Clanging and banging on my Federal typewriter, bought by the sweat and blood of our downtrodden and soak-rich taxpayers, I sit with badly twisted emotions in 101 House Office Building, reviewing “The 101 Ranch,” by Professor Ellsworth Collings and Alma Miller England (sister of the Miller Brothers). Yellow cover; snappy job; printed, bound, and published right on the University grounds.
Emotions. Oh yes. The biblio-midwife has just delivered me of my first book. Professor Collings, living in Injun country, has written heap many books, and on education—which professors say I did not get. I swear I am not trying to get even with the Tribe of Professors, but just as it hurt my dear old Prexy to throw me out of the University of Texas, so it pains me in this case to carp a little.
101 Ranch! What should we get from such a story? Pistol smoke should ooze from it, you should hear the war cry of the Indian, the roar and bellow of the stampede. Also, we should hear and see the pomp, the glitter, spangles, and throb of the circus and the wild west show, the calliope and flashing color.
But the book is, more than anything else, stereotyped praise for the Miller Brothers, with paste-ins from every kind of advertisement and not-so-well written articles from country and big town newspapers; they come from the Rock Island Railroad and 101 Ranch “Magazines.” A better title for the book would be “A Eulogy of the Miller Brothers, containing also a Scrap Book Leisurely Pasted Together in Idle Hours by a Good Professor at Oklahoma U., with Sundry Irrelevant Prices of Cattle, Names of Indians, and Legal Documents With Nary a Whereas Left Out.”
Bill Pickett, black hero of every boy of the Southwest, the originator and still, though dead, the greatest bull-dogger that ever lived, is given too little time and space. Numerous other famous characters who simply riot in color are laid flat and colorless, dead and dreary, with a paste-in. The Miller Brothers themselves, in spite of all the well intentioned eulogy, do not come off so well, though all that may have been said in detraction of them is passed over with praise.
It is a book Texans and Oklahomans will want to read. For outlanders too much is taken for granted, and there is too much of detail in facts and figures meaning nothing. As a product of a university press, it is very interesting, and a symbol of the new and important work being done by these presses for various regions of the country. But the publishers should have insisted on a more cohesive job. The quotations and paste-ins are liable to start anywhere, and blurb-off anywhere. Chapter X, “The Old West on the 101,” tells of the National Editorial Association visiting the ranch in 1905. Suddenly and without warning, we jump to the 1924 Terrapin Derby. Just as suddenly the derby ends, and we then hear of “the many diversified resources of the 101 Ranch,” pasted in from the Daily Oklahoman. Then something is said of the young visiting dudes of the East. Professor, Professor! If university presses are to succeed, they must never give a professor, or a friend, a break. This book could have been pointed up, quotations cut about ninety precent, chapters rearranged, and it might have been very good.
The Saturday Review of Literature, August 7, 1937
Emotions. Oh yes. The biblio-midwife has just delivered me of my first book. Professor Collings, living in Injun country, has written heap many books, and on education—which professors say I did not get. I swear I am not trying to get even with the Tribe of Professors, but just as it hurt my dear old Prexy to throw me out of the University of Texas, so it pains me in this case to carp a little.
101 Ranch! What should we get from such a story? Pistol smoke should ooze from it, you should hear the war cry of the Indian, the roar and bellow of the stampede. Also, we should hear and see the pomp, the glitter, spangles, and throb of the circus and the wild west show, the calliope and flashing color.
But the book is, more than anything else, stereotyped praise for the Miller Brothers, with paste-ins from every kind of advertisement and not-so-well written articles from country and big town newspapers; they come from the Rock Island Railroad and 101 Ranch “Magazines.” A better title for the book would be “A Eulogy of the Miller Brothers, containing also a Scrap Book Leisurely Pasted Together in Idle Hours by a Good Professor at Oklahoma U., with Sundry Irrelevant Prices of Cattle, Names of Indians, and Legal Documents With Nary a Whereas Left Out.”
Bill Pickett, black hero of every boy of the Southwest, the originator and still, though dead, the greatest bull-dogger that ever lived, is given too little time and space. Numerous other famous characters who simply riot in color are laid flat and colorless, dead and dreary, with a paste-in. The Miller Brothers themselves, in spite of all the well intentioned eulogy, do not come off so well, though all that may have been said in detraction of them is passed over with praise.
It is a book Texans and Oklahomans will want to read. For outlanders too much is taken for granted, and there is too much of detail in facts and figures meaning nothing. As a product of a university press, it is very interesting, and a symbol of the new and important work being done by these presses for various regions of the country. But the publishers should have insisted on a more cohesive job. The quotations and paste-ins are liable to start anywhere, and blurb-off anywhere. Chapter X, “The Old West on the 101,” tells of the National Editorial Association visiting the ranch in 1905. Suddenly and without warning, we jump to the 1924 Terrapin Derby. Just as suddenly the derby ends, and we then hear of “the many diversified resources of the 101 Ranch,” pasted in from the Daily Oklahoman. Then something is said of the young visiting dudes of the East. Professor, Professor! If university presses are to succeed, they must never give a professor, or a friend, a break. This book could have been pointed up, quotations cut about ninety precent, chapters rearranged, and it might have been very good.
The Saturday Review of Literature, August 7, 1937
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