Every year is a mixed bag, always with its measure of miseries, but this one, 2024, is packed with celebratory milestones for me. Fifty years of college teaching under my belt. One hundred fifty years of successful agriculture on our family farm. And now, one thousand radio essays under the title, Plains Folk, composed and voiced for Prairie Public.
There have been some awards recently, too, at least one of which is in the “life achievement” category. Not sure what they were thinking there, but let’s dispel any sense that I will be cashing in my chips any time soon. I continue to teach, from freshmen to PhDs. The family farm has more kids and more cattle on it than at any time since 1874. And come next week, ready or not, you can expect Plains Folk radio essay No. 1001 on Prairie Public.
You see, now well past my biblically allotted three-score and ten, I still operate with multiple advantages, all matters of grace for which I am duly thankful. I have the health and acuity to carry on — well, you be the judge of that! I have grandchildren and great-grandchildren, who tilt me toward the future. I have the privilege of living a life of letters and learning. And the capacity to embrace literary enterprises that regenerate gray matter, like my return to the performance and scholarship of balladry four years ago.
These are not random circumstances that just somehow aligned. Farm, faith, upbringing, landscape, education, and the occasional brush with mortality, all are shaping influences. I have what I know is a privileged position at a great land grant university, titles and medals and all that, which makes many things possible. Most of all, I have an exceedingly fortunate marriage to a life partner who herself walks the walk of letters and learning and teaches me (yes, sometimes corrects me) every day.
As for a literary life on the plains, I still have aspirations that sprawl across the beloved landscape, some of which I won’t talk about now, because they are too presumptuous. But here is one to make of record here, in Prairie Public radio essay No. 1000.
In 1931 the foundational scholar of Great Plains studies, Walter Prescott Webb, published The Great Plains. I own two first editions of Webb’s master work, one with uncut pages, a useless relic that I like to hold in my lap when I fall asleep in my big bison-leather chair.
Webb wrote a history for the 20th Century. It is my aspiration and intention, God willing, to publish in 2031 a history of the Great Plains for the 21st Century. Tentatively entitled, A Great Big Place (some of you may recognize the reference). I’m going public with this, and you will hear highlights from it in this forum for years to come.
For you and I, dear listener, have always been treated with respect here at Prairie Public, don’t you think? We can talk about anything in the realm of the public good, and we do not empower its adversaries. I offer my voice here for a constructive history and a good life on the Great Plains of North America. Thank you.
