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About Oregon daily emerald. (Eugene, Or.) 1920-2012 | View Entire Issue (Feb. 18, 1972)
Classic Gas A simple success story . . . The likable young country boy with a unique talent, who, through faith, hard work and perseverance, goes to the Big City and hits the Big Time, making scads of money and creating a legend that will never die . . . He took the famous Moulin Rouge of Paris by storm, captivating the cultured and demanding Parisian audience; a charming man with a large family and many friends, he earned fantastic gate receipts, in competition with the most famous talents of the day—and what he did, speaking bluntly, was—to fart. He stood on stage before the cream of Paris society and “broke wind,” and they went into hysterics over him. Le Petomane, Joseph Pujol, had the weird ability to draw large volumes of air into his lower intestine, by con tracting the walls of his stomach and diaphram—and, through long practice, he had the muscular control to expel that air with force sufficient to ex tinguish a candle a foot away, or to produce, for great audiences, one-man “concerts” of a truly uniaue flavor. So precise was his control that he could produce, with polished and ur bane showmanship, imitations of musical instruments, animal calls, popular tunes, and sounds such as cannon fire, the sigh of a lovesick girl, or a terrifying peal of thunder lasting ten or fifteen seconds . . . and all, needless to say, without opening his mouth; and, mind you, this was in the days before electronic amplification. Paris flocked to see and hear. He shared the stages of ante-bellum France with “The Divine” Sarah Bernhardt, the superb Rejane, and a beautiful “Javanese Temple Dancer” who called herself Mata Hari. In one Sunday performance at the Moulin Rouge, he drew a gate of 20,000 Francs—more than twice what “The Divine Sarah” could do in the box of fice. This was in 1892, “Le Belle Epoque.” Whether Oscar Brand’s lyric of the young man who could “Blow out a Mozart sonata - Or accompany musical chairs” was actually inspired by the career of Joseph Pujol, must remain a moot point—and at any rate, alongside actual history, it is not a very in teresting question. Eyewitnesses describe his con certs: “The enthusiasm became delirious.” “Some would stand paralyzed, tears pouring down their cheeks, while others beat their heads and fell on the floor.” —This audience reaction seems a bit extreme, even for the Rolling Stones— “They fell over themselves to hear him and the laughter, shouting, womens’ shrieking and the whole hysterical din could be heard a hundred yards away from the Moulin Rouge. When Le Petomane saw his public gripped in this way he shouted “ ‘All together, then, one two three . . ” They joined him in chorus and the whole house was convulsed.” Unlike the modern superstars, Joseph Pujol did not “play himself out” and then commit suicide. The outbreak of the 1914 war suddenly ended his musical career, after twenty-two years of strenuous effort. Le Petomane retired to the bosom of his family, to dream of past triumphs and future comebacks. But alas, there would be no comeback; the war changed public Beginning a new column by Walter Wentz on boohs you’ve never read, records you’ve never heard, movies and places you’ve never seen tastes, and the great artist spent his declining years as a prosperous baker. The good old man died in 1945, mourned by a huge family and many admiring friends. He was 88. The History of the Golf Ball Your humble servant is not a devotee of Golf. Methinks that game, in which grown men chase an inoffensive little spheroid around, and hammer it with iron clubs, is one of the most inane and pointless of human activities. This defense being offered, one must still admit that the history of the golf ball, as related by Martin, is indeed “curious.” The author rejects those persistent myths about ancient shepherds who batted pebbles around with their crooks, and instead shows us a bunch of 15th Century Scots and Dutchmen, beating on little leather balls tightly stuffed with feathers. This sort of thing went on for about four hundred years, the fad slowly spreading to England for no discem able reason. The “golf ball” was made by a specialist, who pieced together the leather carcass, and packed it full of goose-down, jammed in tightly with an iron rod pressed down by a wooden crosspiece braced against his chest. Only four or five balls could be made in one day, and the constant crushing pressure against the lungs caused most good ball-makers to die early of respiratory diseases. As a natural consequence, the “featherie” was very expensive. Also, though heavy and hard in fine weather, it became soggy and erratic in English rain. Young Rob Paterson, a divinity student living in St. Andrews, Scotland (birthplace of modern golf), was too poor to be able to afford the “featheries,” but was addicted to golf. He hit on the idea of melting and molding into balls the dried gum of a Maylasian tree, gutta percha. The new balk withstood rain, stayed round, and, best of all, were quite cheap. But then Rob went to America, a barbaric land that had no golf, as a missionary; he lived there golfless for forty years, while at home his kid brother cashed in on “Paterson’s Composite” golf balls. Suddenly everybody was making gutta percha golf balls, golf could be afforded by everyone, and new courses popped up like a rash all over England. A few diehards stubbornly resisted the “guttie”—veterans like Allan Robertson, the last of the St. Andrews featherie makers, who collected and publicly burned every “guttie” he could find, calling them “feelthy stuff.” But change was in the air, along with thousands of the new balls. By 1860, the old featherie was a collector's item. The gutties hung on for over half a century, despite some shortcomings of their own—for instance, in cold weather, a stroked guttie might explode in a shower of fragments, while in hot weather they turned mushy. Nothing worse than a mushy guttie. In the 1890’s some Americans (now all safe from prosecution) introduced the game into this country. The death struggle between the guttie and the rubbercore began when a young sportsman named Coburn Haskell, hoping to win a few games, got the idea of making an extra lively ball for himself out of tightly wound rubber thread covered with a gutta shell. The new ball flew like a homesick angel, and the old guttie, hopelessly out classed, was as dead as the dodo by 1910. “Haskell’s Bounding Billies” performed so prodigiously that golf courses had to be enlarged, and the Scottish perfectionists complained that “the Yankees had ruined the game." An era of development ensued, featuring off-breeds such as all-steel balls, balls with cores of water, glycerine, honey, castor oil, mercury, wine, ice, powdered metal or dirt. Higher and higher thread tensions were used, aerodynamic factors thoroughly studied (many weird surfaces were used before the modern “dimple" was developed); balls began appearing which flew to preposterous distances. Something had to be done, before the golf courses expanded to cover the entire country. Finally, by 1942, the U.S. Golfing Association had established rules limiting size, weight, and initial velocity of officially-used golf balls. Well, there is a lot of interesting stuff from Chapters 7 to 11, but we may as well skip it, and go on to the next revolution in golf balls, which occurred in 1965. This was when a young amateur experimenter (sound familiar?) named James Bartsch developed an all new, one-piece, cheaper golf ball made of a sophisticated new—you guessed it— plastic. Plastic. Is nothing sacred anymore? New Tribes, New Turf ... i™ pw i.> future coalition of groups for change must adopt Indian formats. The desire to have spectacular demonstrations and disruptions must give way to a determination to maintain the community at all costs. This can only be possible by the creation of new mythologies internal to each group in a manner similar to contemporary tribal understandings of the history of the people.” Later, Deloria advocates the creation of new institutions, new religions, and essentially new governments to correspond to each tribal unit. Consciousness is not good enough; one must view himself as a member of a minority group and thus insist on power to his people. If the young can develop viable alternative institutions and mythologies, and will cohesively adhere to them now, then as they grow older they will be able to cling to their integral communities and not be bought out by the system. To a certain extent, of course, a sort of tribalism is taking over this generation. Otherwise, the tei n “counter-culture” would not exist. But exactly how solid this counter-culture is remains to be seen. Youth declared itself a minority group at Wood stock, Deloria and Reich agree, while others say that youth was declared a minority by the police at Chicago. But young middle class whites have a tendency to slip back to their affluent beginnings. No one in the so-called Eugene “community” disputes the great value of the People’s Food Co-op, or Switchboard, or White Bird. Yet these few pioneer organizations are constantly short of volunteer help. Most of the people associated with the counter-culture in this town are only at Reich's stage of consciousness; they haven’t reached the level of commitment. Part of the problem, however, is simply a lack of history. Few people are willing to buy into a new thing until it can prove its staying power. Thus, these institutions will have to struggle along for some time before they receive true support from the community. Already the food co-op, which never intended to be a capitalist success, has proved successful enough to warrant the growth of a second store. It appears, too, that the political energies of young people are being directed away from the large national and international crises, and toward those in their immediate community. Perhaps geographical ties are not the best, but they are a start. From geographic tribes there may spring others, centered around youth—but also around occupation or sex or race or old age. Eventually, however, such tribes must cut across all these barriers, and form unions of men and women, young and old, sharing a specific cultural heritage. Deloria concludes: “As we see contemporary society, we see the world at the moment of creation. We have the chance to build a new cosmopolitan society within the older American society. But it must be done by the affirmation of the component groups that have composed American society. We can no longer build upon a denial of everything that makes a person himself.”