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The Cowboy Image and the Growth of Western Music

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Bill C. Malone and Tracey Laird | Country Music USA | University of Texas Press | June 2018 | 25 minutes (6,531 words)

The emergence of the western image in country music was probably inevitable. Long before the process of commercialization began, the cowboy had been the object of unparalleled romantic adulation and interest. Given the pejorative connotations that clung to farming and rural life, the adoption of cowboy clothing and western themes was a logical step for the country singer.

The increased emphasis on western themes and attitudes appeared unsurprisingly in the westernmost southern states ─ Louisiana, Oklahoma, Texas ─ and in California. In these areas, country music assumed forms differing from those in the more easterly southern states. Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Texas, although southern in traditional orientation, embodied significantly different elements. All three were touched by the oil boom of the early twentieth century, and each possessed population groups that stood apart culturally while simultaneously influencing the dominant “Anglo” element of the state. Oklahoma and Texas were settled, for the most part, by former residents of the older southern states, who had brought with them their values, traditions, and institutions. Louisiana, on the other hand, can be perceived as a land of at least three great cultures: a Roman Catholic, “Latin” culture in the South; an “Anglo,” Protestant culture in the north; and an African American culture whose influence could be felt throughout the state. Immigrants brought slaves and the cotton culture to all parts of the Southwest, making Texas and Louisiana parts of the southern economic and political orbit. They also transported their evangelical Protestantism to southwestern soil and brought with them many features of their folk heritage. Some of the old British ballads survived the westward migration, although they had lost many of their former characteristics. In some Texas communities, such as those found in the Big Thicket, a heavily forested area in the eastern part of the state, old ballads and old styles of singing endured well into the twentieth century. Many of the East Texas communities were, and remain, replicas of the older southern environment. And, in many of them, folk traditions died slowly.

Listen to music writer Will Hermes’ interview with Bill Malone and Tracey Laird on the Longreads Podcast here (read as transcript).

Texas folk music, then, was basically southern derived. Texas rural musicians used instruments common to the rest of the South, sang in styles similar to those of other rural southerners, frequently attended house parties where old-time fiddlers held sway, and learned to read music at the shape-note singing schools. But despite its close cultural affiliation with the South, Texas had a culture all its own ─ a culture produced by the mingling of diverse ethnic strains: southern “Anglo,” black, German and Central European (especially prevalent throughout the southern part of the state), Mexican, and Louisiana Cajun (in the area extending from Beaumont to Houston). A passion for dancing was common among all these groups, and in this heterogeneous society, musical styles and songs flowed freely from one group to another, modifying the old southern rural styles. While rural music was prevalent and pervasive, it differed substantially from that produced in the Southeast or in the Deep South.

The discovery of oil at Spindletop, near Beaumont, in 1901 was the first of a series of finds in southeastern Texas, southwestern Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Arkansas in the years extending up through World War I. The discovery of the great East Texas oil field in the early 1930s, along with the rapid industrialization that began during World War II, further set Texas apart from the other southern states. While these factors contributed to Texas’s uniqueness, they are probably less important than the fact that it was also part of the West. In fact, to most Americans, Texas was and is the West. And this West was a glorious land peopled by cowboys.

The romantic concept of the West, shared by most Americans, has a history virtually as old as the nation itself. James Fenimore Cooper’s early novels describing the restorative qualities of the frontier were not substantially different, nor less romantic, than the themes emphasized later in Bret Harte’s stories, in the western “dime novels,” or in such books as Owen Wister’s The Virginian. Thus, the cowboy and the West had been bathed in romance long before Hollywood and the television industry began their exploitations of the theme. The American people also had long demonstrated a general interest in the songs of the cowboy ─ beginning with Nathan Howard Thorp’s Songs of the Cowboys, 1908, and John A. Lomax’s Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, 1910 (as a matter of fact, as early as 1907, when “San Antonio” appeared, Tin Pan Alley tunesmiths had experimented with “cowboy” themes). Although a few concert-musicians such as Oscar Fox (from Burnet, Texas) and David Guion (from Ballinger, Texas) made classical arrangements of a few cowboy songs, the western theme did not make any significant impact on American music until the 1930s. Guion’s version of “Home on the Range,” first performed in 1930 in a New York play called “Prairie Echoes,” became the most popular arrangement of the song and was said, perhaps apocryphally, to be President Franklin Roosevelt’s favorite song. Such songs became so widely circulated in the 1930s that even Tin Pan Alley reverberated with the melodies of the range. The farther Americans became removed from the cowboy past, the more intense became their interest in cowboy songs and lore. Hillbilly singers and musicians did much to implant the romantic cowboy image in the minds of their American audiences.

Before the 1930s, a few musicians recorded songs that genuinely reflected the cowboy heritage. The concert singer Bentley Ball ─ who did many programs of patriotic and traditional songs, many of them in colleges ─ recorded “The Dying Cowboy” and “Jesse James” for Columbia in 1919. Charles Nabell, in November 1924, recorded some cowboy songs for Okeh, along with other types of traditional material. Several of the early cowboy singers came from Texas, and their songs, for the most part, reflected genuine cowboy experience. Carl Sprague, for example, may have done most to generate an immediate interest in the recorded songs of the cowboy. He grew up on a South Texas ranch near Alvin where he learned many of the songs (most of them from his cowboy uncle) that he later recorded for Victor. His 1925 recordings of cowboy songs — topped off by the immensely popular “When the Work’s All Done This Fall” — mark him as one of America’s first singing cowboys. While attending Texas A&M, Vernon Dalhart’s success as a singer of traditional songs convinced Sprague that a similar market for cowboy singers might exist. He traveled to New York and had a successful audition with Victor Records; his earliest recordings had a sound very similar to that of Dalhart, including guitar and studio violin. Singing, however, was never more than a hobby with Sprague, and aside from his recordings, he made few commercial appearances. For many years he was on the coaching staff at Texas A&M, and, in addition, he attained the rank of major in the United States Army.

The romantic concept of the West, shared by most Americans, has a history virtually as old as the nation itself.

Jules Verne Allen, on the other hand, had actually experienced the rugged life of a working cowboy before he embarked on his career as a radio singer. Born in Waxahachie, Texas, Allen began working cattle in Jack County, west of Fort Worth, at the age of ten. From 1893 to 1907 he worked as a rough string rider and bronco buster from the Rio Grande to the Montana line. Unlike Sprague, he used cowboy music as the basis for a professional career. During the 1920s and 1930s, Allen sang over numerous radio stations, including WOAI in San Antonio, where he performed as “Longhorn Luke.” Like most of the pioneer recording performers of the 1920s, Allen and Sprague drew most of their material from turn-of-the-century cowboy life, although some of their songs were learned directly from the Lomax collection.

Other cowboy singers of the early commercial period varied widely in the amount of actual range experience they possessed. The Cartwright Brothers (Bernard and Jack) grew up in Boerne, Texas, directly on the route of “the long drive” that proceeded on to Kansas. Essentially a fiddle band, the Cartwrights performed a variety of songs. Their version of “Texas Rangers,” however ─ marked by Bernard’s haunting fiddle ─ is one of the greatest performances of a cowboy song heard on early commercial records. Carmen William “Curley” Fletcher, from California, was a rodeo performer and itinerant hawker of songs long before he made any commercial recordings. His greatest claim to fame came through his writing in 1915 of the poem that became the basis for “The Strawberry Roan,” which he sold on broadside sheets. The song became one of the most popular western numbers, performed usually with a chorus added by the California radio singers Fred Howard and Nat Vincent. At least a couple of the pioneer cowboy singers, Goebel Reeves and Harry McClintock, were southerners whose wanderlust drew them west, where they worked at a wide variety of occupations. Both men, for example, spent some time in the famous radical labor union the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, or Wobblies).

Our knowledge of the otherwise shadowy figure of Goebel Reeves comes from the pioneering research done by Fred Hoeptner. Known as “the Texas Drifter,” Reeves was born in Sherman, Texas, in 1899. Before his death in California in 1959, he had enjoyed a varied career that led him across the United States and around the world. Although he came from a respectable middle-class family (his father served in the Texas legislature), Reeves deliberately chose the life of a hobo. During the course of his wanderings, he enlisted in the army, saw front-line service in World War I, worked as a merchant seaman, became active in the IWW, toured the vaudeville circuit, performed on radio, and recorded under several names for such companies as Okeh and Brunswick. In his recording career as a singer and yodeler ─ he claimed to have taught Jimmie Rodgers the yodeling style in the early 1920s while living in New Orleans ─ Reeves introduced some of the most interesting examples of both cowboy and hobo songs found in American music. These included the well-known “Hobo’s Lullaby” (which he claimed to have written), “The Hobo and the Cop,” “Railroad Boomer,” and the cowboy songs “Bright Sherman Valley” and “The Cowboy’s Prayer.”

Harry McClintock was as well traveled as Reeves, having also been a merchant seaman, a soldier, and a hobo. Born in Knoxville, Tennessee, he roamed widely throughout the United States and became a member of the IWW in the early twentieth century. Because of his musical talents, McClintock was a welcome addition to the Wobblies, who had a well-known fondness for singing and whose Little Red Songbook became virtually the bible for labor/protest singers in America. McClintock’s claim that he wrote “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum” and “Big Rock Candy Mountain,” two of the world’s most famous hobo songs, has never been seriously challenged. Once he settled down from his wanderings, McClintock began a career as a radio cowboy singer as early as 1925 on KFRC in San Francisco. “Haywire Mac,” as he was often called, also recorded for Victor from 1927 to 1931. Along with superbly performed cowboy songs such as “Sam Bass,” “Jesse James,” and “Texas Rangers,” McClintock’s labor songs make him one of the important progenitors of western music.

John White and Otto Gray contributed to the shaping of western music by presenting it widely to a national audience. White was an unlikely “westerner,” hailing from Washington, DC. However, he was the first person to introduce cowboy songs on radio to a New York audience (on NBC from 1927 to 1936). He also recorded cowboy songs, as well as hillbilly material, from 1929 to 1931, under several pseudonyms including “the Lonesome Cowboy.” White specialized in the history of cowboy songs, and over the years he did more than any other person to describe the origins of the ballads, and he dispelled much of the romantic claptrap that had gathered around them.

Otto Gray, a prosperous rancher from near Stillwater, Oklahoma, pioneered in the commercialization of cowboy music. In about 1923, he assumed the leadership of a string band that earlier had been composed of real cowboys ─ the McGinty Cowboys (named for Billy McGinty, an Oklahoma rodeo performer). Gray’s group had the distinction of being one of the few country groups publicized in Billboard, although Gray paid for most of the advertising. From 1928 to 1932, Gray and his Oklahoma Cowboys made a tour of radio stations throughout the country and performed on the northeastern RKO vaudeville circuit. Momie Gray (Otto’s wife) was the featured singer of the organization, specializing in sentimental songs. The Oklahoma Cowboys were a highly professional group that possessed most of the characteristics of slick show-business organizations. A special publicity man traveled in advance of the group, and appearances on radio stations provided further exposure. Two agencies, the Weber-Simon Agency in New York and the William Jacobs Agency in Chicago, handled the group’s RKO bookings. The Gray performers, dressed in plain, western-style clothing, traveled in Gray’s $20,000 custom-built automobile, which was wired for sound reproduction and had a radio receiver and transmitter.

If Otto Gray contributed significantly to the commercialization of “western” music, Jimmie Rodgers played an equally important role in fusing it with country music. As discussed earlier, Rodgers spent the last few years of his life in Texas and conducted many of his most successful tours there. He took great pride in the Texas heritage and the romantic cowboy past. The modern concepts of the “singing cowboy” and of “western” music may very well date back directly to Rodgers.

Scores of singers who modeled themselves after Jimmie Rodgers emerged in the 1930s, and most of them gave themselves “cowboy” titles and dressed in western attire. Young Hank Snow, for example, in far-off Nova Scotia, dressed in cowboy regalia and called himself “the Yodeling Ranger.” In even more remote Australia, Robert William Lane performed under the name of Tex Morton, described himself as “the Boundary Rider,” and sang cowboy songs with a bizarre, trilling yodel about both the Australian bush and the Texas Plains. Others, like Ernest Tubb, included few cowboy songs in their repertories but wore cowboy boots and ten-gallon hats. Since the western attraction was irresistible, even young hillbilly singers from the Deep South or from the southeastern mountains, whose associations with cowboys came only through story and song, embraced the western image and imagined themselves “way out west in Texas for the roundup in the spring.”

Perhaps because of Rodgers’s close association with Texas, many of the successful Texas hillbilly performers ─ Ernest Tubb, Lefty Frizzell, Floyd Tillman, Bob Wills, Tommy Duncan ─ credited Jimmie Rodgers as their inspiration. One of the most important of these individuals, and the one who completed the “romantic westernizing” process begun by Rodgers, was Orvon Gene Autry. Autry owed most of his initial success to the fact that he could perform Rodgers’s repertory in Rodgers’s yodeling style. Autry was born on a horse farm near Tioga, Texas, on September 29, 1907, but moved to Oklahoma with his parents while in his teens. Although his father was a horse trader, one finds that Gene experienced little of the cattle ranch life that his promotional material later stressed. At any rate, he left the “ranching” life as quickly as he could, working as a railroad telegrapher and singing at every opportunity.

According to a much-repeated story, confirmed by Autry himself, Will Rogers inspired his decision to become a professional musician. One day in 1927 the great humorist came to Chelsea, Oklahoma, where Autry was working as a telegrapher for the St. Louis and Frisco Railroad, heard the young man singing and strumming his guitar, and strongly encouraged him to go to New York and become a professional. Autry’s first trip to the big city in 1927 was unsuccessful, but he returned to Tulsa and got a job on KVOO as “the Oklahoma Yodeling Cowboy.” Returning to New York in 1929, he made his first records for Victor, accompanied by the Marvin Brothers, Johnny and Frankie. In December of the same year, Autry began a crucial association with Arthur Satherley, who recorded him for the American Record Company (ARC), producer of records for chain stores and for Sears. It was through the association with the Sears Conqueror label that Autry made it to WLS and the National Barn Dance.

In Chicago after 1931, Autry was an immediate success. His appearances on the Barn Dance and on his own radio program, Conqueror Record Time, made him one of the most popular performers in WLS history. His records, released on Sears labels, were those most prominently displayed in the Sears-Roebuck catalogue. As a result of his growing popularity, a number of Gene Autry songbooks and guitar instruction books began to appear in the early 1930s. An ad for a Gene Autry “Roundup” Guitar, priced at $9.95, reminded the reader that Autry had become a famous performer “simply because he learned to play a guitar while on the ranch.” Autry’s promotional mentors, Art Satherley and Ann Williams of the WLS production staff, capitalized on the “western” motif and advertised him as a singing cowboy long before the bulk of his recorded repertory came to include western numbers.

With Autry ensconced as a singing movie cowboy, hillbilly music now had a new medium through which to popularize itself.

In his early years as a professional singer, and on through the WLS period from 1931 to 1934, Autry remained a hillbilly singer, only rarely singing anything of a western variety. In both song selection and in style of performance, he revealed his indebtedness to the southern rural tradition. His Jimmie Rodgers imitations were among the best in country music, and his own “compositions” (written or cowritten with people like Jimmie Long) included such songs as “A Gangster’s Warning,” “A Hillbilly Wedding in June,” “Gosh, I Miss You All the Time,” and “My Old Pal of Yesterday.” In 1931, he recorded one of the biggest-selling hits in hillbilly music’s then-short history, “That Silver Haired Daddy of Mine,” recorded as a duet with the song’s co-composer, Jimmie Long. Autry’s many and varied recorded selections even included at least one labor song: “The Death of Mother Jones,” recorded on at least seven labels, which applauded the life of the famous and radical labor leader. While the song seemed rather remote from the type one would expect from a cowboy singer, it nevertheless reflected the passion for social and economic justice that many people felt during these Depression years.

Autry’s success on the Chicago radio stations and on record labels gained him in 1934 the position that made him the best-known cowboy in the United States and one of the most famous hillbilly singers. In that year, he arrived in Hollywood and began his career as the “Nation’s Number One Singing Cowboy.” Beginning with a small part in Ken Maynard’s In Old Santa Fe, he then starred for thirteen episodes in a strange cowboy/science-fiction serial called The Phantom Empire. Autry went on to a featured role in 1935 in Tumbling Tumbleweeds, a film that also included his old sidekick from Chicago days, Lester Alvin “Smiley” Burnette. In the following decades, he made more than ninety movies for Republic, Columbia, and Mascot, eighty-one of which included the multitalented Burnette, who usually played a bumbling character, Frog Millhouse. While becoming one of the most popular and wealthy actors in Hollywood, Autry also created the stereotype of the heroic cowboy who was equally adept with gun and guitar. Autry was not the first individual to sing in a western movie ─ Ken Maynard had done so as early as 1930 ─ but he was the first to institutionalize the phenomenon. With Autry ensconced as a singing movie cowboy, hillbilly music now had a new medium through which to popularize itself. The silver screen further romanticized the cowboy and helped shape the public idea of western music.

After signing his Hollywood contract, Autry made a radical shift in his repertory from “country” themes to “western” motifs. Instead of singing songs about the mountains, he came increasingly to perform songs with such titles as “Ridin’ Down the Canyon,” “The Round-up in Cheyenne,” and “Empty Cot in the Bunkhouse.” Both in Autry’s singing and in the instrumentation that accompanied him, one hears a distinctly measurable change in the records he made from 1929 to 1939. As the one-time hillbilly singer reached out to a larger audience, he smoothed out his presentation of material with a lower vocal pitch, well-rounded tones, and honey-coated articulation. Instrumentally, Autry’s sound exhibited a similar evolution, particularly after the violinist Carl Cotner became his musical director. Soft guitars, muted violins, a melodious but unobtrusive steel guitar, an accordion, and occasionally even horns could be heard as background instrumentation, as he and his directors sought a sound that would give no offense to America’s broad urban middle class. Whatever vocal sound was featured, however, Autry demonstrated a mastery of it. No country singer has ever shown more versatility.

Autry’s popularity inspired other movie companies to present their own versions of the singing cowboy. In searching for likely candidates, the companies usually delved into the ranks of country music, acquiring acts that had already established themselves on hillbilly radio shows or on record labels. Following Smiley Burnette, the Light Crust Doughboys became the first country group to join Autry in a movie (Oh, Susanna!). Some Autry sidemen went on to become important entertainment personalities in their own right. Johnny Bond, Jimmy Wakely, and Dick Reinhart, for example, came to Hollywood in 1940 (as the Jimmy Wakely Trio) and joined Autry’s Melody Ranch radio show in September of that year. Reinhart became one of the early exponents of the honky-tonk style, with songs like “Fort Worth Jail” and “Truck Driver’s Coffee Stop.” Wakely eventually starred in many movies of his own, became one of country music’s smoothest singers, and made several seminal recordings, such as “One Has My Name (The Other Has My Heart)” (one of the first successful “cheating” songs in country music). Bond remained on the Melody Ranch program until it ended in 1956, playing the role of a comic sidekick and opening the show each Sunday with the bass guitar run introduction to “Back in the Saddle Again.” Bond also became one of country music’s greatest songwriters, creating such songs as “Cimarron” (a song about a small river in Oklahoma, and performed by all western groups), “I’ll Step Aside,” “Old Love Letters,” and “I Wonder Where You Are Tonight” (now a standard in both bluegrass and mainstream country music).

A long line of hillbilly singers made only occasional appearances in western movies, usually as supporting actors for such leading cowboy stars as Charles Starrett and Johnny Mack Brown. The Sons of the Pioneers appeared in numerous movies, while Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys were in about eight. A few singers, such as Ernest Tubb, Jimmie Davis, and Bill Callahan, made only rare appearances.

Other singers, however, became leading men and posed at least modest challenges to Autry’s dominance. Atlanta-born Ray Whitley, the writer of “Back in the Saddle Again” and the designer of one of country music’s most popular guitars, the Gibson SJ-200, became a movie star in 1936 after an earlier successful career in New York as a cowboy singer. Tex Ritter also began his movie career in 1936, and, in the fifty-six movies that he eventually made, he became the most believable of all the singing cowboys. The most successful challenge to Autry, though, came from Roy Rogers, who signed with Republic in 1937. His visibility in American public life would last, because of television, well into the 1960s. The singing cowboy genre also persisted in American movies on into the 1950s, with Arizona-born Rex Allen being its chief exponent after 1949. In many ways, this last singing cowboy was the best singer of them all. Allen’s rich voice ranged from a deep bass to a sweeping tenor ─ a sound that almost no other country singer could equal.

Largely as a result of Hollywood exploitation, the concept of “western music” became fixed in the public mind. After the heyday of Gene Autry, the term “western” came to be applied even to southern rural music by an increasing number of people, especially by those who were ashamed to use the pejorative term “hillbilly.” Not only did the public accept the projection, but even most hillbilly singers became fascinated with the western image and eventually came to believe their own symbols. Autry was the first of a long line of country singers who clothed themselves in tailored cowboy attire; in the following decades, the costuming became increasingly elaborate and gaudy, with the brightly colored, bespangled, and rhinestone-laden uniforms created by Nudie the Tailor (Nudie Cohn, born Nuta Kotlyarenko in the Ukraine in 1902) in Los Angeles being the most favored fare. Eventually, most country performers, whether they hailed from Virginia or Mississippi, adopted cowboy regalia–usually of the gaudy, dude cowboy variety.


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Along with the clothing, country bands and singers ─ particularly in the Southwest and on the West Coast ─ adopted cowboy titles. Singers with names like Tex, Slim, Hank, Red River Dave, the Utah Cowboy, and Patsy Montana, and groups with such titles as the Cowboy Ramblers, Riders of the Purple Sage, Radio Cowboys, Swift Jewel Cowboys, Lone Star Cowboys, and Girls of the Golden West (Dolly and Millie Good) abounded on radio stations (and record labels) all over the nation. Radio and record promoters, of course, were very much alive to the appeal of the western myth, and they often encouraged musicians to adopt appropriate western monikers. Millie and Dolly Good, for example, were farm girls from Illinois who sang and yodeled in sweet, close harmony. Their agent advised them to dress like cowgirls, gave them the romantic title Girls of the Golden West, and then, after scanning the map of western Texas, attached to their promotional literature the statement that they were born in Muleshoe, Texas. The Girls very carefully preserved this fiction to the end of their performing career.

Patsy Montana’s career was similarly shaped by romantic conceptions of the West. She was a singer and a fiddler from Arkansas named Rubye Blevins, but on the West Coast in the early 1930s, Stuart Hamblen renamed her Patsy Montana, and she thereafter cultivated the performing image of the cowgirl. Although much of her career saw her appearing as a “girl singer” with such groups as the Prairie Ramblers, Patsy made dramatic history in 1935 when “I Want to Be a Cowboy’s Sweetheart” became the first huge hit by a woman country singer and a virtuoso yodeling piece that still influences the style of women singers (Austin country-rock singer Marcia Ball, for example, made the song and yodel standard parts of her repertory in the late 1970s).

Many of the “western” entertainers performed cowboy songs, usually highly romanticized, but more often their titles and attire were the only ties they had with the “West.” Several musicians, however, stayed rather close to the cowboy repertory. Some of them had been performing long before Gene Autry achieved Hollywood fame, and many of them, such as “Haywire Mac” McClintock and the Crockett Family (John H. “Dad” Crockett and his five sons, originally from West Virginia), had performed on California radio stations since at least 1925. Other early California groups included Len Nash and his Original Country Boys, broadcasting from KFWB, Hollywood, as early as March 1926; Sheriff Loyal Underwood’s Arizona Wranglers; Charlie Marshall and his Mavericks; and perhaps the most important (and certainly the most interesting), the Beverly Hillbillies.

Largely as a result of Hollywood exploitation, the concept of “western music” became fixed in the public mind.

The Beverly Hillbillies were the brainchild of Glen Rice, station manager at KMPC in Los Angeles. Reversing the trend toward adoption of western names during the 1930s, Rice used the eastern moniker Hillbillies for the group of western musicians that he assembled around the accordion player Leo Mannes (renamed Zeke Manners) and conducted a ballyhoo campaign alleging that a group of strange and primitive musicians had been unearthed in the hills of Beverly. The band made its debut on KMPC on April 6, 1930, and remained a popular feature throughout the decade. Over the years the Hillbillies included several fine musicians, such as Manners, who had no background in country music but had been attracted to California because of the lure of Hollywood. A few Hillbillies were genuine country boys, such as the sky-high yodeler Elton Britt (James Britt Baker), who came from Arkansas in 1930, and Stuart Hamblen, who came from Texas in the same year. Britt went on to become one of country music’s most gifted yodelers (virtually the last of that once-hardy breed) and a leading soloist during the 1940s. Hamblen, the son of a Methodist minister in Abilene, Texas, was a fixture on West Coast radio from 1930 to the 1950s. He hosted his own shows in Hollywood after 1931, boosted the careers of other performers, wrote many of the most successful songs of the decade (including “My Mary,” “Texas Plains,” “Golden River,” and “My Brown-Eyed Texas Rose”), was the first country performer signed by Decca in 1934, and became sufficiently known to become a candidate for Congress in 1938.

The western group that ultimately became the most famous, and the most frequently emulated, was the Sons of the Pioneers. They sang virtually every type of country song and even ventured into popular music, but the majority of their melodies dealt with western themes. Perhaps more than any other group, they preserved a western repertory and exploited the romantic cowboy image. More “western” stylistically than any other group, they were among the least western in terms of origin. Bob Nolan (Robert Clarence Nobles) was born in New Brunswick, Canada, but he moved with his parents to Tucson at the age of fourteen. In Tucson he found himself fascinated with the desert, a feeling that never left him and eventually inspired some of country music’s greatest songs, such as “Cool Water,” “Tumbling Tumbleweeds,” and “At the Rainbow’s End.” Tim Spencer, also an outstanding songwriter, was born in Missouri but grew up in Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico. Roy Rogers came from southern Ohio.

The three musicians came to California in the early 1930s and soon fell into a pattern common to most country singers during the decade, moving from group to group before they formed their own organization. Roy Rogers, the prime organizer of the trio, was born Leonard Slye in Cincinnati, on November 5, 1911, but grew up on a small farm near Portsmouth, in southern Ohio. Here he garnered his earliest musical training from his Kentucky-born mother and his mandolin-and-guitar-playing father. In 1931 he and his father moved to Tulare, California, and worked as migratory fruit pickers. In the following three years, beginning with a duo called the Slye Brothers (Leonard and a cousin), he worked with several western-style groups until the Pioneer Trio was formed in 1933. Renamed the Sons of the Pioneers the following year, the trio soon became noted for their smooth, inventive harmonies and yodeling, and for the finely crafted songs that Nolan and Spencer created. They became so famous for their harmony that their instrumental accompaniment is often forgotten. Two extraordinarily talented brothers from Llano, Texas, Hugh and Karl Farr, joined them in 1934 and 1935. The Farrs were jazz-influenced country musicians whose progressive styles were sometimes obscured by the vocal emphasis of the Pioneers. Hugh Farr, who also sang a low-down bass with the group, was one of the hottest fiddlers of the period, and his brother, Karl, was a master of both the rhythm and single-string styles of guitar.

The Pioneers won extensive popularity on the West Coast with an early-morning radio program on KFWB in Hollywood, but 1936 proved to be their banner year. By this time their radio transcriptions were being widely circulated, and the group became a featured act, along with Will Rogers, at the Texas Centennial in Dallas. Leonard Slye left the group in 1937 after signing a movie contract with Republic Studios. At this point he changed his name, first to Dick Weston, and later to Roy Rogers. His performances after this time were made on an individual basis, and he eventually rivaled Gene Autry as America’s most popular singing cowboy (Rogers was also one of country music’s finest yodelers). He was replaced in the Sons of the Pioneers by Lloyd Perryman from Ruth, Arkansas, whose natural tenor was the first the group had ever had, and who gave them an even closer harmony than they had earlier possessed. The Sons of the Pioneers underwent numerous personnel changes after 1937 but have never disbanded. Their songs moved into the repertories of country singers everywhere, and their style of harmony was widely copied, most effectively by Foy Willing (originally Willingham) and the Riders of the Purple Sage, who appeared with Monte Hale and Roy Rogers in Republic Pictures from 1942 to 1952.

The flourishing singing cowboy industry inspired the emergence of songwriters, including two of country music’s finest ─ Fred Rose and Cindy Walker ─ who made their debuts as country composers in the 1940s when they wrote songs for movies (Rose for Autry, Walker for Bob Wills). The interest in western music in the 1930s, however, was not confined to country performers and their supporters. Writers from Tin Pan Alley also reacted to the western craze, and the entire nation was soon humming western-style tunes such as “Gold Mine in the Sky,” “There’s a Home in Wyoming,” and “I’m an Old Cowhand.” Some of these tunes were written by easterners who had never been near a cow, but the Happy Chappies at least lived in California in the midst of the Hollywood industry. The Chappies were a pop-singing duo named Nat Vincent and Fred Howard who wrote or arranged such songs as “When the Bloom Is on the Sage,” “Mellow Mountain Moon,” “My Pretty Quadroon,” and “Strawberry Roan” (the last a musical adaptation of Curley Fletcher’s earlier poem). The most successful of the western-oriented popular songwriters was a Bostonian, William J. (Billy) Hill. Hill’s birth and musical training gave no indication of his future success as a western songwriter. Born in Boston in 1899, he studied violin at the New England Conservatory of Music and performed for a short time with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. In 1916 he traveled west, riding the rails and working at odd jobs until he had seen most of the western states. He returned to New York in the late 1920s after becoming thoroughly acquainted with western life ─ including everything from camp cooking to cowpunching. In New York he worked as a doorman at a fashionable hotel and composed songs occasionally. Over the years his compositions ranged from popular melodies like “The Glory of Love” to hillbilly songs like “They Cut Down the Old Pine Tree” and “The Old Spinning Wheel.” His chief success, however, came with western-style songs like “Call of the Canyon,” which were distinguished for their beautiful melodies and for rhythms that suggested the gait of a horse. He experienced his most spectacular success in 1933 with “The Last Roundup,” the song that really awakened the general public to the romantic West while becoming the most popular tune in the country. Performed by both hillbilly and popular groups, its appeal may have stimulated a greater interest in the more “authentic” country and western material and ensured a greater national following for country music.

Most of the western bands in California and the Southwest used Billy Hill’s material, but his New York songwriting ventures were directed primarily at big-city popular-music audiences. Although country music has always encountered its coolest reception in the Northeast, particularly in the city of New York, country-style entertainers have always achieved some prominence there on local radio stations. Ethel Park Richardson, for example, did much to educate New Yorkers about the beauties of folk culture between 1933 and 1935 with her weekly dramatizations on WOR and the NBC Network. Each week she was assisted by such singers as Frank Luther, Carson Robison, and Tex Ritter as she dramatized a famous folk song. Luther and Robison had been in New York since the 1920s, but Ritter was one of several cowboy singers who kept New Yorkers range conscious during the mid-1930s. Others included Texas Jim Robertson, a deep-bass singer from Batesville, Texas; Zeke Manners and Elton Britt, who had moved from California; Dwight Butcher, a Jimmie Rodgers disciple from Tennessee; Ray Whitley, who sang regularly at the Stork Club and on WMCA; and Wilf Carter, the Nova Scotia yodeler who performed over CBS as Montana Slim.

The most singular of all the cowboy singers in New York, however, was Woodward Maurice “Tex” Ritter. Born in Murvaul, in deep East Texas, January 12, 1905, Ritter grew up far removed from the scene of much cowboy activity. He attended the University of Texas for five years (singing in the university glee club under the direction of Oscar Fox) and then went to Northwestern Law School for one year. Throughout his youth he had collected western and mountain songs, and therefore had a storehouse of interesting songs when he began singing on KPRC in Houston in 1929. In 1930, he joined a musical troupe on a series of one-night stands through the South and Midwest. By 1931, he had gone to New York, where he joined the Theatre Guild and began his acting career with a featured role in Green Grow the Lilacs (a short-lived play that eventually became the basis for the musical Oklahoma). With his thick Texas accent and storehouse of cowboy lore, Ritter quickly emerged as a New York sensation. He became greatly in demand for lecture recitals in eastern colleges on the cowboy and his song. During the fall of 1932, he was the featured singer with the Madison Square Garden Rodeo and from there went on to a recording contract with ARC and a program slot on WOR entitled The Lone Star Rangers, one of the first western radio shows ever featured in New York City. From 1932 to 1936, he appeared on other New York stations, including the WHN Barn Dance, where he acted as cohost with Ray Whitley. Then, inevitably, in 1936, he made the first of several movies, Song of the Gringo. Ritter, however, was not a cowboy, but was instead a very believable interpreter of cowboy songs. Impressionable easterners were easily convinced that he came, not from a small East Texas community and a college background, but from a working cattle ranch. And Tex very skillfully lived up to the part.

Tex Ritter’s exploitation of the western theme was typical of what was happening all over the United States in the mid-1930s. From New York to California, individuals responded to the western myth, and “cowboy” singers and groups sprang up in all sorts of unusual places. “Western” became a rival and often preferred term to “hillbilly” as a proper appellation for country music. It is easy to understand, of course, why “western” would be preferred to the seemingly disreputable backwoods term. “Western,” specifically, suggested a music that had been developed by cowboys out on the Texas Plains or in the High Sierras; more generally, it suggested a context that was open, free, and expansive. In short, the term fit the American self-concept.

***

Listen to music writer Will Hermes’ interview with Bill Malone and Tracey Laird on the Longreads Podcast here (read as transcript).

Excerpted from Country Music USA. Copyright ©1968 by the American Folklore Society. Copyright © 1985, 2002, 2010, 2018 by the University of Texas Press. All rights reserved.

One Dollar a Word? That’ll Be $28,000

NEW YORK, NY - OCTOBER 06: Carl Bernstein attends the 2017 New Yorker Festival - All The President's Reporters at SVA Theatre on October 6, 2017 in New York City. (Photo by Brad Barket/Getty Images for The New Yorker)

In October 1977, Carl Bernstein — then still basking in the post-Watergate glow (though, at the time, he had recently left the Washington Post) — wrote a 25,000 word feature titled “The CIA and the Media” for Rolling Stone detailing the chummy relationship between the press in the United States and the CIA. According to Bernstein’s reporting, reporters for the Post and the New York Times, among other publications, had advanced the agenda of the CIA for years. As he wrote,

…[More] than 400 American journalists who in the past twenty‑five years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency, according to documents on file at CIA headquarters. Some of these journalists’ relationships with the Agency were tacit; some were explicit. There was cooperation, accommodation and overlap. Journalists provided a full range of clandestine services—from simple intelligence gathering to serving as go‑betweens with spies in Communist countries. Reporters shared their notebooks with the CIA. Editors shared their staffs. Some of the journalists were Pulitzer Prize winners, distinguished reporters who considered themselves ambassadors without‑portfolio for their country. Most were less exalted: foreign correspondents who found that their association with the Agency helped their work; stringers and freelancers who were as interested in the derring‑do of the spy business as in filing articles; and, the smallest category, full‑time CIA employees masquerading as journalists abroad. In many instances, CIA documents show, journalists were engaged to perform tasks for the CIA with the consent of the managements of America’s leading news organizations.

The feature should have been scathing, but its publication was instead somewhat of a dud. For starters, the story accompanied the first-ever punk cover in Rolling Stone‘s history — a feature on the Sex Pistols by Charles M. Young — and America did not react kindly to a snarling Sid Vicious and a sneering Johnny Rotten on newsstands: The magazine only sold 108,000 copies, one of the worst-selling issues in Rolling Stone‘s history. Secondly, for all of Bernstein’s revelations — one such bombshell was that the New York Times, under the direction of the late publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger, knowingly secured media credentials for CIA operatives — the piece was jejune. As Joe Hagan writes in Sticky Fingers, his 2017 biography of Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner,

…’The CIA and the Media’ was a dud (and no revelation to Wenner, who appointed a former CIA agent, Putney Westerfield, a retired publisher of Fortune, to his board of directors in 1977).

Wenner called the article his “one mistake” in publishing, and features editor Harriet Fier (who, following her tight edit of Bernstein’s draft, later became the magazine’s managing editor) told Robert Draper in the classic Rolling Stone Magazine that the piece was “really terrible.”

Still, in light Robert Mueller’s independent investigation and strained relations between President Donald Trump and the United States’ intelligence communities, Bernstein’s exposé is in the midst of a renaissance. Notably, the decades-old feature was given a boost in mid-July when Jack Shafer included it in Don Van Natta’s weekly “Sunday Long Read” newsletter as a “Classic Read.” But what’s interesting about the article viewed through today’s prism are not those connections — rather, it’s the stark contrasts between the two media climates.

Bernstein had always wanted to write for Rolling Stone, telling a Playboy interviewer that before Watergate, he felt that he had reached his ceiling at the Washington Post. He had grown bored of “covering Virginia” and editor Ben Bradlee refused to send him to Vietnam, so he thought his next move would be to join the ranks of music criticism and become a “rock critic.” Bernstein had heard whispers that Hunter S. Thompson was about to leave Rolling Stone, so he wrote to Wenner, asking (as he recounted to Playboy), “Hey, I’d really like to take Hunter’s job.” Bernstein sent the letter weeks before the Watergate break-in, but even so, “Wenner being Wenner, he took forever to make up his mind about what the hell he was doing” and Bernstein ultimately “stayed at the Washington Post, and that was the end of that.”

But, following his departure from the paper, the two reconnected, at a time in which Wenner was flush with cash: The magazine, which was about to shed San Francisco and move to New York City, was in the midst of a publishing boom, launching Outside (for $1 million) and helping reinvigorate Look magazine; its fat revenues were helping to finance prestige journalism. The year before, Wenner had paid photographer Richard Avedon $25,000 for “The Family” issue, a multi-page spread of Washington’s most influential figures. The issue had won a National Magazine Award, and Wenner believed an investigative feature by Bernstein could help snag another Ellie, so he commissioned “The CIA and the Media.” The price Bernstein quoted? An astounding $28,000 (which, accounting for inflation, would be $116,430.16 today). True, it was a little more than $1 per word, but the fee was an exorbitant boondoggle and as such, it was breathlessly reported throughout the publishing industry, which only helped to hype Rolling Stone‘s success and acclaim.

It’s challenging to imagine a media climate in which a reporter — even one as celebrated as Bernstein at that point — could earn that much for one article. Wenner’s employees certainly couldn’t understand it: Draper reported that the fee was more than what the magazine’s associate editors made in a year, and it even dwarfed Young’s salary. When compared with publishing in 2018, the halcyon fee is almost perverse. According to the Washington Post, 200,000 jobs in journalism have been eliminated since 2000, not to mention cuts to the editorial staff of the New York Daily News, half of which were let go this week in an attempt to trim $14.8 million from its coffers (a debt that was created when Tronc, the paper’s publishing company, shelled out $15 million to jettison its chairman Michael Ferro following sexual harassment allegations made against him).

There are serious conversations being had about whether journalists should write for free, and if exposure counts as payment, all the while chants of “fake news” are continuously being hurled against those in the profession. Dark times, indeed, and it is frankly astonishing to think back to a moment in publishing history in which five-figure payments were — while not the norm — at least not gobsmacking.

According to Bernstein, the CIA began to work in tandem with the Gray Lady during the Cold War:

Arthur Hays Sulzberger signed a secrecy agreement with the CIA in the 1950s, according to CIA officials—a fact confirmed by his nephew, C.L. Sulzberger. However, there are varying interpretations of the purpose of the agreement: C.L. Sulzberger says it represented nothing more than a pledge not to disclose classified information made available to the publisher. That contention is supported by some Agency officials. Others in the Agency maintain that the agreement represented a pledge never to reveal any of the Times’ dealings with the CIA, especially those involving cover. And there are those who note that, because all cover arrangements are classified, a secrecy agreement would automatically apply to them.

Attempts to find out which individuals in the Times organization made the actual arrangements for providing credentials to CIA personnel have been unsuccessful. In a letter to reporter Stuart Loory in 1974, Turner Cadedge, managing editor of the Times from 1951 to 1964, wrote that approaches by the CIA had been rebuffed by the newspaper. “I knew nothing about any involvement with the CIA… of any of our foreign correspondents on the New York Times. I heard many times of overtures to our men by the CIA, seeking to use their privileges, contacts, immunities and, shall we say, superior intelligence in the sordid business of spying and informing. If any one of them succumbed to the blandishments or cash offers, I was not aware of it. Repeatedly, the CIA and other hush‑hush agencies sought to make arrangements for ‘cooperation’ even with Times management, especially during or soon after World War II, but we always resisted. Our motive was to protect our credibility.”

Read the story

Bundyville Chapter Four: The Gospel of Bundy

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

Leah Sottile | Longreads | May 2018 | 46 minutes (11,600 words)

Part 4 of 4 of Bundyville, a series and podcast from Longreads and OPB.

I.

The best way to get to Bundyville is to drive straight into the desert and prepare to never come back.

The ghost town that used to be home to the Bundy family is reachable only by deeply rutted roads covered with red quicksand so thick that it can suck in even the burliest 4×4 if you hit it wrong.

On the map, Bundyville is actually called Mount Trumbull. But back in the early 1900s, people started referring to it as Bundyville, because, according to one Arizona Republic article from 1951, “every single soul in the tiny village except one person answer to the name Bundy!” There was never electricity, no phones.

Abraham Bundy, Cliven’s great-grandfather established the town with his wife, Ella, in 1916. Their son, Roy, homesteaded there with his own family. And Cliven’s dad, David, was born in Bundyville — a place “perched atop a cold and forbidding plateau at an elevation of 5,200 feet,” according to the Arizona Republic article.

Before World War II, as many as 200 people — mostly Bundys — made their home in Bundyville, despite its remote location. Newspapers took six days to arrive. Four postmasters doled out mail twice a week. There was a school, a general store.

It was a Bundy utopia. A place that was all theirs, a place no one else wanted. And yet, still, it slipped right through their fingers. There wasn’t enough water to sustain them. By the 1950s, the place was mostly abandoned. Little had changed between the time the Bundys arrived and the time they left. “We heard the coyotes howl at night,” one Bundy resident once said, “but did not see a living soul.”

I want to stand in that place — where the family’s curse of loss began and where their anger at the government may have originated. I want to go to the middle of nowhere to see how far this family has been willing to go to live by their own code.

Bundyville still holds meaning for the family. Each year, hundreds of Bundys make a pilgrimage back for a giant Bundy family reunion. It’s like it’s not just a place in the desert, but a state of mind, too.

When Abraham Bundy and his wife arrived there, it must have seemed like it was the only place where they could fathom solace, calm. Far from civilization, far from the reaches of the federal government, the family tried to tame the landscape, farm, and raise livestock for themselves with little forage or water. To live by their own rules. To make an intractable place bend to their will.

I explain all this to a representative at the BLM’s Arizona Strip field office — that I’d like to go to the place the Bundy story started. And she clearly doesn’t think it’s a good idea for me and my producer, Ryan Haas, to go there this time of year. It’s been raining recently, she tells me. I think, so what? I’m from Oregon. But rain is unusual in that part of the Southwest, and it turns the clay-like dirt on the roads into a silty paste known to suck up tires, stranding unprepared people in potentially deadly temperatures until someone can come with help.

I read about an old lady who got lost on the road to Mount Trumbull and almost died before anyone found her. Another article talks about some hikers who’d come across skeletons in the desert there.

The outdoorsy dude-bros at a Jeep rental place in Hurricane, Utah, were skeptical, too: Just before we pull out of the lot in the burliest Jeep they’ve got, one of them throws a shovel into the back for us. “Better than nothing,” he says with a shrug.

The next morning, we wake up at 3 a.m. The way we’re figuring, if we’re going to make it, we’d better go while the ground is frozen. Read more…

Bundyville Chapter Three: A Clan Not to Cross

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

Leah Sottile | Longreads | May 2018 | 29 minutes (7,300 words)

Part 3 of 4 of Bundyville, a series and podcast from Longreads and OPB.

I.

Since Cliven Bundy took in his first desert breath as a free man this past January, the old cowboy has found himself more in ballrooms and meeting rooms and on stages across the West than back in the saddles he fought so hard to sit in again.

Just two days after his release, he stood in front of the Las Vegas Metro Police Department in Las Vegas, bullhorn in hand, goading the sheriff to come outside: “Is this man going to stand up and protect our life, liberty, and property?” he asked the small crowd gathered around him, smartphones livestreaming his words. The sheriff never emerged.

“My defense is a fifteen-second defense: I graze my cattle only on Clark County, Nevada, land, and I have no contract with the federal government,” Bundy told his flock.

Later that month, on a rural Montana stage flanked by ruffled red curtains, there he stood in jeans and boots and an ash-gray sport coat as a crowd of a couple hundred welcomed him with whoops and whistles fit for rural royalty. “I have a fifteen-second defense,” he said. The crowd listened, rapt.

And there he was again, in February, on an amateur YouTube talk show, in a blue plaid shirt and bolo tie, expounding for well beyond 15 seconds on his ideas about government.

If Cliven Bundy was a star among constitutional literalists after the standoff in 2014, two years in jail transformed the old man and his family into the full-fledged glitterati of the far, far right.

His trademark 15-second defense line is mostly true: Cliven has no contract with the federal government and, yet, continues to graze his cows illegally on public land. Read more…

Bundyville Chapter Two: By a Thread

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

Leah Sottile | Longreads | May 2018 | 26 minutes (6,578 words)

Part 2 of 4 of Bundyville, a series and podcast from Longreads and OPB.

I.

It’s mid-November, the end of the first week of the trial in Las Vegas. I’ve found that my favorite time of day here is early morning, when the only people to talk to are those calling “good morning!” from the doorways and brick plazas where they’ve slept. It’s when Fremont Street is free of tourists and populated only by guys with hoses whose jobs are to wash away the things that seem always to fill this city street: spilled margaritas and cheap beer and puke.

I’m staying in a cheap casino on Fremont Street in a room that’s not expensive enough to have a coffee maker, which means I have to eject myself into the world without any caffeine, a thing I would never do at home but here I’ve come to look forward to. It’s the only time it’s quiet enough to think, to not lose yourself in the things Vegas asks you to become.

At night on Fremont, blocks from the federal courthouse, you will be offered whatever you need. Booze, drugs, money, beautiful women, beautiful men. Your fortune, told to you in cards. Your name etched on a bottle opener, a license plate, a flashing keychain, a pair of dice. Get drunk. Get high. Get wild. It’s Vegas, baby — a line people repeat here like a mantra in packed elevators, in coffee shops, in the security line of the “fed castle” where Bundy’s followers empty their pockets of change and pocket-size Constitutions before going through the metal detector. When Judge Gloria Navarro strolls to the bench each morning — always late, always carrying an iced coffee — people explain it with a shrug: “Vegas, baby.”

I’ve avoided the Vegas life this week, but on my last night — a Thursday — I stop into a bar on Fremont Street and take the only seat left at the bar, next to a Mr. T impersonator. There’s no court tomorrow, so I’m OK with staying out a little late and seeing what’s so appealing about this city. Vegas at night, despite my resistance to it, is fun — and I’ve had enough to drink with Mr. T that I strike up a conversation with a couple of guys who’ve traveled here from the East Coast to sample the legal marijuana. I ask them if they’ve heard of Cliven Bundy, and one responds immediately, “He’s that cowboy the government is trying to steal land from, right?”

This must be what poker face feels like.

The next morning, I’m a little hungover and way out in the suburbs of the city. I’m sitting in this bright-white, fluorescent-lit office, guzzling complimentary bottles of water. I’m in the office of an ex-Bundy follower who used to be close with the family, Melissa Laughter. She went to Bundy Ranch in 2014 and to Malheur in 2016. She has spent holidays with the Bundys.

She’s since become a vocal detractor of the Bundys and the wider Patriot movement that supports them. She says the Bundys demand loyalty, allegiance. She has come to think of them as cult leaders.

“A cult is is a blind following of some enigmatic leader,” she says. “They don’t question. They don’t act independently. They act as one.”

Laughter is a devout member of the Mormon church, and the granddaughter of a Utah dairy farmer. She explained what initially attracted her to the Bundys. “I’m like, OK, we have something in common. I’m interested in talking to them and hearing what they have to say,” she says. “So like many people, I was sympathetic to them to begin with.”

Laughter is a staunch conservative — a woman who has run for public office in Nevada as a Republican. She has bright white teeth and wears big cowboy boots with dresses. She’s pro-gun, vehemently anti-marijuana.

She grew up in the church and felt like something was off about how the Bundys talked about the Gospel to friends and family. “We would often have these philosophical religious debates where they would talk about LDS doctrine,” she says. According to Laughter, her differing perspective on church teachings wasn’t well received around the ranch. “They constantly take offense if you say anything against what they’re saying.”

But the Bundys were seeing things in the Gospel she couldn’t understand.

“I’m going to show you something else no one else has but the federal government,” she says. She reaches to grab something from the floor, then plunks a big black binder onto her desk.

“Have you heard about The Nay Book?”

Yeah, I’d heard murmurs of it. I just didn’t think it was real. Read more…

Bundyville Chapter One: A War in the Desert

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

Leah Sottile | Longreads | May 2018 | 27 minutes (6,900 words)

Part 1 of 4 of Bundyville, a series and podcast from Longreads and OPB.

I.

The place where all the chaos began is a few minutes off Interstate 15 North, where a row of American flags line a curve of rural road and the only sound is the desert wind in their fabric. Two tall flagpoles reach out from a patch of gravel topped with gilded cursive letters spelling out the opening to the U.S. Constitution: We The People.

On them hang several flags, including the American flag, the Nevada state flag, and a blue banner bearing a sharp white V stacked atop a round O — the cattle brand of the last rancher from around these parts, Cliven Bundy. He’s not the only cattleman represented on these poles; a flag bearing the mark of a rancher shot and killed by police flies here, too.

Nearby, just over the Virgin River, a rough road cuts through the dusty Nevada desert. Sandy rocks darken into a deep red all the way out to the horizon, where a dark strip of mountains jut skyward.

Drive down that road and a patch of bright green pops into view — the color of life shrill in a place where everything else looks dead.

It’s here, in Bunkerville, Nevada — in Clark County, about an hour from Las Vegas — that the 72-year-old Bundy owns 160 acres of land: the place where he raised children, grows melons, and rears cattle. A modest house is barely visible from the gravel road. Hay bales are stacked neatly in piles around the property. There’s farm equipment everywhere — hunks of metal weathered by a sun that seems to never set and winds that never cease.

For the better part of the past two years, Cliven Bundy wasn’t allowed to live here. Instead he was housed in a Nevada detainment center, wearing a red jumpsuit and jail-issue orange clogs every day, sleeping in a bunk bed in a room full of other men awaiting trial.

He had been charged with conspiracy to commit offenses against the United States, with assault, extortion, with threatening federal officers.

The trial he faced last fall, in a way, would also decide which of the two distinctly opposite characters Bundy has been portrayed as was real.

There’s Bundy’s version of himself: a rebel cowboy father of 14 and grandfather of 66 who believes the government is determined to either kill him or put him behind bars for life, while also stealing his livelihood.

Then there’s the government’s version of Bundy: a vigilante capable of summoning an army eager and ready to revolt against the federal government.

When it comes to Cliven and the rest of the Bundy Family there are a few points that nearly everyone — no matter how they vote or what side of this case they’re on — can agree:

Number 1: An event of seismic proportions occurred near Cliven Bundy’s ranch in April 2014 when he — believing federal agents were closing in — called people from around the country (many heavily armed) to his aid. Along with them came militiamen: the Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, members of western militias. People call this event a lot of things, but the most common name for it is the Bundy Ranch Standoff.

Number 2: At that time, Bundy owed the federal government at least $1 million in grazing fees. For more than 20 years, he allowed his cows to graze on public lands managed by the federal government despite not having a permit to do so. He fought in and out of court about it, and he lost every time. But he didn’t take his cows off the land. They’re still out there.

Number 3: Cliven’s own sons, Ammon and Ryan Bundy, led their own armed standoff in early 2016 at a federal bird refuge in southeastern Oregon.

And last, but not least, number 4: No matter how hard the federal government seems to try to arrest, imprison, or see the Bundys found guilty of federal crimes, they just can’t get them.

“I do not think there is a jury in this country that will convict us,” Ammon Bundy said to reporters last December outside the Las Vegas federal courthouse. Ammon smiled wide, his arm slung around his mom’s shoulders. “The truth is on our side.”

The truth.

What really is the truth when it comes to the Bundys?

For the past two years, I’ve been reporting on the Bundy Family and people who consider themselves followers. I’ve talked to just as many people who see Cliven and his sons as godly figures — prophets, great historical leaders — as people who see them as terrorists, extremists, and the embodiment of everything that’s wrong with America. There seems to be no middle with the Bundy Family: You either are with them, or you’re not. And how you see the family may say just as much about you as it does about them.

This story is one of alternative facts and fake news — two, three years before those terms entered the common lexicon. It is a tale of conspiracy theories, crooked politicians, and two polarized sides who read the same facts and take away completely different messages.

When you look closely at the actions of the Bundy Family, their history, their religion, the words of their followers — you can find a story that reflects so much about America right now. There are deep divides. Unrest. You can’t talk to the Bundys or their followers about cows or land without also talking about patriotism and the flag and the Constitution and the Bible, too. Their definitions of freedom, patriotism, terrorism, and even the law might be exactly the same as yours, or they might be way, way different. To have a conversation with or about the Bundys, you have to accept that they consider themselves to be the ultimate Patriots and that they don’t acknowledge the federal government’s authority. They are here to tell the federal government what to do, and to tell the rest of us how we’ve been bad Americans.

People call their theories fringe. Others call them insane.

The Bundy name in much of the West can make blood boil. And where some have cast the old man as a crackpot, a flash in the pan, the details behind the family’s anti-government actions are complicated, stretching back decades — a century, even.

But when Cliven Bundy strolled out of jail in the first days of 2018 — cowboy hat on his head, his legs free of shackles — and raised a fist in victory, what just occurred seemed simple. For the second time, the Bundys thumbed their noses at the feds and got away with it. Read more…

Finding the Soundtrack to My Desert Life

Photo courtesy the author, notes via Shutterstock

Aaron Gilbreath | Longreads | April 2018 | 30 minutes (7,571 words)

After I transferred from the university in Phoenix in late 1995, I kept myself in motion so compulsively that I barely got to know my new town. I biked to class. I hiked after class. I ditched class to hike during the week and drove all over Arizona’s rugged southeastern corner to hike the whole weekend. Half a year passed during which I spent as little time in my sad, lonely apartment as possible. I didn’t know anybody in Tucson, and I didn’t want to — not yet. My previous friendships had only helped me turn myself into a pothead. And yet I couldn’t stand to be alone and sit still either. Struggling with my isolation and anxiety about life, I tried to work through my twitchy misdirection in the border region’s dry mountain forests and lowland deserts, taking advantage of the long highways that gave me time for silent contemplation at 75 miles per hour.

Madera Canyon in the Santa Rita Mountains, Sycamore Canyon in the Pajarito Mountains — in those first Tucson months, I saw more of this rugged landscape than many University of Arizona students did in four years of college, yet I never really saw my new city for what it was, because I didn’t take the time. I only saw the land around it.

***

I was restless at age 20, lost, searching for something beyond my reach and always beyond my understanding, some cosmic insight and career path that Mother Nature’s vast deserts seemed capable of offering in a way cities could not. I’d smoked too much weed during the previous three years, and I was trying to quit in order to find my calling. Sitting still meant dealing with temptation; hiking kept me on track. I read a lot of ecology and nature books back then, and what compounded my avoidance was my belief that the wilderness held the answers to all of humanity’s questions — from the meaning of life to cures for cancer to an objective sense of right and wrong. I still believe in wild nature, but in my young, confused Thoreauvian worldview, urban areas were cancerous “man-made” places to escape, not savor, so I fled Tucson every chance I got, just as I had fled Phoenix the year before.

Phoenix was bland. It had a Taco Bell personality. Tucson had a singular, authentically Sonoran Desert character that evolved from its origin as a military outpost in Spain’s old northern territory, then developed in the isolation resulting from Phoenicians’ dismissal of the city as a backwater. People nicknamed it the Old Pueblo. Even before I moved there, I could see the Old Pueblo’s superiority. Prickly pear cactus grew as tall as trees. Roadrunners climbed ornamental palo verdes in the middle of town, and the lonely howl of passing trains rang throughout the night. Many streets had no sidewalks, just as many houses had no lawns. The plaster on old buildings peeled to reveal straw in the adobe bricks underneath. It was as if the city was letting you see who it really was.

Phoenix looked as engineered as Las Vegas, or worse, like bad cosmetic surgery. Central Tucson looked like an extension of the desert, natural and spacious and endearingly shaggy. I could see this when I arrived, but my philosophical views let me rationalize my unwillingness to really appreciate it; it was a city, natural-looking or not. Only when I discovered The Shadow of Your Smile, an album by a band called Friends of Dean Martinez did I finally quit running long enough to find something to value about urban Arizona, besides Mexican food and live music. I’d learned to use cities as basecamps for outdoor excursions. This instrumental steel guitar band helped me stay put, because its cinematic cowboy lounge music matched the personality of this Spanish colonial city. When I started looking at its beauty as equal to that of wildlands, I not only started feeling at home in my city, but also in my own body, and I found my sense of direction.
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The Strike: Chemicals, Cancer, and the Fight for Health Care

Ian Frisch| Longreads | April 2018 | 32 minutes (8,040 words)

When 59-year-old Jack Mack wandered from picket station to picket station to ask the Question, he tried as best he could to ease into the conversation. He didn’t want to scare anyone off. It was two months into the strike, and tensions were high. “You know, we handle some pretty nasty stuff in there,” he’d say. Or, if the guy was older: “C’mon, you’ve been here as long as I have! You know everyone!” Sometimes, if he already knew the person, he’d cut to the chase: “Wasn’t there a guy you worked with down there that was diagnosed with cancer a few years back? Did he make it through?” If they didn’t answer, staring instead at their steel-toed boots, Mack would lean in and say, “You know, I’m sure you heard, but I was diagnosed with cancer myself. Beat it, but — you know.” Then he’d turn toward the sprawling complex across the street — the site of the only job he’d ever had — and nod, adjusting the cap perched on his head. “Yup. Forty years.” He’d inhale deeply, nearly a sigh. “That’s a lot of hours around those chemicals.” He’d shake his head, unsure if he should blame himself or Momentive Performance Materials, the chemical plant in Waterford, New York, where he had dedicated so many years of his life.

Like Mack, many of the employees on the picket line had worked at Momentive for decades, and while they didn’t know for sure that working at the plant caused their cells to metastasize, the workers certainly knew of the inherent consequences that stemmed from handling carcinogenic chemicals on a day-to-day basis. That fear of a link is what troubled Mack and his cohort, and it’s why in November 2016, nearly 700 unionized workers at Momentive went on strike, protesting what they thought was an unfair contract — one that pushed for more expensive and restrictive health insurance for workers and the elimination of health care for retirees altogether, “many of whom,” according to leaflets handed out during the strike, “are suffering from job-related illnesses caused by exposure to dangerous chemicals.” For decades, the workers had mixed and churned chemicals in a variety of forms to produce an endless array of products, which included specialized goods such as F14 fluids and rubber stoppers on syringes along with items encountered on a day-to-day basis like exterior coatings for soft drink bottles and the rubber used to manufacture nipples for baby bottles.

Now, though, those same workers were walking out for the first time, and the union outfitted a defunct hot dog shack across from the plant into a headquarters. Nearly all of them had been picketing the plant’s nine entrances 24 hours a day, powering through snow squalls, huddling around burn barrels for warmth, trudging through slush puddles.

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Union strikers around a burn barrel outside Momentive’s Water Treatment Facility. (Jonno Rattman)

On the picket line, in rare close quarters with men who worked elsewhere in the massive plant, Mack learned his coworkers’ stories. He took a few minutes out of each day to ask strikers if they’d had cancer or knew anyone who did. Sometime after Christmas, Mack had started jotting down the names — current and retired, dead and alive.

He kept the handwritten list folded up in his jacket pocket, adding new sheets as he collected new stories: six pancreatic cancers, seven bladder cancers, nine brain cancers, 11 throat cancers, 18 prostate cancers — spine, skin, stomach, and more. While these are cancers that do afflict men of a certain age—according to the American Cancer Society, one in nine men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer—the diagnoses outpace certain national averages. Brain cancer afflicts .006 percent of adult males, far below the roughly 2 percent of the strikers with throat cancer whom Mack surveyed. By mid-January, he had 85 names. Many of these men had worked in the plant for more than 20 years, which meant they’d tallied up decades of exposure to dangerous chemicals. (Of the scores of men on Mack’s list, I’ve independently confirmed the cancer diagnoses of two dozen, through interviews with either the men themselves or, in the case of 11 who died, with family and friends.) Mack himself had long known coworkers with cancer. To him and other employees, it was almost commonplace to know a guy who had been diagnosed. “Three other electricians I worked with in waste treatment also have cancer,” he told me. “Long-term exposure — in some of these buildings, there’s no way you can avoid that.” Mack, an electrician who works on the machines that process the plant’s chemical waste was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2014. His brother, who also works at the plant, was diagnosed with tongue cancer the next year. Their father, who worked at the plant for 36 years, died of cancer in 1994.

Mack’s oncologist, Dr. Kandasamy Perumal, who specializes in urology and has operated a practice in nearby Troy for 35 years, is no stranger to cases like his. “As time went on, more and more people came from that area with instances of malignancy, rather than Troy or Latham or other towns. My practice sees comparatively disproportionate numbers of tumors from people who live in Waterford and Mechanicville,” he said. “But do we know if they all worked at the plant? I don’t know for certain,” he added, explaining that his practice is not obligated to collect workplace information from patients. Momentive said that it was unaware of any chronic health problems among employees as a result of exposure to raw materials, and that their well-being is its highest priority. “The company takes all necessary actions to ensure strict adherence to all federal and state health guidelines,” said a Momentive spokesperson.

There were risks in taking on this kind of work, Mack knew. So did many of the men whose names were folded up in his pocket. But there had been some promise of security at Momentive, a belief that their jobs would take care of them — a good living, a secure retirement, health care. Today they’re not so sure. After the plant was acquired by a private equity firm in 2006, things took a dark turn. A decade of control by Wall Street brought pay cuts and a litany of increasingly rancorous labor disputes — culminating in the massive strike.

When I visited Momentive in January 2017, workers sat at the booths inside the hot dog shack wearing camouflage jackets, reading newspapers, drinking coffee, and eating hot dogs and stale pastries. One checked in picketers who, after nine weeks on the line, were eligible for unemployment. They were also paid $400 a week by the union. The 104-day walkout began November 2 and ended February 14, and during that time these men were constantly on edge, both about the security of their job but more importantly about the precariousness of the benefits they desperately relied upon. The men were on strike for many reasons, but high-quality, affordable health care was their main concern. It was what they needed most.

Bill Tullock, a 55-year-old senior advanced control operator, whose doctor had found a tumor in his throat during an endoscopy for acid reflux in 2015, maintains that he’d never have gotten the routine procedure that led to his cancer diagnosis without Momentive’s old health insurance. At the time, his annual deductible was $500; now it’s $3,500. Tullock doesn’t solely blame the plant for his cancer, but he’s adamant that were it not for the generous coverage, he’d never have known he was sick.

“I dodged a bullet,” Tullock said of his battle with cancer, which, thanks to the low deductible he paid courtesy of his previous health care coverage, was caught early. “With the new insurance, I am pretty confident I would’ve never had the endoscopy, and would’ve never known there was a tumor. Then it would’ve spread, and I wouldn’t have known.” Under the new contract, once he retires, he’s on his own. “I dedicated myself to this place,” he said during the strike in January, sitting in the basement of the hot dog shack, holding back tears. “I should have never started working here. And now they are trying to give us this shit insurance and just — what, ‘Go die?’” He rubbed his eyes with the palm of his hand. “Our health insurance is like the final firewall of personal protection,” he said. “It’s all we’ve got.”

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Bill Tullock was told by his doctor to get an endoscopy in 2015; it turned out he had a tumor in his stomach. Jack Mack sits down with his list of sick workers while on a break at union headquarters. (Jonno Rattman)

The men who’ve worked at the plant for decades and battled cancer — whether they think it’s from the chemicals they handled or not — now face a task familiar to millions, one from which they thought they had a reprieve: They must either sign up for the company’s onerous coverage or fend for themselves to get health insurance, with costs varying widely through the complicated, cumbersome public exchange overseen by the government — the precariousness of which is compounded by the Trump administration’s promise to gut the Affordable Care Act, leaving workers in an even more fretful state of uncertainty.

Like so many Americans, they’re threatened by a toxic triumvirate of lax chemical-safety regulations, costly health coverage, and growing pressures on Wall Street to perform — the latter of which has forced businesses to perform under expectations that set them up to fail, with employees taking the brunt of the downfall

The decade of private equity ownership had gradually worn down a generation of workers, stoking a divide between those who would be taken care of and those who would go without. “Sacrifices were made with the expectation that we would get adequate health care when we retired,” Mack said. “If you are going to work in environments like this, you are going to need affordable health care.” The strike marked dividing lines between worker and owner and financier, but it also revealed a rift so deep that it was often left unspoken: What do American workers owe to one another?

***

Waterford, New York, is one of a cluster of manufacturing towns situated north of Albany, where the Mohawk River joins the Hudson. It blossomed into a factory hub as early as the mid-1800s and was known for its paper mills. A reported stop on the Underground Railroad, it was even visited by Alexander Hamilton and Frederick Douglass. Drive into town from across the Hudson and you’re greeted by a memorial to Waterford’s veterans, including men who fought in the Revolutionary War. Keep driving north on Route 4, past the village center, and the Momentive complex flanks both sides of the road, sprawling across an 800-acre plot.

The town greeting in Waterford, New York.

The town greeting in Waterford, New York. (Jonno Rattman)

The chemical plant is one of Saratoga County’s largest employers. First built by General Electric in 1947, it anchors the region both economically and culturally. For decades, the plant with its hundreds of union jobs offered its primarily male workforce a stable, middle-class kind of prosperity, one where high school graduates could eventually earn a six-figure salary. There was a sense of local pride: The soles of the boots in which Neil Armstrong took his one small step were made of silicone rubber manufactured here. “If you’re from here, this is where you work,” said Vinny Anatriello, a third-generation employee. “And if you don’t work here, you work in the school where all the guys’ kids go to, or you work in the doctor’s office where the guy’s sick wife goes, or you work in the grocery store.”

It’s no secret to the workers that materials used in Momentive’s Waterford plant can be dangerous. It’s been this way for decades. The plant sources silicone ore and, through reactions with various chemicals, produces materials used in consumer products ranging from shampoo and medical equipment to caulking and car parts. Numerous longtime workers say that the current operations use dozens of toxic chemicals, among them benzene, lead, mercury, and hydrochloric acid. The waste it has produced over the years — over 11.4 million pounds in 2015 alone — has at times included more than three dozen toxic chemicals, 11 of which are carcinogens, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

There used to be even more, workers say, decades ago when GE owned the plant. Numerous workers said that until the early 1980s, they cleaned their winter coats with pure trichlorethylene, now a known carcinogen, and used fiberglass and lead as fillers in chemical mixtures. For some processes, they weighed out raw lead by hand. “Back then we’d scoop it like it was salt,” said George LaMarche, 65, who retired in July 2017 after 44 years at the plant and whose doctor is closely monitoring his elevated prostate-specific antigen levels — potentially an early sign of prostate cancer. “We never wore any protection for that.” In a statement, a Momentive spokesperson said that the company provides all its employees with protective equipment, extensive training, and instructions in how to properly handle the materials they work with: “When employees act in accordance with the policies and procedures Momentive has in place, potential risks are mitigated.”

Millions of American workers are exposed to carcinogens, or possible carcinogens, according to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, the division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that researches and investigates workplace safety and health. In 2012 alone, upward of 45,000 diagnosed cases of cancer — and, since the agency is still investigating and uncovering potentially carcinogenic materials used by the American worker, perhaps twice that many — were caused by past workplace exposure. On average, nearly eight times as many people die each year of diseases acquired on the job as die from injuries sustained on the job.

He kept the handwritten list folded up in his jacket pocket, adding new sheets as he collected new stories: six pancreatic cancers, seven bladder cancers, nine brain cancers, 11 throat cancers, 18 prostate cancers.

Since 1976, federal law has required all new industrial chemicals to be submitted for review by the Environmental Protection Agency. (Tens of thousands of industrial chemicals already in use were grandfathered in.) But after that initial environmental review, many industrial chemicals — which don’t necessarily have to get tested before being used in manufacturing — may never get a closer look by regulators. Once chemicals have entered the market, U.S. law only requires the EPA to collect data on the roughly 3,700 of them that are used at a rate of at least 500 tons per year. The data collected pertain mainly to their effects on the environment or the consumers of the products they produce — not on the workers who handle them.

“These chemicals are never sent back with actual information from the workplace,” said Jennifer Sass, a senior scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council’s health program. “The regulations are focused on the end of the pipeline. But you can’t put the genie back in the bottle at that point. People are already affected.”

Updates to the Toxic Substances Control Act, which was amended by Congress in 2016, mandated more pre-market testing for new chemicals seeking federal approval and required the EPA to review already-approved chemicals in widespread use. Ten of the most toxic of those are slated to be tested in 2018, but it’s unclear whether that deadline will be met. (Two of the chemicals have been commonly used at Momentive.) Since then, however, President Donald Trump has promised to scale back regulations broadly and has targeted federal agencies, the EPA chief among them, for sharp funding cuts.

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Momentive Performance Materials, a chemical plant in Waterford, New York (Jonno Rattman)

In May 2017, Nancy Beck, a former industry advocate and executive at the American Chemistry Council (of which Momentive is a member), was selected to become the deputy assistant administrator of the EPA unit tasked with implementing the updates to the toxic-chemicals law. Just two months earlier, she had gone before a Senate subcommittee as a then-executive at the ACC to push back against the review process. According to an investigation by Eric Lipton at The New York Times, the EPA has spearheaded “a broad initiative by the Trump administration to change the way the federal government evaluates health and environmental risks associated with hazardous chemicals, making it more aligned with the industry’s wishes.” This included reevaluating plans to ban certain uses of two chemicals that have caused dozens of deaths or severe health problems: methylene chloride and trichloroethylene, both of which have been used by Momentive employees.

Regardless of these policy reversals, tens of thousands of chemicals that have been in production for decades still need review. The Union of Concerned Scientists, an environmental-advocacy group, estimated in 2015 that it could take 50 years to reevaluate 1,000 of the most toxic chemicals on the market. “Most toxins have not been adequately studied, employees have no tools to act on their suspicions, the companies have a disincentive to learn the full truth about what its chemicals do in terms of health impact, and the government is underfunded and doesn’t have sufficient tools to fully investigate,” said Dr. Steven Markowitz, director of the Barry Commoner Center for Health and the Environment at Queens College. “It’s a recipe for making the health consequences of working with toxic chemicals invisible.”

***

Tim Larson is a tall, broad-shouldered man who wears a musty cap tossed on his head. When I met him during the strike, he carried a megaphone that he used to shout chants on the picket line. His face lit up when he screamed, and his eyes — which seemed to hang out of his skull — bulged even further from their sockets. I stood with Larson most nights while I was there — he held the late shift on the picket line — and he explained that the plant is a complex of various buildings, each housing in a different part of the production line. You’re either breaking down raw ore, reacting the rock with chemicals, mixing together intermediate materials, packing products, or organizing them for storage and shipment.

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Tim Larson steps off a bus before a protest in Momentive CEO Jack Boss’s neighborhood in Saratoga Springs. (Jonno Rattman)

Larson, a chemical operator, began working at Momentive in 1988 when he was 35 years old. He told me stories about the different parts of the plant, including Building 78. This area of the massive plant is home to the Waterford plant’s fluorosilicone manufacturing operations. There, a silicone base is reacted in roughly 100-gallon “dough” mixers at more than 240 degrees Fahrenheit to produce fluorosilicone gum for use in automobile gaskets and aerospace products. (The mixers are also used to produce “intermediates,” which are unfinished products that passed from building to building within the plant, and included different grades of polymers and fluids.) Long-term exposure to seven chemicals used in Building 78, according to Momentive material-safety data sheets, are suspected of or known to be reproductive toxins. Another chemical, Tris(2-chloroethyl) phosphite, is a carcinogen. Workers call the building the One-Nut Club, for reasons that to them seem less ominous than inevitable.

When GE owned the plant, risks from fluorosilicone production had been on the company’s radar since the 1970s. In a “strictly private” 1977 safety audit, a safety specialist said that research had shown that materials created by these processes, when ingested — which could mean breathing in the chemical or having it touch one’s skin — shrank rats’ prostates and testes “and may have similar effects in man.” The specialist also wrote that tests showed that the chemical compound handled by workers was “probably not a carcinogen.” GE performed a similar toxicity review 20 years after its initial testing and analyzed several chemicals used to the produce fluorosilicones. “The data, although not definitive, did not give rise to any concerns over the potential for carcinogenicity,” the report concluded.

“Nobody admits there is a correlation, but we put stickers on the tanks that hold this stuff, saying that it causes cancer,” Larson told me, referring to the warning stickers that California state law required them to affix. (Many of their products are shipped to the Golden State.) “It’s right there in front of you.” 

“After six years, my eyes started bulging out of my head,” he told me, pointing to his face. He was diagnosed in early 1996 with Graves’ disease, an autoimmune disorder that affects the thyroid. “I had to get my eyelids sliced, because I couldn’t close my eyes,” Larson said. He knows he can’t prove a direct link, he added, but he is “convinced that all my autoimmune problems are directly related to working here.” Soon after his diagnosis, Larson transferred to another area of the plant.

The men were on strike for many reasons, but high-quality, affordable health care was their main concern. It was what they needed most.

Other workers voiced their concerns about Building 78. In 1998, a GE-employed research chemist named Herman Krabbenhoft wrote a letter to two operators who worked there, Joe DeVito and Dan Patregnani, explaining that the previous year he had expressed concerns to managers about the vapors released during fluorosilicone operations. Krabbenhoft wrote that GE’s health and safety manager was supposed to have initiated a study of how to measure the vapors’ concentration, but that after a year nothing had been done, adding that he was told by a colleague to “back off on pushing this because it might affect how GE’s managers viewed me and my performance.”

“Herman was on our side,” DeVito said.“He said, ‘Stay away from it. It’s going to kill you.’” Shortly thereafter, DeVito said, Krabbenhoft was fired. (Multiple attempts to reach Krabbenhoft for comment were unsuccessful; GE declined to comment for this article, referring all questions to the plant’s current ownership, who also declined to comment on the specific incident.)

The building’s ventilation system was updated in the early 2000s, multiple employees who worked there said. The system was supposed to be air and temperature controlled. “It never worked, never sealed the room properly,” said John Ryan, who worked in Building 78 at the time, adding that temperatures could reach 110 degrees in the building due to the faulty system. In 2005, Ryan said he filed a formal grievance, asking to spend less time near the mixer, explaining that he didn’t want to be exposed to the hazardous mixture and its vapors. “But nothing changed,” he said. “And they never fixed the dough mixer either. Materials would come out into the air or spill onto the ground. That’s still going on, until this day.” In mid-2017, Momentive installed a second dough mixer to Building 78 to ramp up production, and though the machine suffered at first from issues relating to its packing seal, there haven’t been any recent health-related complaints. (Both the venting system and the initial dough mixer have also been serviced and are reportedly in working condition.)

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Joe DeVito was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2013. He worked in Building 78. (Jonno Rattman)

Now, DeVito said, workers must wear full-face respirators when they clean the mixers, which have to be pristine before the machine can be used to produce another product. The fluorosilicone is so sticky, Larson claimed, that he used to have to climb into the 100-gallon drum and scrape off any lingering substance with a razor blade. “Fluorosilicone is a highly resistant chemical — oil, water, you name it,” he said. “That’s why it is used on gaskets and car bumpers, or in rocket ships.” According to DeVito, “Momentive took more steps for safety over the years,” but the process itself and the chemicals used in it remained the same. Additionally, the company’s material-safety data sheets do not indicate whether the vapors produced from these chemicals are hazardous to humans, despite there being a warning that TFPA vapors, which are highly toxic, may evolve from the products used to make fluorosilicone gums and polymers. “The company raised certain health issues related to the chemicals used in this building, but despite a very incomplete knowledge base, they draw the conclusion that there is no cause for concern,” said Dr. Markowitz of Queens College, who reviewed the documents. “My conclusion would’ve been: ‘There’s a big gap in what we know versus what we don’t know.’ That’s the proper conclusion.”

DeVito was diagnosed with stage 4 throat cancer in 2013, after a bump on his neck swelled to the size of a golf ball. DeVito told me he knows of five other control operators who worked in Building 78 who were diagnosed with cancer. He told his doctor about his decades of exposure to fluorosilicone vapors. “She said, ‘It would take years to prove that it happened from work,’” he explained. “‘Take care of this and just move on.’” His treatment, radiation, and chemotherapy, were successful. He retired in early 2018.

Some workers, like Tony Pignatelli, who worked in the plant for 34 years, weren’t so lucky. Pignatelli was diagnosed with brain cancer in January 2000 and passed away three weeks later. “My dad knew the risks, but he did it because they took care of them with good pay and health care,” his daughter said. “But I can’t even begin to understand what those guys are going through down there now with this new contract.”

***

Employees accepted the risks associated with working in the plant, the backbone of their community, for over half a century. They felt taken care of: stable pay, a sizable pension, affordable and quality health care, good communication with management, camaraderie with fellow workers. But that all changed when GE sold its global silicone operation, with the Waterford plant as its centerpiece, to a Wall Street investment firm in 2006 in a leveraged buyout. “When it was GE, they treated you like family,” Jack Mack said. “After the sale, everything changed.”

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Matthew, Kenny and Vinny Annatriello—father, nephew, and son—on the picket line. (Jonno Rattman)

Apollo Global Management, a private equity firm that manages $249 billion in assets, bought a controlling stake for $3.8 billion, then saddled the corporation (which changed its name to Momentive Performance Materials in December 2006) with $3 billion in financing debt while it collected a $3.5 million that first year for “financial and strategic advisory services.”

Many employees didn’t understand the implications of the sale until 2009, when nearly 400 production workers received surprise pay cuts. Brian Cameron Jr., a 34-year-old second-generation employee, was making $27 an hour as a chemical operator. He had just bought a house in Waterford and a new Dodge Ram pickup the previous summer. “Everything was going good. I paid my bills,” he said. “I thought I was set for life.” Then his wages were slashed to $17 an hour. He eventually took a higher-paying position at the plant, but his debt piled up too fast. “I thought if I moved quickly, I would be able to save my life,” he said. “But it was too late.” He lost his house, gave back his truck, and moved into a coworker’s apartment.

The cuts meant that his coworker Ron Gardner, then 53, and his wife, Donna, could no longer afford the $1,300 monthly payments on their two-bedroom ranch home in Grangerville. “We were struggling,” he said. A few years later, in 2013, they abandoned it and moved into a trailer park in Saratoga Springs, just two miles from Momentive’s current CEO Jack Boss’s $950,000, 4,375-square-foot home. They took out personal loans to pay for a $23,000 double-wide, then used savings and loans from family members to pay for the roof and the lot’s rental fees. Unable to sell their ranch, they filed for bankruptcy and began paying off their new debts.

The local union contested the wage cuts, and 18 months later, in 2010, with their contract soon to expire, Momentive agreed to settle by issuing back pay — more than $50,000 before taxes for some workers — while making the wage cuts permanent going forward. Gardner, Cameron, and others who had lost their homes or been pushed into bankruptcy by the cuts couldn’t turn down the chance to repay their debts. “People were so broke from the wage cuts, they voted yes for that contract,” said local union president Dominick Patrignani, who has worked at the plant for over 30 years and was the chief bargainer during last year’s strike. “They were given no alternative.”

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Ron and Donna Gardner lost their home, then Ron developed esophageal cancer. Dominick Patrignani, president of the local union, is the chief bargainer for the 700 strikers. (Jonno Rattman)

But Momentive wasn’t done. In 2013, the company froze pensions for workers under 50 and those with less than 10 years of service. “Every contract, they slashed benefits and made it harder for me to do what my father did: provide for his family,” Cameron told me during the strike. All of this is par for the course for private equity firms like Apollo. According to a study led by Josh Lerner, professor of investment banking at Harvard Business School, private equity buyouts lead to sizable reductions in earnings per worker compared with traditional companies, as well as modestly greater job loss, with a comparative decline of 4 percent over a two-year period.

“If a private equity firm needs to goose their returns, they will take it out of worker’s compensation — wages, pensions, benefits, all of it,” said Eileen Appelbaum, a co-director at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the co-author of Private Equity at Work: When Wall Street Manages Main Street. To her, private equity firms only care about one thing: profit. “The fastest and easiest and least controversial way, in their point of view, is to cut compensation. They make a dollar every time they take a dollar out of workers’ compensation,” she said. “Private equity controls management and the board of directors. They can fire anyone at any time. They sit at both sides of the table. There is no one looking out for the workers.”

In 2014, still under Apollo management, Momentive filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, trimming its debt obligations from $3.2 billion to $1.2 billion. This is also a familiar tactic for the firm. “It makes sense [Apollo did that] because you create money out of thin air,” said Tony Casey, professor of law at the University of Chicago, who studied the Momentive bankruptcy case. “Apollo is an aggressive investment firm,” he added. “They are not shy when it comes to using bankruptcy to their advantage.” The company announced a public offering three years after it emerged from bankruptcy, but the offering was postponed. When it did, Apollo owned the largest stake of shares.

Taking advantage of bankruptcy courts is also a preferred method of President Trump, who counts Apollo CEO Leon Black as a friend. And while Trump boasts about his dedication to the American worker, the company he keeps deliberately erodes the foundation upon which the middle class is built. In a 2011 interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC News, Trump said: “If you look at our great businesspeople today — Carl Icahn, Henry Kravis, Leon Black of Apollo — all of them have done the same. They use and we use the laws of this country, the bankruptcy laws, because we’ll buy a company. We’ll have the company. We’ll throw it into a chapter. We’ll negotiate with the banks. We’ll make a fantastic deal. … You know, it’s like on The Apprentice. It’s not personal. It’s just business. OK?”

“Every contract, they slashed benefits and made it harder for me to do what my father did: provide for his family.”

During Momentive’s bankruptcy proceedings, GSO Capital Partners, the credit arm of Blackstone Group, one of America’s largest hedge funds — headed by Steve Schwarzman, who chaired President Trump’s defunct Strategic and Policy Forum — translated its bond investment in Momentive into public stocks, a 6.8 percent stake. (A spokesman for Blackstone said the firm sold its stake in Momentive on August 3, 2016 — the same day union workers voted to strike if a contract agreement could not be reached. The spokesman, however, could not provide documentation of the sale. The spokesman also confirmed that Blackstone senior adviser John Dionne is still on Momentive’s board of directors.)

In 2013, Blackstone had bought a 20 percent controlling stake in another longtime upstate New York employer, then-declining Eastman Kodak, which had already slashed retiree health care benefits and pensions (though the company did restore elements of its pension plan upon emerging from Chapter 11 bankruptcy in late 2013). When Carl Icahn, the recently ousted special adviser to the president on regulatory reform — whom Trump also counts as a close friend — came to Trump’s rescue and retained full control of his Taj Mahal casino through a bankruptcy proceeding, he shut down the operation rather than give the union employees better health benefits. Roughly 3,000 people lost their jobs. “It’s a classic take-the-money-and-run — Icahn takes hundreds of millions of dollars out of Atlantic City and then announces he is closing up shop,” Bob McDevitt, the president of the local union, said in a statement after the closing.

Others in Trump’s family and inner circle have deep ties with these Wall Street operators, whose business tactics, like those being implemented in Waterford, affect middle-class families. Blackstone has loaned Kushner Companies, the real estate empire of Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, more than $400 million for real estate deals since 2013. The firm is one of the company’s largest lenders. Two months ago, the New York Times reported that Joshua Harris, a founder of Apollo, met with Kushner several times in 2017, at one point even discussing a possible job opening in the White House; by November of last year, Apollo would lend $184 million to Kushner Companies. (While Kushner is no longer CEO of the real estate company and has sold a chunk of his stake, he still reportedly holds properties and other interests in Kushner Companies — those investments are worth upward of three-quarters of $1 billion.) Kushner Companies is also on the clock to pay the $1.2 billion mortgage debt for 666 Fifth Avenue, a 41-story albatross in Manhattan that the company purchased in 2006, which is due February 2019.

Jack Boss joined Momentive as an executive vice president in March 2014, one month before the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and he officially became CEO that December. The union believes that Apollo brought in Boss specifically to weaken the union during the next contract negotiation, which was slated for 2016. “They planned this entire thing,” Dominick Patrignani, the local union president, told me. “They knew what they were doing.”

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Dan Patregnani, a union member who worked in Building 78, and the headquarters of Apollo Global Management at 9 West 57th Street in. New York City. (Jonno Rattman)

In mid-January 2017, workers rallied outside the midtown Manhattan headquarters of Apollo Global Management, the private equity firm that had bought their company more than a decade prior. About a month later, members of their parent union, the Communications Workers of America, also handed out leaflets near the White House as President Trump met with Schwarzman, whom he had named an economic adviser and head of the Strategic and Policy Forum during the early days of the strike. (The 16-member group would disband just months after this meeting.)

Jack Mack, the second-generation worker who compiled the list of employees with cancer, trekked down to New York City to participate in the demonstration outside Apollo HQ. He stood with dozens of other workers and supporters, and his hot breath crusted in the frigid air as he called out Leon Black by name. This was the first time I met Mack — the strike had just begun. As the event came to an end and the NYPD began to shuffle protesters off the street, I asked Mack what he planned to do next.

He looked me in the eye and said, “Go back up to the plant and stand out there until this whole thing comes to an end — until we get what we deserve.”

***

The labor negotiations broke down over the summer of 2016, and by August a strike seemed imminent. In early September, 85 percent of workers rejected an offer that would have forced current employees into more expensive health insurance plans and eliminated the much-beloved benefit for future retirees altogether. They officially went on strike November 2. Five days later they voted again, with the same result — they rejected the offer by a larger margin.

Ron Gardner retired on New Year’s Day 2015. He was 61. He’d already lost his home and moved into his trailer, and he’d spent much of the previous summer at Saratoga’s venerable racetrack, watching and sometimes betting on the races. “I won enough to keep going the entire season,” he said, seated at his dining room table, television game shows audible in the background. Soon after he retired, he changed his health insurance on Momentive’s recommendation, switching providers and opting for a plan that was cheaper from month to month but caused his deductible to rise from zero to $3,500. He wasn’t worried. “I had never been sick a day in my life,” he said. But shortly before he retired, right around Thanksgiving 2015, he began having trouble swallowing. “It scared me,” he recalled. “I couldn’t even swallow my own spit.” There was a nearly two-inch tumor in his esophagus: adenocarcinoma, a form of cancer.

Gardner had begun working at GE’s Schenectady plant in 1973 and transferred in 1988 to Waterford, where he held various positions over the years, including the production of chemical mixers for caulking After GE sold the plant in 2006, he worked for more than two years refining chemicals in Building 30, filtering out cloudy imperfections before transferring those same liquids into drums to be sold to consumers. “I often inhaled a lot of vapors,” he said.

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The water treatment facility at Momentive Performance Materials. (Jonno Rattman)

Gloves, Gardner said, weren’t required for the job. According to material-safety data sheets, gloves are required only if a risk assessment deems them necessary. “He would come home covered in this caulking shit, all over his clothes and his hands,” his wife, Donna, said. “It would be everywhere.”

He transferred five years later to wastewater treatment, where he ran presses that compacted hazardous waste into dry, disposable cakes the size of kitchen tables before dropping them into trailers for disposal. He had to clean up spilled waste by hand and scrape out the presses if the cakes didn’t fall properly. The plant, he added, didn’t require respiratory protection for that particular job. “I breathed that stuff in for three and a half years,” he said. By the time Gardner began his last job at Momentive, the white walls of the facility had long turned gray from the dust produced by the waste. “That’s where I think I got the cancer from.”

Starting in January 2016, Gardner began a six-week course of chemotherapy and a month of radiation, paying off the $3,500 deductible in installments. Despite the treatment’s apparent success, Gardner’s doctor pressed him to undergo an esophagectomy. The operation — which would remove part of his esophagus and reconstruct it with the upper portion of his stomach — would be risky, and one of his lungs would have to be temporarily deflated during the procedure. Gardner decided against it.

By October 27, 2016, his cancer had returned. He needed the surgery to survive. But now he was racing against two clocks: the cancer and the company. Labor negotiations had broken down months before; the strike would begin within a week, and his current insurance coverage would run out at the end of December. “Company-paid medical, dental, vision, and drug coverage will not extend for the duration of employee strike activity,” a letter to employees from Momentive said.

“I wrote all the numbers down, in case I didn’t make it through the surgery, so Donna could get my pension,” Gardner said. “I didn’t trust Momentive to call her and say she was entitled to it.” He called his lawyer and had his will updated. He went into surgery on November 29, and spent nearly two weeks in the hospital. “I wish I could’ve been out there on the picket line,” he said. “It was all such bad timing.”

Once home, Gardner was told by Momentive to sign himself and Donna up for new health insurance through Mercer, a private online benefits marketplace, where employees can choose from a variety of providers and plans. A 2014 Aon Hewitt survey found that despite accounting for only 5 percent of current plans, 33 percent of employers said they would begin offering insurance through private marketplaces in the next three to five years. In a 2016 report, Mike Gaal of Bloomberg BNA wrote that large employers pitch private exchanges to employees as a way for them to “buy down” to more appropriate levels of coverage. “While this may be true,” he wrote, “the reality is that the plan savings, in this example, are derived through shifting costs to employees through high deductible, copayments and out-of-pocket limits.”

“I wrote all the numbers down, in case I didn’t make it through the surgery, so Donna could get my pension,” Gardner said. “I didn’t trust Momentive to call her and say she was entitled to it.”

The Gardners’ 2017 deductible would drop to $600 each, but their monthly premium soared from $262 to $1,152 per month — a hike Momentive promised to offset for already-retired workers under 65 with a $400 monthly subsidy. He got his first subsidy check on January 27, 2017. As a retiree, Gardner was one of the lucky ones. The younger generation was battling a contract that offered them expensive insurance while they worked — and nothing when they were finished with their working lives.

***

As the strike wore on, it drew the attention of elected officials in the area. Twenty-one Albany County lawmakers wrote to Momentive chief executive Jack Boss that the proposed contract seemed “to greatly hurt retirees and take too many health care and retirement benefits away from active employees.” State comptroller Tom DiNapoli reached out to Apollo; he has New York’s state-employee pensions partially invested through the firm. “I urge you to encourage Momentive to work diligently towards an expeditious settlement of this dispute on terms that are fair to labor and management,” he wrote. On the picket line in Waterford, one popular sign slung around the necks of strikers called out Apollo’s chief executive by name: hedge fund billionaire leon black, tell momentive: don’t destroy good jobs.

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Union strikers hold a sign outside of Momentive CEO Jack Boss’s home near Saratoga Springs. (Jonno Rattman)

In early February 2017, likely facing pressure from the governor’s office and intense publicity around both the strike and Momentive’s high-profile shareholders, Boss contacted the union’s regional leadership, bypassing the local chapter, and offered to resume negotiations. Four days later, a tentative deal was reached. Governor Andrew Cuomo, in his first public statement on the strike, announced his support for the deal, calling it key to “investing in the [union’s] world-class workforce, restoring operations at the plant and keeping upstate New York moving forward.”

Under the proposed new contract, to be voted on February 13 and 14, Momentive would keep matching 401(k) contributions of workers whose pensions had previously been frozen and would pay each striking employee a $2,000 bonus upon returning to work. In exchange, the union would accept the proposed health care amendments for current workers — more expensive premiums and deductibles. The company, rather than provide health insurance to future retirees, agreed to give at least 100 veteran workers a $40,000 cash bonus upon retirement — around $23,000 after taxes — that would hopefully cover any medical expenses before workers were eligible for Medicare at age 65. Though this was a win for the union, the next round of negotiations, in 2019, could decide the future of whether retirees will continue benefitting from Momentive’s medical coverage. “We have the right to negotiate now, which we didn’t have before last year’s strike,” says Patrignani. “It was going to sunset, but it’s still a topic of bargaining for future contracts.”

“You either have a preexisting condition, or you have an underlying condition, or you have an undiagnosed condition because of the inherent risk of working in a chemical plant,” said Robert Hohn, a 55-year-old employee. “You would probably have to pay a high premium and a high deductible. Would $23,000 cover that if something went wrong?” Hohn’s wife has degenerative disc disease, which requires constant care, and chronic gastrointestinal inflammation. Under the new contract, Hohn would have to pay $74 per week for him and his wife, with a $3,500 deductible and an annual maximum payment of $7,000. (Most workers signed up for this plan, which is the cheaper of the two; the other option has a $12,000 out-of-pocket maximum for a family). “The health care is going to kill me,” he said the day of the vote. “With my wife’s condition, we will definitely be hitting the maximum every year.” When the new contract came up for a vote, he felt he had no choice but to vote no. (At the beginning of 2018, Hohn’s wife left the insurance plan; he now pays $36 per week and a deductible for himself of $1,750.)

But many other workers feared that if the contract didn’t pass, some would cross the picket line to return to work, giving up their representation and fracturing the union. “They are pitting us against one another and using that to their advantage,” one worker said as he waited in line to vote on the proposed contract. “People are scared, feeling forced to vote ‘yes,’ even though the contract isn’t much better than what we went on strike for.”

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A classified ad for temporary replacement chemical operators in the Saratogian newspaper on a table in the union’s break house.

This internal tension became more and more apparent as the strike wore on, endless weeks of picketing outside during the coldest part of the year for upstate New York. “When it comes to these guys losing their health care, I should give a fuck?” one Momentive worker, speaking on condition of anonymity, wondered aloud in January, before the new union contract was ratified. “Why should I care about you when you didn’t give a shit about me in the past?”

Like some other younger union workers at the plant, he was in the minority and had voted yes on the contract back in September, recalling the wage cuts and pension freezes of years past. To them, the older generation were on their way out; the younger workers needed this place to provide for their families for decades to come. They wanted a fair contract for everyone, but they didn’t want to ruin what they had already — a stable job — and were willing to sacrifice benefits in the process.

Apollo has shut down other manufacturing plants in the past, and that threat was real for workers on the picket line. Noranda Aluminum’s Missouri plant once employed over 800 union workers. Then it began a slow decline, and after Apollo sold its position in 2015, the plant shut down in early 2016. To some workers, a long and intense strike could make that possibility a reality. “To me, it’s not worth losing all of this. If they shut down, where will we go?” said another during the strike. “Stop whining and move forward. These old guys, they’ve had it so good for so long that they don’t want to give anything up. Sometimes, to me, it’s better to take one step back so I am able to still move forward — not like this situation now.”

The contract passed on February 14, 2017. The men went back to work within days. “They didn’t achieve everything they wanted,” said Bob Master, the union’s legislative director for the region. “But sometimes the fruits of victory don’t show up until later on, during the next round of negotiations, when the company remembers the spirit and determination of a united workforce.”

***

Robert Hohn and his coworkers are already anxious about what new concessions their next contract negotiation in 2019 might bring. Since the company’s sale to private equity a decade ago, men like Ron Gardner, who went into bankruptcy after leaving his home for a double-wide trailer and fought cancer from exposure at the plant, have watched as their Wall Street–backed corporation trimmed job benefits they’d counted on for decades — benefits all the more crucial now, as they face retirement tinged with the threat of cancer. This time around, it was health care for retirees. What will it be next time?

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Outside the entrance gate of the Momentive chemical plant. (Jonno Rattman)

Apollo, meanwhile, announced in July 2017 that the firm had raised $24.7 billion for its latest global buyout fund, the largest sum of leveraged-buyout capital ever raised by a private equity firm, poised to pave the way for many more acquisitions like the one that created Momentive. Up in Waterford, there are whispers that Apollo is even trying to force the landlord to sell the hot dog shack — which the union still uses as it’s headquarters — and its surrounding land rights.

But despite these big-picture moves by corporate financiers, workers at the plant are still focused on their benefits — assets that are crucial to their survival. “I still don’t trust Momentive,” Gardner told me. The company had already cut his pay. What, he wondered, would prevent it from eventually taking away the insurance subsidy he received each month? If he lost the subsidy before he got Medicare, he explained at his dining room table, he won’t be able to afford health insurance. “After that, I don’t know what would happen,” he added, looking out the window. It was starting to rain. “If the cancer came back and I didn’t have coverage, I would die.”

***

Ian Frisch is a journalist based in Brooklyn. He has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, Wired, Playboy, and Vice, among others. His first book, on magic and the secret lives of the subculture’s most prominent young magicians, will be published in 2019 by Dey Street Books, an imprint of HarperCollins. 

Editor: Michelle Legro
Photographs: Jonno Rattman

Fact checker: Matthew Giles
Copy editor: Sean Cooper

A Teen and a Toy Gun

(Illustration by Nicole Rifkin)

Leah Sottile | Longreads | February 2018 | 33 minutes (8,200 words)

I.

The night before Quanice Hayes was shot in the head by a police officer, the skinny 17-year-old was snapping selfies with his girlfriend in a seedy Portland, Oregon, motel room.

Bella Aguilar held her phone close when she clicked off the photos: In one, the 18-year-old girl pushes her tongue out through a smile, her boyfriend leaning over her right shoulder, lips pressed to her cheek, his dreads held back with one hand.

In another, Aguilar cradles her cheek against a black-and-sand-colored gun. It’s fake — the kind of air-powered toy that kids use to pop each other with plastic pellets in indoor arenas. Hayes peeks into the frame behind her.

If you know that the gun is fake, you see a snapshot of two kids playing tough; if you don’t, those photos looks like the beginning of a story about to go terribly wrong.

A few hours later, it did.

It was a cold night in February — a Wednesday. Aguilar and Hayes  snapped photos and danced when friends came by the motel room where the couple had been crashing. They drank cough syrup and booze. There were pills and pot and a bag of coke.

They fired the toy gun at the motel’s dirty bathroom mirror, laughing when they couldn’t get the glass to break.

When the long night caught up with Aguilar and she lay down to pass out on the room’s queen-size bed, Hayes yanked on her arm, nagging her to stay awake. Two friends crashed on a pullout couch; two more were on the floor. But Hayes didn’t want to sleep. He walked outside.

Hours passed. The sun came up. Aguilar jolted awake and felt the bed next to her, but her boyfriend wasn’t there. His phone was — it sat on the table next to the bed. She felt frantic. Panicked. Confused. “I don’t know why, but it was that moment. I just felt really, really bad,” she said last summer, sitting outside a Portland Starbucks where she took drags from a Black and Mild.

She couldn’t remember why Hayes had left. She couldn’t remember so much of the night.

She frantically tapped out a text to her boyfriend’s mother, Venus: Do you know where Quanice is? Read more…

Percy Ross Wants to Give You Money!

Illustration by Matt Lubchansky

Jacqui Shine | Longreads | July 201723 minutes (5,700 words) 

Percy Ross was a trash-bag tycoon, a serial entrepreneur who had made millions in plastics in the 1960s and relished spending it. But in 1977 he staged an astonishing reinvention. Ross would become a philanthropist — and not just any philanthropist, but one for people like him: a “blue-collar millionaire,” as he put it. He’d give money away the way he’d gotten it, in bills small and large, and always when it was needed the most. He’d portion out his millions in cash, in checks, accompanied by the satisfying clink of a silver dollar. Percy Ross would become, as the newspapers called him, “America’s Rich Uncle.”

Ross always said — boasted, really — that he’d made and lost two fortunes. It was his third business that stuck, the one in plastics. Ross had been a fur auctioneer in the 1930s — he met the woman who eventually became his wife at a craps table in Las Vegas while in the company of Clark Gable — and an organizer of farm-equipment auctions. In 1958, the story went, Ross borrowed $30,000 to invest in a failing plastics company. He knew nothing about the industry, and within five years he’d filed for bankruptcy — but with hard work, the help of his family, and a little innovation, he eventually turned the company around. Poly-Tech, as he renamed it, made plastic garbage bags. He liked to tell people he sold Poly-Tech for $8 million on the same day Neil Armstrong walked on the moon: July 20, 1969.

The story of the trash-bag turnaround was part of Percy Ross’s pitch-perfect rags-to-riches tale. Born in 1916 in Laurium, Michigan, a small town on the state’s copper-rich Upper Peninsula, Ross was the son of immigrants, desperately poor Jews from Russia and present-day Latvia. His father was a junk dealer who worked constantly, and so did his three sons. By the age of 6, Percy had begun making weekly rounds through the neighborhood with a wagon of farm eggs his father had bought for 12 cents a dozen, which he then sold to neighbors at a 3-cent markup. He sold magazines. He started his own business rebuilding car batteries. He would have shined shoes at the country club if they hadn’t rejected him for being too poor and too Jewish.

Read more…