The Art of Manliness - July 31, 2025


#370： The Era of Bright Expectations


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast after world war
00:00:18.780 ii and before the korean war america experienced a short period free from the fear of war and
00:00:23.180 conflict people this time were optimistic about a future of peace and plenty my guest today calls
00:00:27.920 this time the era of bright expectations and he experienced it firsthand as a young man who had
00:00:32.320 just graduated from college this era's burgeoning sense of optimism inspired him and a few of his
00:00:36.580 college buddies to set out all the way from texas on a road trip to canadian wilds in search of the
00:00:40.900 spirit of romance and adventure my guest name is earl labor and i've had on the show before to
00:00:44.920 discuss his landmark biography on jack london today we talk about his memoir of this youthful trip
00:00:49.220 his called the far music earl tells us what life was like right after world war ii and before the
00:00:53.520 korean war and whether he regrets missing the chance to fight in world war ii we then discuss
00:00:57.700 earl's rite of passage road trip from texas to canada talks about hitchhiking back in those days
00:01:02.060 sleeping in barns fields and state fairgrounds when he and his buddies didn't have any money for a room
00:01:06.520 at the ymca and how they ate during those lean times earl then talks about the jobs they worked
00:01:10.580 along the way to save money for their trip to canada including farming building grain elevators
00:01:15.080 and bagging alfalfa for an entire week with little or no sleep earl even did some prize fighting
00:01:20.260 for a bit to make some money and also worked at a burlesque theater in kansas city we'll talk all
00:01:25.320 about that we then discuss what the difference was between his road trip and jack kerouac's road
00:01:30.640 trip which is going on exactly the same time that road trip inspired on the road we end our
00:01:35.040 conversation talking about the outcome of his trip and then earl makes an impassioned call for men to
00:01:39.660 celebrate their manliness and to never lose the spirit of romance and adventure even as they get
00:01:43.620 older you don't want to miss this show and as you listen you'll probably notice that i'm speaking a
00:01:47.120 little bit slower articulating my questions a bit more earl is almost 90 years young so he's a bit
00:01:51.880 hard of hearing so i had to make sure you could understand me so earl joins me now by phone
00:01:56.000 earl labor welcome back to the show thank you very much it's great to be here brett so you have a new
00:02:09.340 memoir out and it's about a specific period in your life in history it's the years 1945 through
00:02:16.660 1950 and you call this period the era of bright expectations why is that i'll tell you brett this
00:02:25.440 is an amazing phenomenon in that this particular era between the end of the second world war and the
00:02:35.980 beginning of the korean war was absolutely distinct unique but it's been neglected unlike the 20s
00:02:46.640 and what have you there was a terrific kind of optimism i call it a bubble of euphoria during this
00:02:54.020 period because we had we just uh gone through the worst depression in american history and gone through
00:03:03.200 the most horrendous war in world history we'd won that war and emerged as the most powerful nation in the
00:03:12.500 world and we were ready to meet any kind of challenge and there was a kind of optimism there that
00:03:20.120 was never there before and i'm afraid hasn't been there since and i wanted in the book for our readers
00:03:27.720 to understand the uh distinction or the wonderful uh uniqueness of that uh particular five years
00:03:36.760 you were too young to fight in world war ii did you ever feel like you missed out on taking part
00:03:42.940 in it i yes and no when the war began like uh most other young guys at the time i was chomping at the
00:03:52.020 bit to get in i wanted to be a fighter pilot if i'd been a year older i might as i say in the book i
00:03:58.720 might not be here to talk now i might not have been able to write the book because i might be dead
00:04:04.680 as the war went on especially later i think my enthusiasm uh waned a bit for example one of my
00:04:12.280 best friends lb broach was just i guess less than a year older and uh he went into the army
00:04:20.200 in the uh late summer or fall early fall of 1944 and hadn't been in there six months when he was killed
00:04:30.220 in the battle of the bulge so i'm just saying that i sort of have mixed feelings about uh about getting
00:04:37.060 in there to the fight so you attended smu during this time what was smu like after world war ii
00:04:45.660 well it was no longer at least for a few years there was no longer the country club of the south
00:04:52.240 which had been and i don't know if we have that reputation now i think it's got a terrific
00:04:57.480 reputation i'm proud of my alma mater but during that period with all the veterans coming back on
00:05:03.580 the gi bill uh the atmosphere was was quite different now i've got to say that our culture
00:05:11.340 of course was very different then than it is now there was more of a sense of unity and a sense as i
00:05:18.780 said earlier of optimism our professors as far as i had any idea were not politicized i mean i never
00:05:26.420 got a sense that they were a member of one particular party or another and the students
00:05:31.580 i think were not as politicized as they are today in fact most of us especially the veterans i say
00:05:39.080 were more interested in learning how to improve their lives through college education i don't remember
00:05:46.340 anybody wanting to protest at the time and it was just i've got to say i consider it a more
00:05:52.380 ultimate situation uh maybe even saner than than i noticed out there today you're a college professor
00:06:02.020 that's what you did did you notice do you notice a big difference between students today besides the
00:06:06.960 wanting to protest the politicization is there a difference between students today in the ones you
00:06:11.760 saw in the 1940s i've noticed a number of differences of brett in terms of the attitude and
00:06:18.320 as i say there was not the kind of disunity we see not the kind of protesting taking political
00:06:26.740 sides or what have you even the curriculum was very different back in those days we were still
00:06:33.100 studying the classics like shakespeare and and even the roman and greek classics what have you
00:06:40.220 instead of trying to be more politically correct or whatever and i think the students back then
00:06:48.160 once again were were more in one sense i guess patriotic maybe even more conservative or what have
00:06:56.260 you and less inclined to to raise hell than they became later on so your memoir is called the far music
00:07:06.180 what's that reference to let me take a little time for this one brett the idea of of escaping going
00:07:14.560 back to nature hitting the road and what have you getting away from all the pressures of society that
00:07:21.400 essentially was my idea wanted to get up to the canadian wilderness work our way up on the road to get to
00:07:29.400 the canadian wilderness go out there and build a cabin and spend a year away from society and all the
00:07:37.220 pressures that are put on you by society the title of the book though the idea of writing a book about it
00:07:44.540 was my buddy pink lindsey's he was a world war ii veteran he was only a couple years older than i but
00:07:52.640 he seemed much older because of what he had been through in the war he was like a big brother
00:07:57.680 almost like a father figure to me and he was uh physically the strongest man i'd ever met at the time
00:08:03.940 and we bonded both of us were weightlifters and that's where i first met him up at the gym and
00:08:12.520 at smu working out with the weights we bonded almost immediately he's just a good old boy from
00:08:18.740 pb lindsey from gilbert texas and i my home was pittsburgh texas at the time about 20 miles from there
00:08:26.380 anyhow back to pink he'd come to smu on the gi bill uh to be a pre-med become a doctor but he took a
00:08:37.140 course under a professor george bond on the american novel and read jack london's martin eden
00:08:45.340 as a result of that he decided they wanted to become an english major and become a professional writer
00:08:52.320 and uh what he did before he died uh he he wrote several pages of of a manuscript called the far music
00:09:04.440 that was his term and uh i uh i got to credit him with the idea of the book he he was essentially a
00:09:16.500 poet i think i'm reading and and short giving you a shortened version of some of this
00:09:22.300 that he uh left behind in a manuscript that he left for me he said uh about the far music it is the
00:09:31.580 music of the spirit and the heart and the soul that lies deep within us the sleeping beauty that
00:09:39.420 dwells below the surface of mean experience perhaps it is it can only be heard when we are very young
00:09:47.640 because i was then young and had known no great and abiding sorrow in spite of the indescribable and
00:09:56.420 unthinkable things i'd witnessed in the war i felt optimistic about my search for the days of my life
00:10:04.000 were new and machine which was my body was new and sinew and blood and bone worked together
00:10:11.060 in that admirable way so peculiar to early years it is a cry from beyond the horizon
00:10:20.040 and like the horizon would by necessity recede from me as i pressed forever toward it
00:10:27.860 i love that section from his manuscript and as i say that's uh the best description i can think of
00:10:35.640 what we meant by the far music i love that you said you had this idea to go to canada
00:10:42.800 was there something that inspired that adventure or was there someone an author what what was the
00:10:49.280 inspiration behind the adventure well i think both of us were tired of book work by the time
00:10:55.340 we graduated in 1949 we'd been pretty steady at the books for four years there and wanted to get
00:11:04.540 away from not only the books but also uh the other pressures of society uh in fact both of us had
00:11:12.760 had some some uh fairly uh passionate love affairs in my case uh i'd gone with this lovely young woman
00:11:22.440 for three years and everybody expected us to get married and so did i but as we got closer to the
00:11:30.160 to the date of graduation i began to think look i'm not ready for the responsibilities that come
00:11:38.380 with marriage and family and think on the other hand it had a pretty passionate uh affair with a
00:11:45.580 young woman who was uh older than most of the smu students and uh that kind of burned itself out i think
00:11:54.120 both of us were ready to hit the road and and have a different kind of romance if you accept that
00:12:01.020 term what was the original idea of your adventure was it it was to get to canada but you had to work
00:12:08.040 your way up there so what was that's right what was the plan we thought originally we might follow
00:12:13.880 the wheat harvest up there but the wheat harvest was delayed by a couple of weeks by rain that summer
00:12:21.540 so we started working in grain elevators uh throughout uh kansas and and uh that was
00:12:29.360 uh the main source of our of our uh income uh for most of the summer until we settled down in kansas city
00:12:38.500 later on around the first of september or so we we work on let's say grain out of building grain
00:12:47.340 into elevators in uh mead kansas and wichita and finally in hutcheson which was uh supposed to be
00:12:55.380 the largest grain elevator ever built up there and what was that work like was it back backbreaking
00:13:01.800 labor well it was warm it was hot out there and i can remember the first day out working at mead
00:13:10.460 we we hadn't prepared much in the way of sandwiches i think peanut butter sandwich and maybe
00:13:16.640 that was about peanut butter and jelly and uh our job was digging a ditch out there we had the the
00:13:25.940 elevator there in mead was almost finished and we had to dig a ditch for the electrical connections
00:13:32.400 up to the main the head house as they called it the main part of the elevator and i can remember
00:13:40.000 ordinarily you know a young man will fantasize about sports and maybe about girls and what have you
00:13:47.480 but i remember i had a different kind of fantasy that day because i was so hungry and hot out there
00:13:55.080 my uncle glenn had been taking me once a week when i was in college to this uh cafeteria close to campus
00:14:03.400 in dallas and so all day long out digging that ditch i was going through the line
00:14:09.140 in my fantasy uh getting all these salads and and uh other uh desserts and what have you
00:14:17.900 all day long while i was digging the ditch pink had a different story about he described a shovel in
00:14:26.600 different terms he says i believe that in the final tally a reckoning would be uh that with the slow
00:14:35.720 and subtle attrition of time the pen shall be mightier than the uh sword but of one thing i'm fairly
00:14:45.440 certain the shovel is mightier than both and he talks about being out there so hot and working on this
00:14:54.680 ditch i don't see how god ever created the universe out of nothing for we as his creatures are not
00:15:02.160 capable of building anything without first digging a ditch he says the draft to win that suddenly
00:15:08.220 spring sprang up at mid-morning across the kansas plain was cool surprising enough and was our salvation
00:15:16.280 i thought of all things significant the clashing of worlds in far space the haunting melodies of
00:15:23.760 ten hauser ten hauser the magnificence of beethoven's ninth the bursting seeds of life the cold inexorableness
00:15:31.580 of death the ever-moving globe time and space and somehow failed to reckon by what manipulation of
00:15:39.120 all things natural and unnatural i've been coerced into being at this spot at this time uh i'm sure there
00:15:46.740 must be some great moral attached to all this but as my breakfast played out at about 11 o'clock
00:15:55.040 i i felt an even deeper ache that there was some great moral to all this but i'll be a son of a
00:16:02.860 bitch if i know what it is hey i had to share that with you whether or not you got time for it or not
00:16:10.040 but anyhow let's move along here as best we can so how did you travel from job to job you didn't have
00:16:18.360 a car that first part of your trip correct at first we were hitchhiking which was no big problem back in
00:16:25.680 those days i wouldn't uh i wouldn't advise it today because all the craziness out there but we uh for the
00:16:32.780 first uh several weeks we were on the road hitchhiking then we got enough money to come back to texas
00:16:38.140 and uh get a used car we bought let's say pink's uncle hiram lindsey owned a uh used car uh dealership
00:16:48.060 in gilmer texas and he took us down to longview for a dealer's auction we bought a little 1940 ford for
00:16:55.540 400 and that was our transportation almost to the very end there and where did where did you sleep
00:17:02.960 like what what did you do for lodging uh let's see the most common way of sleeping was in the car
00:17:09.520 in the front we'd switch back and forth between the front seat and the back seat the back seat was
00:17:15.300 more comfortable it was a sedan as i should have pointed out anyhow as we were on the road if if we
00:17:22.400 spotted a haystack i preferred that pink having grown up on the farm knew about snakes in haystacks
00:17:32.040 but i wasn't that i wasn't that worried about them if there was a snake in one of the haystacks i
00:17:37.740 slept in we didn't bother each other there was a period when we were working at the uh grain elevator
00:17:45.040 in hush and kansas before both of us could get a room at the y pink managed to get in but they
00:17:51.000 they were short of rooms and for a week out there i slept out out outside town in the woods and i there
00:17:59.260 was one memorable experience i'll share with you i i we worked from seven at night to seven in the
00:18:05.380 morning on that grain elevator we'd come back in and i'd get some breakfast and i'd walk on out or
00:18:12.960 trot on out the edge of town out to the woods and find a place that was comfortable under the trees
00:18:18.760 out there and i'm i'd sleep from about oh nine in the morning about three in the afternoon something
00:18:25.820 that sort one afternoon i was asleep and i heard this voice in the distance
00:18:31.400 and i couldn't figure out what it was and as it came near it was some kid was yelling hey
00:18:39.140 charlie hey charlie come over here i see a dead man over here and i thought well i better let those
00:18:49.000 kids know that i'm i'm alive i raised up and i they were about what 50 yards away or so about i'm
00:18:57.040 guessing about 10 years old out exploring the woods i raised up and as as as i did that the one in the
00:19:04.920 lead says oh don't bother he ain't dead after all he was disappointed that the corpse had some life
00:19:12.940 in it anyhow that i guess that's enough about sleeping there was one time we slept in oak fields
00:19:18.180 out in south dakota but mainly it was the car so besides the grain elevators you spent some time
00:19:25.800 working at an alfalfa mill and can you tell us a little bit about that oh the alfalfa mill i think
00:19:32.080 i'm gonna hold on just a minute i i think that was uh i'm gonna paraphrase charles dickens here
00:19:41.380 it was the best of jobs it was the worst of jobs brett i'm i mean the best and it was
00:19:50.880 the worst it's certainly the most memorable the worst meaning it was the unhealthiest i i point out
00:19:57.740 in a book that it was unhealthier than working in the heat drinking barbed wire fences in east texas
00:20:04.760 and bailing hay plowing and wheat fields in oklahoma or trimming hams for armor's meat packing plant in
00:20:12.860 kansas city even hell it was unhealthier i i think if less dangerous than what i'd done working on a
00:20:21.840 maintenance crew for long star steel company not to mention the work we had uh done on the grain
00:20:28.540 elevators but it was something very special uh i've got to point out these alfalfa mills are not the
00:20:36.720 same today as they were back uh 70 years ago this is out this one out uh about seven miles west of
00:20:46.520 larnet kansas was uh a mill where they bring in the cut alfalfa and they bring in the they harvested
00:20:54.760 alfalfa and trucks from the fields and they dump it into the top of this building they've got there
00:21:01.340 this structure where it's chopped up and dried and it comes down through pipes down to the floor
00:21:08.840 that are bifurcated and here's what we encountered on the floor we worked down at the bottom each of
00:21:17.960 these three major funnels or pipes with a chopped and dried alfalfa which was intended for a stock feed
00:21:27.240 by the way each was bifurcated and there were a lot of gunny sacks you put a gunny sack on one of those
00:21:36.200 on one opening there and you you fill up that gunny sack to approximately 100 pounds and then you
00:21:44.240 flip over the lever to another gunny sack while you take this one that's full you take it off take
00:21:51.660 it over to scales weight up to exactly 100 pounds there's a shovel there and there's a barrel that
00:21:58.140 you can either get a little more out of put some in to make sure you've got exactly 100 pounds in each
00:22:03.800 of those gunny sacks you sew up the gunny sack you put it on a dolly till you get three or four
00:22:09.940 stack there then you take the dolly out to the deck outside there's a box car out there and you
00:22:17.960 stack those gunny sacks up to the top of the of the box car there now that's pretty strenuous work
00:22:26.120 both of us were champion weightlifters so uh that wasn't much of a job i wasn't too much but what was
00:22:33.460 really the toughest was the air it was filled with this green dust and the dust got into your eyes
00:22:41.720 and your ears and your nose and your lungs and i don't know why in the world they didn't provide
00:22:49.360 some kind of mass for us but they didn't and there's supposed to be six men working at that eight
00:22:57.400 hours around the clock on three shifts and they couldn't keep them there guys either quit because
00:23:05.200 they of the work or they quit because they got sick pink and i finally toward the end of that i think
00:23:12.340 was about three weeks there they had only the two of us working around the clock and we tried to split
00:23:18.780 up the time so that we'd be just one man doing that and the other one tried to get a little rest and
00:23:24.380 food but that was the most uh horrendous job that we had and i'd say the healthiest as a matter of
00:23:31.380 fact think who was so strong actually got some kind of dust pneumonia or whatever that he it took him
00:23:39.080 months later to shake but that was uh as i say uh the most memorable experience what we had there in
00:23:46.340 the alfalfa mill nowadays they don't have that they we went back 37 years later to that site and then
00:23:54.180 the mill had been torn down we noticed uh several miles from there there was another mill but they
00:23:59.380 make the tablets they make the alfalfa feed now into tablets without all that dust in the air we're
00:24:05.940 going to take a quick break for you work from our sponsors yeah so you and pink end up in kansas city
00:24:10.600 what did you do for work there kansas city we had originally by the time we finished our work at the
00:24:18.140 alfalfa mill we saw it was too late to go up to canada and build a cabin out in the wilderness
00:24:26.560 that the snows would set in before we could really get all that done so we decided we'd go back to
00:24:33.300 we'd go to kansas city and uh see if we could you know get some jobs there until the next spring when
00:24:41.440 the weather warmed up then we'd go back to uh to our odyssey and going up to canada and uh uh pink
00:24:50.300 uh had he'd been a foreign boy and he'd gone into the army when he was 17 he'd never really had a
00:24:57.460 job in the city so he had some problems getting a job in kansas city now i was okay i was lucky in that
00:25:07.660 during the war i had worked the boy scout counter at tach kettinger this big department store in
00:25:14.180 dallas so i managed to get a job at peck's department store in kansas city selling luggage and men's
00:25:20.820 accessories which was okay except that i didn't get but about twenty dollars a week after taxes
00:25:27.620 and after we'd been there a couple or more weeks uh pink hadn't been able to get a job i said look
00:25:34.780 buddy we can't get by on what i'm making here not to pay the rent here at the ymca and also feed
00:25:42.280 ourselves so we looked at the sunday edition of the kansas city star and we saw an ad in there
00:25:49.800 that said salesman wanted working conditions uh very good and uh pay is is fine etc etc and and put the
00:26:02.000 address of the place for us to uh apply and uh it turned out that that the address was
00:26:11.240 the same address as the famous folly theater in kansas city uh which has now been restored by the way as a
00:26:21.560 historic landmark i mean it had been a site for famous comedians like the marx brothers bob hope
00:26:28.960 jack johnson and jack dempsey had put on exhibitions there frank james the brother of jesse had been a
00:26:39.520 ticket collector or something at the folly theater in his history now by the time we went there it was
00:26:46.600 on the skids it was just a burlesque theater wasn't nearly as fancy as it had been back in the
00:26:53.000 20s and 30s but we we interviewed for the job and the man said well you're going to be selling
00:27:02.060 some stuff during intermissions here between the uh the uh burlesque acts and what have you and
00:27:11.560 you've got uh you've got cold drinks to sell for 15 cents and you sell some candy that we've got here
00:27:22.940 for 25 cents a box and you also can sell this literature that we distribute for 25 cents a copy
00:27:36.660 well the literature as you can imagine was not the kind that you usually got on the newsstand back in
00:27:42.640 those days it was uh i think pretty tame compared to what's out there now uh very openly but back then
00:27:50.880 it was it was kind of forbidden stuff i can remember uh the salesman we'd go up and down the aisles
00:27:58.440 selling this stuff between the uh shows and we we would alternate on who sold the uh cold drinks and
00:28:07.580 who sold the candy and who sold the uh magazine and so i developed the spiel
00:28:14.320 when i was it was my turn to sell the magazines and i said uh ladies and gentlemen when when you get
00:28:25.380 this little magazine you let your conscience be your guide and then i'd say in a lower voice
00:28:32.180 if you don't have a conscience you won't need a guide and i got down to the front and i turned around
00:28:39.060 and looked up pink was selling cold drinks up in the balcony he was bent over the rail back and he
00:28:44.900 laughed and when we went up to the uh room uh we stayed in between uh uh shows or what have you
00:28:53.800 i said what the hell were you laughing at he said i was wondering what smu president uh humphrey lee would
00:29:00.560 have thought if he came in here and saw his outstanding senior man selling that that kind of stuff
00:29:06.960 i said pink i don't think either of us would have said anything at the time i think we'd have kept it
00:29:13.420 quiet anyhow i got to tell you this breath we we encountered virtually no meanness this whole time
00:29:21.500 and even in the burlesque show the stuff that was on the stage the strippers and what have you
00:29:27.420 was much tamer than then when there's open to public on tv and everything else out there today
00:29:33.620 the man who hired us uh when pink uh was not he never did quite recover from that
00:29:41.920 dust that he got at the alpha alpha mill and decided to go back to texas and get well down there
00:29:47.500 then he'd come on he'd come back to kansas city and we'd resume our trip when he got ready to go back
00:29:53.020 and told al the manager that he had to quit uh uh al himself reached in his pocket and pulled out a
00:30:02.640 ten dollar bill and gave it to him of course ten dollars meant more back in those days than now
00:30:07.120 but i'm just saying that uh throughout this adventure we encountered people who were really
00:30:12.500 decent and and caring anyhow so that was that was kansas city now i lucked out later on after pink
00:30:21.540 left i'm i think i've told you i said something in the book about uh my brief career in the ring
00:30:29.720 may we talk a little bit about that yeah talk about your prize fighting career i've been working
00:30:34.920 for pex department store only getting about twenty dollars a month but i managed to save up enough
00:30:40.580 finally there was a lovely young woman working uh ladies lingerie there at pex and so i saved up
00:30:48.760 enough to take her out on a date uh so i we went to see the um after having cokes and what have you
00:30:56.760 at the drugstore when we got off work we went to see the movie champion would just come out champion
00:31:02.840 with kirk douglas it's a great movie i think it's probably the best movie he ever made anyhow
00:31:08.280 and if you know much about it he's he's a boxer there who becomes world champion etc etc i won't go
00:31:15.960 into the plot for you but a terrific movie and we're coming out of the movie and my date named
00:31:22.760 mary she said you know earl you look kind of like kirk douglas so you know as my mom used to tell me i
00:31:32.840 was full of it back in those days full of myself and i decided well shoot maybe i i can do a little
00:31:41.360 boxing myself and they had a boxing team at the y and i trained up there finally uh my coach jules
00:31:50.720 snyder said uh you know uh you might like to uh uh might like me to enter you in on one of the bouts
00:32:00.640 next tuesday now back in those days i don't know how it is now but in those days kansas city was
00:32:05.960 was big on amateur boxing every tuesday night in the college sim the main auditorium downtown
00:32:13.880 they'd have these amateur fights about half a dozen of them amateurs now i've got to tell you they
00:32:20.760 weren't strictly amateur because uh under the cover they paid you 10 bucks to fight up there so i could
00:32:28.360 claim a brief career as a semi-pro if i wanted to the first fight i was mashed up against a young
00:32:35.160 fellow that had very little more experience than i did and i won the fight and boy i was so proud of
00:32:41.240 myself so jules snyder the coach says earl you you've got a a natural straight left he says uh you're
00:32:50.120 going to do well i'm gonna put you in the ring with uh billy here billy was a kid who'd had about 27 28
00:32:58.440 fights well i thought you know he's a fancy dan but i might get lucky and win this fight too
00:33:06.120 turned out that i didn't get lucky and he beat the hell out of me and i was a mess when i i didn't
00:33:13.000 realize at the time because my adrenaline was flowing but when i got down afterwards looking
00:33:18.120 myself in the mirror i was shocked and i mean my my right eye he had thumbed me in the right eye and
00:33:24.600 it was swollen shut my right ear was uh swelling and blue the whole side of my right face was turning
00:33:32.440 blue and i chipped the tooth and what have you uh wasn't wearing a mouthpiece back then because it
00:33:38.840 was i thought it was strictly for fun it occurred to me you know this is not fun at all these guys out
00:33:43.960 to hurt me i better stick to weight lifting but i couldn't get i by the way i didn't mention i'd
00:33:50.200 quit my job at uh pex just the day before because i'd gone in and asked the woman for a raise she said
00:33:56.760 well you're not ready for it yet and again i was uh that hit my ego so i said well you can have the job
00:34:03.720 i figured i'd get another job easy enough but looking the way i did after that fight it wasn't easy i went
00:34:09.080 around to several places and and i explained i was a member of the ymca boxing team and they would say
00:34:14.920 well you know that's a great sport and we respect that we'll call you when we have an opening after
00:34:21.160 about a week of that i realized they weren't going to call at all i lucked out brett when i saw this ad
00:34:27.720 in the kansas city star uh armor's meat packing plant across the river over there and uh was looking for
00:34:35.800 somebody we're looking for help and by golly they didn't care how i looked they hired me to
00:34:41.160 work on the on the ham line trimming hams there and it was a lifesaver for me otherwise i'm not
00:34:48.120 sure how to got by much longer without uh without a job up there so that was my brief uh career as a
00:34:56.120 as a prize fighter and i've never regret leaving it we know now how much damage uh the blows to the head
00:35:03.160 do and i'll tell you this for a week after that second fight uh my headache so i knew that that
00:35:09.720 wasn't the best thing in the world for me so you didn't make it to canada did you think the trip was
00:35:15.160 a failure i never i hope i'm answering this correctly let me let me tell you that uh although we didn't make
00:35:24.440 it uh this was uh uh i call this let me put it this way i call this a happy failure
00:35:36.600 the two of us had no idea about what those dark frozen months of winter would be like up in the
00:35:43.240 canadian wilderness the good lord was with us and not letting us get up there i'm not sure what would
00:35:49.880 happen even so i say it was a happy failure because it was really a life-changing adventure
00:35:57.080 for me it not only provided me with the true glimpse of of american decency and holder wholesomeness but it
00:36:05.240 also proved to me that i could get by on my own without necessarily having to depend on family and
00:36:13.320 friends that's when i was up there in kansas city by myself after pink had gone back to east texas
00:36:20.120 so i i it was a wonderful adventure and i'll talk a little bit more about it maybe when
00:36:25.640 when we wrap this thing up if you like sure your road trip adventure went on about the same time
00:36:34.360 jack kerouac was going on his that inspired on the road how would you say your road trip
00:36:42.120 was different from kerouac's that's a great question uh uh brett it's right the heart of things
00:36:49.640 because kerouac was on the road at virtually the same time that pink and i were on the road
00:36:57.800 but his vision of america in his book his famous book it was very very different from ours
00:37:05.960 uh i don't know if you want to call it more cynical or whatever but it's interesting to me one of the
00:37:13.640 reasons i wanted to publish the farm music pink's manuscript and what i'd done with it was to show
00:37:22.280 that uh there was a different side to america back in the late 40s than the one that jack kerouac
00:37:29.480 presents his book i mean it's a great book i don't want to denigrate in any way but it was more relevant
00:37:36.920 to the 60s and the beat generation than than to mine i mean the kind of stuff that he encountered
00:37:45.720 uh we did not find at all for one thing he was in a different part of the country and most of the
00:37:52.600 time going from east to california i think he missed the true heart of america in states like
00:37:59.720 oklahoma and east and west texas kansas and south dakota he missed by and large the kind of people
00:38:07.720 we encountered this is a i think this is worth pointing out not once in all those adventures
00:38:14.520 that we had and we were with in some tough places not once did we encounter drugs now there's also a
00:38:23.000 different in time uh we went back to retrace some of the itinerary 37 years later i got to tell you
00:38:31.880 this and we went back to the site of the alfalfa mill out west of larnet kansas now they had torn down
00:38:39.560 the uh mill itself uh we were out there i was taking pictures of some guy in a pickup comes rolling across
00:38:47.640 the field gets out and said what are you fellas doing here and i explained we explained that we
00:38:53.400 had worked there uh at a particular time we were just coming back kind of you know refresh our
00:38:59.080 memories take some photographs i said what's the problem he said i thought you were out here making
00:39:04.360 a pickup this has become a drug drop in other words brett out in the middle of the prairies in
00:39:10.600 western kansas during that period of time note the transformation from what we'd encounter
00:39:17.320 and the uh what came later on after the 60s and what uh uh also i think back to jack carowak
00:39:27.080 all credit due to him he missed the kind of uh men that we worked with so much work with their hands
00:39:34.280 in the fields and on the farms and what have you but the kind of guys that emerson calls uh they had
00:39:42.040 what emerson called simplicity of character that doesn't mean simplicity of mind but these guys had
00:39:48.840 a kind of intelligence and common sense and integrity that is special to men that work close
00:39:55.480 to the earth i think and as a result i i developed a deep and abiding respect for both the men and the
00:40:04.440 women that make life so much easier for the rest of us and one of those of us who take so many of
00:40:11.800 our basic necessities as well as our modern day luxuries for granted anyhow uh i think i hope that
00:40:19.160 answers my your question about jack carowak how did this trip influence the rest of your life well i
00:40:26.920 call it a live uh life uh changing experience for me uh of course the world has changed so much since
00:40:35.720 then i i i have not been the same since then i felt that i came of age in fact quite literally i i was 21
00:40:47.720 years old and as i said a little bit earlier in our discussion here i i found a part of the world
00:40:55.000 that has uh i think made an influence made a terrific influence on me a very different kind of world than
00:41:03.800 the academic world or even the business world or what have you and uh it just uh it's something
00:41:11.560 i have said at one point uh that those musical notes from the foreign music become a part of me
00:41:20.920 forever since that adventure i wouldn't trade it for anything did it influence your your career to
00:41:28.280 become a jack london scholar yes and no i mean mainly no i think brett in that uh uh i hadn't really
00:41:37.960 got i hadn't got really involved in jack london until i was in the navy later on and read that
00:41:45.800 same book that influenced pink lindsey he's the one that told me to read martin eden i was on a
00:41:51.320 weekend pass from uh u.s naval training center in bainbridge maryland up and i was up in manhattan
00:41:59.080 and browsing the newsstand and saw a paperback edition of martin even i said well i gotta check this
00:42:05.400 out this is something that my buddy pink uh uh said i had to read of course at the time he told
00:42:11.560 me that when i was in college i had other interests mainly extracurricular anyhow i bought a 25-cent
00:42:17.720 copy of martin eden and started reading it on the bus back to the base i got back to the base and i was
00:42:24.920 so caught up in it i turned on my flashlight and finished reading it that night in my bunk and that's
00:42:30.520 what really determined me if i ever went back to get a doctorate i was going to do my work on jack
00:42:36.200 london and that was the defining thing maybe in a deeper sense unconsciously that trip influenced me
00:42:43.320 because of the fact that london uh had been such an adventurer he was uh what i and if you give me a
00:42:53.000 let me plug my biographies what we uh we call a seeker he was he was motivated by that
00:42:59.480 deep uh seeking drive one of us that is along there with the drive for food and sex and and what have
00:43:08.840 you do you think it's possible for young people to go on an adventure like yours today uh it's possible
00:43:18.760 i think maybe but much more difficult for example i wouldn't i wouldn't want to see my sons as young
00:43:26.520 guys out on the road hitchhiking with all the craziness and the drugs and what have you out there
00:43:33.560 um i mentioned the deal and and learning the alfalfa fields out there and what have you
00:43:41.560 uh i think you know uh it's possible nowadays for young guys to have adventures and i think that
00:43:50.440 if they can get out there and i've got a grandson and who who climbs mountains for example out in
00:43:58.760 colorado he has he's uh i think done some traveling but most of it's been in the car i think as i say
00:44:05.800 it's possible it's just uh it's not as easy now the jobs for example that we were able to get out there
00:44:12.760 i don't think that they're as readily as available as they were 70 years ago do you have any parting
00:44:20.280 words of advice for young men listening to this show based on your experience with the far music
00:44:28.600 uh bear with me i may this may sound a little bit like a sermon or something but uh it may i don't
00:44:37.080 want to sound like a bunch of cliches but i talked about that seeking drive that we have there are
00:44:43.480 all kinds of adventures uh not just physical but intellectual and spiritual i don't think we uh we
00:44:53.560 should ever give up on that on that kind of seeking and adventuring of course after you get married and
00:45:00.520 have a family you've got to kind of modify the kind of adventuring you're going to do but it's still
00:45:06.680 possible to say not only uh physical but but uh intellectual and uh adventures of the mind and
00:45:15.560 spirit i would say even jack london toward the end of his career discovered the works of uh carl
00:45:23.320 young and told his wife i'm standing on the edge of the world it's a new and wonderful terrible i'm
00:45:28.520 almost afraid look over into it so he was still seeking there toward the end of his life i if i had a
00:45:36.440 i had to give some uh uh advice and say again bear with me if it sounds too much like a sermon i'd say
00:45:44.840 look to guys out there look guys you're a vital part of the magic chain of humanity
00:45:52.120 you're blessed with a a unique identity special gift and i make the most of this wonderful
00:46:01.480 adventure we call life and i want to i want to emphasize celebrate your manhood resist all the
00:46:09.800 current socio-political pressures to deprive you of your unique identity as a man
00:46:18.120 uh this is your own special god-given gift and i'm saying celebrate it while you can
00:46:25.720 well earl that was fantastic thank you so much for your time it's been a pleasure
00:46:30.920 it's been a great experience for me and i appreciate you brett my guest name is earl labor
00:46:35.480 he's the author of the book the far music it's available on amazon.com also check out his biography
00:46:40.280 on jack london it's called jack london a life great biography if you're interested in that guy also
00:46:45.000 check out our show notes at aom.is far music where you can find links to resources we can delve deeper into this topic
00:47:04.200 well that wraps up another edition of the art of manliness podcast for more manly tips and advice
00:47:08.280 make sure to check out the art of manliness website at artofmanliness.com if you enjoy the show
00:47:12.040 you got something out of it i'd appreciate it if you give us a review on itunes or stitcher it helps
00:47:15.480 out a lot as always thank you for your continued support and until next time this is brett mckay
00:47:19.160 telling you to stay manly