: Gordon Shepherd
: Life Moves On Memoir Reflections of an Arkansas Traveler
: BookBaby
: 9798317829902
: Life Moves On
: 1
: CHF 3.10
:
: Biographien, Autobiographien
: English
: 188
: kein Kopierschutz
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
In Life Moves On, Gordon Shepherd offers a compelling collection of memoir stories drawn from his adult life in Arkansas as an academic sociologist with a deep affection for the state and its people. The Arkansans he encounters reflect and transcend regional stereotypes, revealing a complex and often surprising cultural landscape. His stories span unscripted religious fervor in a northern Arkansas county, the legacy of the 1919 Elaine Massacre in the Arkansas Mississippi Delta region of the state, the struggles of a Vietnam veteran returning to college, and the quiet generosity of a local pharmacist competing with corporate giants. Other vignettes explore family ties, racial reconciliation, and the enduring impact of the 1957 Little Rock Central High crisis. Baseball threads through several stories, from the formation of the Conway Hardball League to the dreams and dilemmas of young Latino players navigating immigration politics. As a bonus story, Shepherd recounts his encounters during a Road Scholar trip to Havana, Cuba, offering a cross-cultural reflection from an Arkansan's point of view. While Shepherd's stories are organized in rough chronological order, they are eclectic in their subjects and focus. Some are short while others are fairly lengthy. Independent of the stories' particular settings and contents, all are humanistically rendered. They reveal Shepherd's sympathetic curiosity for learning more about his surroundings and the normative traditions that shape other people's lives; and they reflect equally his appreciation for people's reciprocal interest in him as an Arkansas traveler, and their generosity when he encounters them in the context of their daily lives and occupations. Life Moves On will appeal to all readers of ethnographic memoir, regardless of where they themselves live or come from; and it will appeal especially to readers who are from Arkansas and claim it as their own.

Gordon Shepherd, a distinguished professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Central Arkansas, was born and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah. Shepherd earned his bachelor's degree from the University of Utah and his PhD from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He is the sole author of 'America the Beautiful: In Dark Times and Lost Conversations with Abraham Lincoln.' With Gary Shepherd, he is co-author of 'Stories of Sports Idols and Other Ordinary Mortals' and 'Growing Up in the City of the Saints: Glimpses of Salt Lake City During the 1950s and 60s.' He is also the lead author of the forthcoming book 'The Greatest of Their Times: Comparing Baseball's Peak Performers Across Eras.'

Chapter 1

Miracle Of The Bridge

If men define situations as real, they are real in theirconsequences
—W. I. Thomas

December 15, 1981

I finished telling my story and paused. The students in my UCA graduate statistics seminar had been listening attentively. I asked them what they thought. “Interesting,” ventured Francine Sandusky, “incredible, actually.” Jane Davis agreed. It was certainly more interesting than probability theory and the Chi Square test I had been trying to teach them, she conceded with a broad smile. (The subject of my recent field work observations in the small community of Bradford, Arkansas had come up before class started, and I had needed only modest encouragement to abandon the prepared statistics lesson in favor of telling my story). Well, yes, interesting, but what was their assessment? What questions did my account of events raise? What explanations did they have to offer?”

For a moment nobody said anything. “All right,” responded David Smedley, a former military officer and undergraduate psychology major who had converted to sociology in order to obtain a master’s degree, “I’ll say the obvious. The guy in your story was a crackpot, probably a paranoid schizophrenic with pronounced delusional tendencies.”

“Certifiably crazy”? I asked.

“Yes,” answered Smedley, “without doubt.”

None of the other students appeared inclined to dispute him. After all, more or less normal individuals do not regularly hear the voices of God and the Devil contending for control of their lives. Most sane people do not spend months cleaning and painting an obscure county bridge because they have been directed to do so in a vision.

You could be right, I granted Smedley, but maybe the young man’s psychiatric state wasn’t the only puzzle to be considered. What about the people who lived in Bradford, who debated and hedged their bets about the meaning of what was taking place in their town? And could we really say without qualification that the young man’s fantastic claims were entirely discredited in the end, or could we say that in some sense he was vindicated?

Smedley snorted.

I proposed that we suspend judgement about the authenticity of the young man’s visions and enlarge the framework of our questions; that as sociology students we shouldn’t divorce him from the social setting in which he had grown up and acted in. It wasn’t merely his private version of reality that mattered but the collective reactions of people in the community to his claims and their attempts, through town gossip and rumor construction, to produce some plausible definitions of who he was and what he represented. In short, there was a social reality to contend with as well. Why wasn’t he permanently dismissed as a fool or fraud? How were his claims of religious guidance translated into an anticipated event that captured and held the attention of the community?

Smedley wasn’t on board with my attempt to suggest a larger interpretation of events that shifted attention away from the lead protagonist of my story to the larger community and the efforts by its members to form a collective definition of the situation. For Smedley, the things I emphasized were of marginal concern. The fact remained, he insisted, the entire episode was a series of delusions.

I was frankly disappointed and mildly annoyed by Smedley’s rejection of an opportunity to think sociologically. Maybe I was in the wrong profession, if not deluded myself.

An ImplausibleStory

For me, the story of the bridge had its beginnings a month previously when one of my UCA undergraduate students, Jeannie Hancock, approached me with a local news item she thought I might find interesting. In late August, a young man had appeared in her hometown of Bradford in White County, Arkansas, 70 miles northeast of Conway. Jeannie told me that for the past three months the young stranger had been scouring the rust off of an old bridge that spanned the waters of Departee Creek. Day after day the young man was at the bridge with his wire brush painstakingly cleaning its steel beams and girders. Apparently he had been given permission to do so by a White County judge who saw little harm in a volunteer effort to spruce up the old bridge. Their curiosity piqued, Bradford residents and county farmers on their way over the bridge would stop to ask the young man what he was doing. He would then inform them of his mission. God had called him to Bradford, he told them, and given him