanted to herself. She had had insomnia so badly she often read late and slept fitfully till nine or ten. Since giving up her regular job in the publishing firm two years before, to avoid seeing Alvin again, she had made herself punch a mental time clock every day, but in an out-of-kilter way, on a different shift, so that she wouldn't mesh with anyone's life but her own.

-- from Open the Door (1966)

Another hazard of our mountainside croquet was the two goats. Mother had acquired them soon after we moved in, and had tied them casually to a post in the backyard. Give them enough rope and they'd clear quite a good piece of property, she figured.It's true that by dint of inexhaustible appetites they eliminated the worst grass clumps, which is more than my brother and I did. On the other hand, none of us children ate the clothesline and three suits of my father's underwear, so this makes us all about even. The goats were named Belle and Beauty, perhaps to delude the neighbors about the way they smelled. They had been given to us, along with a little red goat cart, by a family leaving Franklin who had managed to contain their joy as they bid the goats good riddance.

Theoretically, one of the goats' chief duties, besides mowing the grass, was to pull Bobby, Sally and me, one at a time, in the goat cart. However, for some curious reason, Belle and Beauty were always confused and thought it was we children who were supposed to pull them. After we'd ridden a few hundred feet, both goats would sit down and wait to be hauled home. It was an awful unsatisfactory arrangement, and nobody cried when Belle and Beauty were given to a farmer who came to sell us eggs each week and admired the red goat cart. After he'd had the goats a week, he stopped bringing us eggs, probably to get even.

--from We Shook the Family Tree (1941)

The chairman waved away these loose ends. He wore a red-jeweled ring on his little finger, and his sport jacket was so tight he looked rather like a sausage encased in madras plaid. "Fellow citizens, the PTA has asked me to make a top-priority announcement. Due to the sudden increase of child molesters, mothers are organizing volunteer watches at all school bus stops. This will continue till summer vacation, June twentieth. Volunteers may call Mrs. Hinck."

"What if the mothers are molested too?" somebody asked.

Mrs. Hinck stood up, or popped up. She looked very flushed and determined. "The mothers will go in pairs and they will be armed-- with paralyzing nerve gas."

"But that stuff is illegal."

"Not this brand," a man said. "It's on sale in the hardware store-- doesn't have much effect anyway except maybe make you sneeze." Somebody sneezed but changed it hurriedly to a nose-blow.

"Thank you, Mrs. Hinck," the chairman said. "I'm sure you'll get more volunteers than you can handle."

-from Heat Lightning (1969)

Three days after the fall of Fort Sumter, a small, lively man with stick-out ears, cowlicked brown hair, and a shy, enchantingly sweet smile, sat having supper in the shanty-like hotel of a new oil settlement that would one day be named after him. Henry Rouse was thirty-seven years old, a bachelor, with the biggest following of children of any man around. The pockets of his rumpled suit bulged stickily with licorice and peppermints, and small friends surrounded him like the Good Humor Man. They scrambled up for rides on his big black mare, tagged him on foot, and listened saucer-eyed to his stories. With grownups, he was still bothered sometimes that had made him give up a law career, but with children it vanished magically.

-from The Great Oildorado (1959)

Owing to one of those mysterious social changes that come on as suddenly as elm blight, almost every hostess in Wingate was serving sandwiches for cocktail hors d'oeuvres that summer. No cheese. No nuts. No crunchies. Just dainty little sandwiches, very thin, water cress or cucumber or ham or some such. And that's how the vounteers at the local charity thrift shop, the Second Run, happened to inherit sandwiches for their tea that Friday afternoon. (Usually they had cookies from the supermarket.) Barbara Finney, the yongest volunteer, had brought sandwiches left over from the night before when she'd entertained her husband's boss.

As soon as Lucy Ramsdale bit into one, she knew why they'd been left over. "My God, what's in this?" As the oldest volunteer there, she was freer to say what she felt.

-from To Spite Her Face (1971)

The man responsible for the school's tithe of royalties, Levi Dodd, was one of the most fiercely moral men who ever settled their families in Franklin. He started the first Presbyterian Sunday School and poured large, forcible doses of religion into his children like castor oil. His son Sam was one of the brightest pupils in the public school-- ten years before his father drilled for oil in the playground there. I doubt if Sam ever played even Blindman's Bluff, because he was a dud at sports and games. What he did best was debating. After graduating from Jefferson College below Pittsburgh (now Washington and Jefferson) he had studied law with James Kerr and been admitted to the Venango Bar just in time for the oil boom, at the age of twenty-three. He was a big, clumsy, overgrown bear-cub of a man with a funny little mustache that would have better fitted a poodle. Townspeople agreed that he was smart as a whip, but too free-thinking, and at first they felt safer giving their business to old, established law firms like Church & Heydrick.

...

He was odd for sure, by town standards. When a fellow lawyer ran into his office to tell him jubilantly that Cyrus Field's transatlantic cable had been laid successfully, he was startled at Sam's bitter reaction. "Life's already too harried," Sam said. "It won't be worth living unless we stop making inventions to annihilate time and space. Why do we have to tie continents together with electric bands? Why can't we get along the old way?"

Even his most clacking critics agreed that he didn't care a hoot about money, and he practiced law and took all kinds of cases for the sheer love of it. When the big railroads began to move in, to carry oil freight, and took right of way through farmers' property willy-nilly, Sam Dodd handled so many cases for farmers that he was called the Poor Man's Friend. Just the same, his practice swelled so lucratively that while he was still paying $8 a month rent for his house, he paid six times that for a new office to hold his onrush of clients. Frankliners always called him by his first initials-- S.C.T., Esseetee-- which ha d a hissing sound in the mouths of those who considered him too radical. I mention this because later Sam Dodd became the head counsel for Standard Oil, and drew up Standard's first trust, on one sheet of paper.

- from The Great Oildorado (1959)

It was two years after the Armistice when Mother saw The House. My Grandmother Brown , a lively, beautiful old lady, was visiting us at the time, and she and Mother discovered it one afternoon when they were out walking. At dinner that night, they tackled my father.

The House was not only for sale, they said, but would cost even less than the one we now owned, so that it would actually be a saving to move. They described how it sat on the hill at the top of Buffalo Street, and Mother kept stressing the view, and how important it was to have room to breathe. Whenever my father asked what the house was like, both my mother and grandmother would say, "Oh, Cliff, it's so original."

My father, being a man, found the description rather ominous, but he consented amiably enough to go and see the house that Saturday afternoon. Bobby and I were to stay home and "amuse" our little sister, but we wanted to see the house too, so in the end even Sally came along. A few weeks before, father had bought our first automobile, a Ford sedan. After taking an half-hour driving lesson from the salesman, he had brought it home proudly to show Mother, and said he was going to take it out on a country road and practice turning around and backing. Mother was charmed and wanted to go along, but Grandmother Brown wouldn't let her. "Nonsense, Kitty," she said. "You have three little children and you can't afford to risk your neck. I'll go with Cliff myself." She came home very bouncy and gay, describing how they'd even missed hitting a cow, and said it was perfectly safe for Mother or any of us to ride with Father. So on that Saturday afternoon, we all piled into the Ford and chugged up the steep Buffalo Street hill to see The House.

--from We Shook the Family Tree (1946)