A Letter to Tim Holst

(continued from A Clown in Williston ND)

I have always loved writing letters. I still write them today, in the Age of Email -- mostly to grand kids, who think that mail carriers are my personal assistants. In the Ringling clown alley of 45 years ago I nearly bankrupted myself, buying stamps and stationery. My portable Underwood clacked merrily away day and night.

My news director job at KGCX turned out to be less of a sinecure than I thought it would be. And I wrote reams of letters to friends back in clown alley about it. I had to jump out of bed at 4am to walk down to the station and turn it on. The station’s broadcasting equipment was elderly, bought piecemeal from Army surplus entrepots and assembled by Oscar Halvorson, the owner. He was actually a wheat farmer who had taught himself electronics over the years, first as a hobby and then as a business investment. My job was to get Oscar’s vacuum tubes warmed up properly before turning on the main switch to flood the whole shebang with current. A cold vacuum tube is finicky and liable to blow up if not handled with kid gloves. This required an exact sequence of events; turning on switch A before switch B, and waiting ten minutes before turning on switch C, and so on. My skills in this department were puny. I’d forget the order or wait too long or do something else that left the broadcast assembly unfriendly and uncooperative. Then I’d have to call Oscar to guide me. Although he was a farmer, he was not an early riser. And he didn’t care to be roused from slumber while it was still pitch black outside. He soon gave me a nickname: Dum Gutt. That’s Norwegian for stupid boy.

Once I had the whole thing up and humming, I played a scratchy recording of the Star Spangled Banner and then announced that KGCX was now on the air. This was followed by the latest weather forecast off the AP machine and then a selection from an old Jim Neighbors record called “Hymns and Country Favorites.” At this point I turned everything over to the announcer at the home office over in Montana and busied myself getting my first local newscast ready.    

I rarely got out of the office before 4pm. And then there were city council meetings, county commissioner meetings, and school board meetings to attend at night. And whenever there was a lull in the action at the office I wrote letters. Lots of letters. On thick and grainy yellow paper provided for the AP machine in large rolls. This gave me the appearance of being very busy all the time, which impressed Oscar, but not his wife Faye, who did a ten minute Farm Cooking show each morning.

“You’re always writing away but you don’t produce much news” she liked to tell me. I would just smile and nod my head in reply. Then I would mention her in my next letter to Tim Holst as “that horse-faced harpy with a beehive hairdo.” For of all the people I wrote to during my tenure at KGCX about half of the letters went to Holst. Because he always wrote back -- not much, maybe just a postcard, but it was comforting to get a reply with the Ringling letterhead on it. I always made carbon copies of my letters, and I still have a goodly number of them today, salted away in an old footlocker. One of my first letters to him from Williston concerned l’affaire Becky Thingvold. With a few edits for clarity and continuity, here’s what I wrote him:

My Dear Holsty Tolsty;

These early North Dakota mornings are only made bearable by the song of the birds. I take a ten block walk from my basement apartment to the station, along streets that have houses on one side and wheatfields on the other side.The stoplights flash green until 6am, then automatically begin their duty of harassing what little traffic there is. Downtown consists of a sleepy Main Street that dips down to the Amtrak station. On the other side of that is a slough that drains into the Missouri River. Meadowlarks and magpies and jays banter with me as I stroll, as if merrily mocking my decision to abandon the big top. I may take up birdwatching, as opposed to girl watching -- less stress.

I’m involved with a girl named Becky, a reporter on the local rag. Well, not ‘involved’ involved -- more like I have fed her a string of fibs about starting my own Clown College here in town. She wasn’t impressed with my clowning background until I mentioned that I would start up a clown school. She wants to attend it, to write about it for the paper, and if I could make her my only student . . . . (insert your own dirty clown joke here.)

So it seems I’m committed to training the rubes around here in the fine art of pie throwing and pants dropping. Good thing I’ve got my clown trunk stored in my mom’s basement. I wonder how much it costs to have it shipped out here on the train?

Boy, I miss living on the train! A different view from my window each week and those familiar sounds and reeks -- Roofus snoring like a buzz saw and raw sewage dripping on the tracks. Here I rent a basement apartment for one-hundred dollars a month. It has a small furnished living room and kitchen and a huge bedroom with a king size bed that’s the size of my roomette back on the circus train. I wonder who has my roomette this season? Bet it’s a First of May. Please tell me what they are like this season -- they can’t be as good as we were that first season.

Well, that’s all for now -- I’ve got to go down to the Cop Shop to see what Chief Atol has been up to. He’s a roly-poly chain smoker who starts every morning by replacing his Winstons with celery and carrot sticks, but by late afternoon he’s alway back on the nicotine -- like a dog back to its vomit. He’s from a tribe of Lebanese that settled in these parts sixty years ago as shopkeepers and cafe owners. Now they own most of the construction and paving companies in the county -- remember I told you there’s an oil boom going on here? The Chief was one of the main hellraisers in Williston when he was a kid, until, the way he tells it, he was brought before a judge who gave him a choice -- either ninety days in jail or he could join the police force. He chose the flatfoot option and worked his way up to Chief. That’s the way things work around here, I’ve noticed. If you’re a native you always move to the top of the greasy pole, and if you’re an outsider (like me) you stay where you are.

Be good, amigo -- and if you can’t be good at least be Republican.  Tork.

A week later I got Holst’s reply on a postcard:

Dear Tork; the new clowns are a sorry bunch. All college grads. They overthink the clown gags until Swede and Prince Paul start foaming at the mouth. Linda is pregnant. How does Barnum Bailey Holst sound for a name?

Yours until the popcorn runs out, Tim Holst.

(to be continued)