Thurber Tonight: Part 1 of "Gentleman from Indiana" -- Thurber's recollection of his father

"To my father, looking fondly westward from Columbus, Ohio, where he spent most of his life, [Indiana] was the romantic land of the moonlit Wabash, the new-mown hay and the sycamores, the house of the thousand candles, and the Lockerbie Street of James Whitcomb Riley."

-- Thurber, about the "Gentleman from Indiana"

by Ken

In the click-through we have Thurber's own description of how the pieces that were collected as The Thurber Album came into existence, beginning "as a kind of summer exercise in personal memory." Most of the subjects of that exercise weren't family members, but amid the 16 chapters ("arranged," an author's note tells us, "in a kind of chronological order") -- in fact, almost smack in the middle -- are a seventh and eighth chapter devoted to his parents.

This week we're going to look at "Gentleman from Indiana" and "Lavender with a Difference" -- and, as I mentioned last week, the uproar that broke out among the living Thurbers back in Columbus when "Gentleman" first appeared in The New Yorker of June 9, 1951, with publication of "Lavender with a Difference" only a few weeks away. (Nearly all the chapters of The Thurber Album appeared first in The New Yorker, as "recollections" under the general head "Photo Album," a heading that took on a particular piquance in a magazine that readers knew didn't publish photographs -- the album in question was Thurber's own.)

Charles L. Thurber, his middle son tells us, had a fascination for politics and, though not himself a politician, made his living in and around government. As his son James tells the story, his dedication to "the ideal and practice of good government" survived a lifetime's worth of successive waves of what for most people would have been crushing disillusionment. In tonight's installment of "Gentleman from Indiana" we follow him up through the numbing defeat of former President Theodore Roosevelt's 1912 Bull Moose Party presidential candidacy, for which he served as Ohio state organizer:

He liked a good, hard campaign, since he had a keen love of competition, but usually at the end, whoever won, he was left exhausted and disillusioned of the hope he once had that the American Way was destined to produce a breed of men selflessly devoted to the ideal and practice of good government. He actually believed a metamorphosis might result from the florid Presidential campaign of Teddy Roosevelt nearly forty years ago.

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