The Legend of Cas Walker

 The Cas Walker Knoxville city council fist-fight; LIFE Magazine

[Editor's Note: As I am facing numerous writing deadlines, this seems like a good time to give a retrospective glance to the first two years of Art of the Rural. Over these weeks I will feature a few new articles, but also many favorites from the archives. Thanks again to everyone who has read and contributed; what began as a labor of love has become a project far larger, and far more rewarding, than I ever could have anticipated - and I deeply appreciate the readership and participation of such a diverse audience. Starting March 12th, we will offer new articles and share some new projects related to our mission.

The Legend of Cas Walker was originally published on April 11, 2011.]

 
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I recently received an email and suggestion from Chuck Shuford, a writer and arts commentator for The Daily Yonder and a number of other publications. I think that many of our readers will be interested in this: the life and times and televised work of Cas Walker (1902-1998). Here's an excerpt from Mr. Shuford's correspondence:

My friend sent me a link to Cas Walker pontificating on his early morning TV program -- this was probably sometime in the 70's.   You need to know about Cas.  He owned a chain of grocery stores in E.TN, E. Ky, and SW Va.  He was also a politician, serving on the Knoxville City Council where he got in a fist fight at least once with a councilman holding a contrarian view.  He was elected Mayor of Knoxville and then very soon after, recalled.  He then ran for council again successfully until he retired in the early 70's. If god ever made an ornerier man, I've been hard to come by him.  As someone once said "If I ordered a car load of SOB's and they only sent Cas, I'd sign for it."  Dolly Parton and the Everly Brothers sang on his show as youngun's.   His home, which he lived in until his death, is about 3 blocks from our home.  Ironically, it is now owned by a lefty UT professor who recently wrote a book on Eugene V. Debs.

Writing in the Knoxville Metro Pulse, Betty Bean reveals how this "Hillbilly Collosus" also possessed an ability to manipulate media and technology:  

Cas had served on City Council longer than I’d been alive, and had been among the first to grasp the power of television not only for selling stuff but for fighting off fluoridation, metro government, bad check writers, shoplifters, dog thieves, civic improvements of any sort, and police officers who hung around and drank coffee in establishments other than his own.

YouTube offers a small selection of Cas Walker Farm and Home Hour clips, including one of the Dolly Parton performances Mr. Shuford alludes to above. Is that Waylon Jennings playing on the right of the screen?

Cas Walker's life is impossible to summarize in just a few paragraphs, so please refer to this lively and surprising feature by Ms. Bean in the Metro Pulse. Mr. Walker's ascension to millionaire grocery magnate is marked by a rough, self-conscious transition from rural to urban life--and a hatred (an accurate word in this case) for "the silk-stocking crowd" who taunted him during his youth. While he had a combative sense of class, and an equally combative political sense, even those who opposed him in these regards were charmed and even awe-struck by the stubborn creativity Mr. Walker channeled into The Farm and Home Hour and his grocery store promotions.

Ms. Bean writes extensively of one of Mr. Walker's most legendary exploits, when he buried local character Digger O'Dell alive for multiple weeks, just to generate increased sales at this grocery stores:

"He [Digger O'Dell] said 'I will be buried, six feet underground, with a stovepipe running down to where I am so people can talk to me.' I [Cas Walker] said, 'What do you get for that kind of work?'"

He said "I get $100 a day.'

"I said 'I was thinking about offering you $25 a day, but I am going to offer you $50.' His wife was a Jewish woman and she was shaking her head yes so I knew I was going to start burying a man and I had never had that experience before.

"We dug our hole, and I got ready to bury him. Of course, I advertised that I was going to bury him at a certain time. You never seen a crowd like we had."

Digger had a telephone, and Walker remembers that he "talked with women all night. You have never experienced a ladies man such as this one was."

Walker put up a tent over Odell's grave to accommodate the crowd, which one night numbered 1,500 at 2 a.m.

But Digger wanted to be dug up before he had fulfilled his 30-day contract. Walker was having none of it, since daily receipts at the Chapman Highway store had increased from $3,500 to $8,000.

"I told him that was too much money to dig up," Walker said in a 1990 interview with the Knoxville Journal.

Digger started faking heart attacks and calling the newspapers and the health department to complain that Walker was denying him medical care.

Walker's solution was to dress two women who worked for him in "nurse suits" and station them above the grave, selling barbecued chicken sandwiches.

Knoxviews offers a brief write-up of these stunts (including the LIFE Magazine fist-fight)--make sure to read the comments section, as many local folks contributed their own memories of Cas Walker.

The Tennessee Archive of Moving Image and Sound also houses many of the historical Cas Walker commercials and Farm and Home Hour tapes. TAMIS deserves its own post here on the The Art of the Rural, and that will be forthcoming, but, until then here is one of the archival commercials:

The Museum of Appalachia also features John Rice Irwin remembering Mr. Walker and his love for Coon Hunting.

Rural Roots: 1956, 2011, and 2228

The brig at the 2011 Trekfest; Rob Daniel, The Press Citizen

When I was recently traveling through Iowa on my way to the National Rural Assembly I had the chance to spend an evening in Riverside,  a small-town about 20 miles south of Iowa City. Simply put: Riverside is a beautiful place. It's benefitted from both a strong sense of community pride and from an influx of revenues generated by a riverboat casino built a few miles east of downtown. For better or worse, when politicians talk about "small town America," Riverside is the kind of place they envision: clean streets, well-kept parks, and a host of local businesses.

Anticipating the Assembly, I was particularly conscious of the larger narrative that's often stretched over our rural places. Riverside has found an ingenious way to deal with this issue. I'll include below the text from the Riverside Area Community Club's Assignment Earth: Trekfest 2011 brochure:

Stephen Whitfield and Gene Roddenberry's book, The Making of Star Trek, stated that Kirk "was born in a small town in the state of Iowa."

In 1984, Riverside City Councilperson Steve Miller wrote to Gene Roddenberry requesting that the small town in Iowa be Riverside.

Through city proclamation, TV, radio, magazine, and newspaper interviews (including The Wall Street Journal) and with certificate of commendation from Gene Roddenberry himself, Riverside has become known for this historical event!

On March 25, 1985, the Riverside City Council voted unanimously to declare a spot behind what used to be the town's barber shop as the "future birthplace" of Star Trek's Captain James T. Kirk, commander of the spaceship U.S.S. Enterprise, NCC-1701.

While YouTube abounds with video from Trekfests past, Allen Huffman's video montage below is a fine introduction, though you may need to mute the sound:

While I can't help but applaud Riverside for the creative way in which they landed their community on the intergalactic map, I'm also interested in Trekfest for what I see as a convergence of two somewhat related forms of nostalgia. While the primary strain, of course, relates to the long-since-departed television show, there's also the kind of nostalgia that Mr. Roddenberry and Whitfield encoded into the character of Kirk: the boy who must leave his rural roots behind to better himself and, in this case, save the universe. This mixture of local pride, nostalgia, and assertiveness aimed toward the larger urban centers is common to many small towns from which a noted leader emerged; it's echoed in Riverside's town motto: where the trek begins.

From this perspective, it's startling the number of pop-culture narratives that also follow this model of a character rising from a solid and safe rural upbringing only to leave behind the community to face greater challenges: see Superman, Citizen Kane, all the way to science-fiction blockbusters such as Star Wars or The Lord of Rings.

While, in a political context, this is still a powerful metaphor, I wonder if another part of the nostalgia that draws folks (including myself) to something like Trekfest is that it's a story we're no longer telling, a story that's a remnant of a moment in American culture when small town life had a different kind of hold over an audience's collective imagination (as, by mid-century, many urban viewers would have been part of the rural diaspora). Has a kind of reality-television, or riches-to-riches narrative, replaced the humble arc to greatness of James T. Kirk? 

Consider the map below, by Kenneth Johnson of The Carsey Institute, excerpted from a must-read article published in The Daily Yonder. The colors on the map correspond to the number of years between 1956 and 2009 that deaths exceeded births in rural counties; the darker the color the deeper the decrease in population. (see the The Daily Yonder for more information and larger graphics):

 

One of the reasons I love Brown Valley so much is that you know the people you're dealing with: they're a neighbor or a friend or a friend-of-a-friend. And you can trust them because they are part of the community. If there's a bad egg around you, you find out pretty fast. 

As if they were following this research, Hollywood has begun to tell the story differently. In the recent film Cedar Rapids, the naive and God-fearing insurance  agent  Time Lippe comes to this Iowa city for an industry convention: his first trip out of Brown Valley, his first plane ride, his first hotel room. The opening lines of Cedar Rapids above announce the film's intentions--to reveal an audience's notions that rural Americans are insular, close-minded, gullible, and yet somehow the ideal paragons of national virtue:

I considered Trekfest and Cedar Rapids before heading to the Assembly. As I left for St. Paul, Michele Bachmann stood before a national television audience in front of a historic building in Waterloo, Iowa, to announce her candidacy for President. I found myself less interested in her political platform than in the ways she tried to angle her candidacy toward the Iowa primary voters and toward a notion of "Iowa-ness" that equates with Traditional American Values. The keywords she repeated multiple times: Iowa, roots, heartland, values. 

As my hosts explained, Waterloo is a conundrum for Iowans--it's perched between small town and city mentalities and has a diverse population. Though I could not locate the clip, a local TV journalist put together a kind of "gotcha" piece that asked many African-American residents of Waterloo if they were aware of Bachmann's local connections--it's a video that showed how far easy campaign rhetoric falls from the realities of rural and heartland roots. Undoubtedly, as the primaries approach, Bachmann will find some company. 

Yet, in thinking ahead a few election cycles, we may be embarrassed at how this political rhetoric ignored the demographic changes already occurring in many rural communities. As Kenneth Johnson reminded those gathered for the Rural Assembly in St. Paul, 46% of the children born in America this year will be from a "minority" group--a statistic that cuts to the misnomer of the term itself. 

More information on this diversity map can be found at The Maynard Institute

Afterwards a panel comprised of Delia Perez of the Llano Grande Center, Kim Phinney of YouthBuild USA and Peter Morris of the National Congress of American Indians brought the youth dynamic to this research. As this panel eloquently put it, we're living 2050 today. The statement served as a moment of clarification; we need to respect and share the story of our rural roots, but we also need to think inclusively about who has--and will have--a place in the narrative.

The Legend Of Cas Walker

This is the photograph that originally appeared in LIFE magazine.

I recently received an email and suggestion from Chuck Shuford, a writer and arts commentator for The Daily Yonder and a number of other publications. I think that many of our readers will be interested in this: the life and times and televised work of Cas Walker (1902-1998). Here's an excerpt from Mr. Shuford's correspondence:

My friend sent me a link to Cas Walker pontificating on his early morning TV program -- this was probably sometime in the 70's.   You need to know about Cas.  He owned a chain of grocery stores in E.TN, E. Ky, and SW Va.  He was also a politician, serving on the Knoxville City Council where he got in a fist fight at least once with a councilman holding a contrarian view.  He was elected Mayor of Knoxville and then very soon after, recalled.  He then ran for council again successfully until he retired in the early 70's. If god ever made an ornerier man, I've been hard to come by him.  As someone once said "If I ordered a car load of SOB's and they only sent Cas, I'd sign for it."  Dolly Parton and the Everly Brothers sang on his show as youngun's.   His home, which he lived in until his death, is about 3 blocks from our home.  Ironically, it is now owned by a lefty UT professor who recently wrote a book on Eugene V. Debs.

Writing in the Knoxville Metro Pulse, Betty Bean reveals how this "Hillbilly Collosus" also possessed an ability to manipulate media and technology:

Cas had served on City Council longer than I’d been alive, and had been among the first to grasp the power of television not only for selling stuff but for fighting off fluoridation, metro government, bad check writers, shoplifters, dog thieves, civic improvements of any sort, and police officers who hung around and drank coffee in establishments other than his own.

YouTube offers a small selection of Cas Walker Farm and Home Hour clips, including one of the Dolly Parton performances Mr. Shuford alludes to above. Is that Waylon Jennings playing on the right of the screen?

Cas Walker's life is impossible to summarize in just a few paragraphs, so please refer to this lively and surprising feature by Ms. Bean in the Metro Pulse. Mr. Walker's ascension to millionaire grocery magnate is marked by a rough, self-conscious transition from rural to urban life--and a hatred (an accurate word in this case) for "the silk-stocking crowd" who taunted him during his youth. While he had a combative sense of class, and an equally combative political sense, even those who opposed him in these regards were charmed and even awe-struck by the stubborn creativity Mr. Walker channeled into The Farm and Home Hour and his grocery store promotions.

Ms. Bean writes extensively of one of Mr. Walker's most legendary exploits, when he buried local character Digger O'Dell alive for multiple weeks, just to generate increased sales at this grocery stores:

"He [Digger O'Dell] said 'I will be buried, six feet underground, with a stovepipe running down to where I am so people can talk to me.' I [Cas Walker] said, 'What do you get for that kind of work?'"


He said "I get $100 a day.'


"I said 'I was thinking about offering you $25 a day, but I am going to offer you $50.' His wife was a Jewish woman and she was shaking her head yes so I knew I was going to start burying a man and I had never had that experience before.


"We dug our hole, and I got ready to bury him. Of course, I advertised that I was going to bury him at a certain time. You never seen a crowd like we had."


Digger had a telephone, and Walker remembers that he "talked with women all night. You have never experienced a ladies man such as this one was."


Walker put up a tent over Odell's grave to accommodate the crowd, which one night numbered 1,500 at 2 a.m.


But Digger wanted to be dug up before he had fulfilled his 30-day contract. Walker was having none of it, since daily receipts at the Chapman Highway store had increased from $3,500 to $8,000.


"I told him that was too much money to dig up," Walker said in a 1990 interview with the Knoxville Journal.


Digger started faking heart attacks and calling the newspapers and the health department to complain that Walker was denying him medical care.


Walker's solution was to dress two women who worked for him in "nurse suits" and station them above the grave, selling barbecued chicken sandwiches.

Knoxviews offers a brief write-up of these stunts (including the LIFE Magazine fist-fight)--make sure to read the comments section, as many local folks contributed their own memories of Cas Walker.

The Tennessee Archive of Moving Image and Sound also houses many of the historical Cas Walker commercials and Farm and Home Hour tapes. TAMIS deserves its own post here on the The Art of the Rural, and that will be forthcoming, but, until then here is one of the archival commercials:

The Museum of Appalachia also features John Rice Irwin remembering Mr. Walker and his love for Coon Hunting.

Saying Goodbye to Oakdale, Illinois

The Daily Yonder and The Rural Blog are two sites I read each day; they both provide some of the most thorough, provocative and indispensable information and commentary on rural issues. The Daily Yonder today offers analysis on the senate election in Massachusetts (both the most heavily rural and heavily urban counties voted for Democrat Martha Coakley) as well as this fantastic reminiscence on the local history of Oakdale, Illinois--the fictional small-town home of As The World Turns. Here's a glimpse of writer Julianne Crouch walking down this soapstone memory lane:

Geographically, Oakdale started out in the corn fields somewhere in central Illinois. The town now has at least one hospital, a television station, three newspapers, a university, a fancy hotel (where characters unaccountably live for long stretches), a dive motel, and a police force. It has a convenient airport, with jets on stand-by if one needs a quickie divorce in “the Islands.” Like the town of Springfield, where the cartoon Simpsons live, it has whatever geographical features suit the story line. Oakdale is an easy drive to the mountains, New York City, and of course, Chicago. 

The show premiered in April 1956. When I first moved to Oakdale for one hour a day, Chicago was rarely mentioned. It might come up if someone sought an abortion or needed an organ transplant. But over the years, Chicago has become central to the lives of Oakdalians. Either Chicago’s suburbs are sprawling or Oakdale is snurching north. Oakdalians are Cubs fans but seem to have little interest in the Bulls or the Bears. They go to the Windy City for rock concerts or occasional shopping trips. They can get there and back in no time, unless they slide off the road and hit a tree or are kidnapped along the way. Hey, it happens.

While the essay reads as a sort of fabulist narrative of post-war rural America, the Daily Yonder's page also features a very thoughtful response:

Daily Yonder readers undoubtedly will be interested to learn that there is, in fact, a non-fictional Oakdale, Illinois, and it’s a lovely place.  It’s located in the southwestern part of the state – specifically in southwestern Washington County, about 55 miles southeast of St. Louis, Missouri (and about 30 miles northeast of my hometown of Chester, Illinois).  The population as of the 2000 census was 213.

Oakdale is home to one of only three congregations of the Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America in Illinois.  Its existence reflects the early-nineteenth-century migration of Scots-Irish Covenanters from Upcountry South Carolina to present-day southwestern Washington County and northeastern Randolph County, Illinois, largely because of their opposition to slavery.

 Read more from the Julianne Crouch's essay here.