The Shovel Incident

January 18, 2009

A couple of days ago, not quite tired enough to go to bed and bored, I googled “neil clark pine bluff.” The usual things came up: my father’s obituary, a news blurb about a weekly newspaper he had founded that was celebrating its 25th year, and then an odd-looking article from 1996 I had never seen before. From the Knight Ridder News Service, the headline, “Gifts to Presidents Reveal America’s Passion Politics” popped up, and then some generally confusing information having to do with Daddy and a shovel. I clicked on the link and read about an incident my father was involved in that I had known nothing about.

It seems that back in 1967, Daddy had sent President Lyndon B. Johnson a shovel with this message: “I figure this shovel will come in handy to bury all the young American boys uselessly killed in Vietnam last week. I would personally like to see you have to dig the grave for every one of them.” My father. The anti-war activist. According to the article, the shovel and the note had been duly archived in the National Archives, and in the mid 1990s, the National Archives had mounted an exhibit of interesting gifts presidents had received, and my father’s shovel made the cut. It was on public display from March 22, 1996, through February 2, 1997, right along with the Declaration of Independence, Magna Carta, and Emancipation Proclamation, and all of us, including Daddy, were unaware.

Daddy was a bonafide hero of the Second World War. Decorated with both the silver star (the third highest award given for valor) and two air medals, he was in the thick of things as a forward observer behind enemy lines on the European Front. That experience was enough for him to know that war was not the way to settle differences among men, and besides that, his only son, my older brother, was, at that moment, in Vietnam patrolling rivers and conducting search and rescue missions for downed pilots. To Daddy, the Vietnam War was an American-made invention, something which didn’t have to happen, and war was bad enough when it wasn’t even optional.

One time, I naively gave Daddy a coffee table book about the life of John Wayne. Of course, the actor had been in many war movies, was well-respected (I thought), a man of Daddy’s generation, and I thought he might enjoy it, especially since he devoured books and there was no better present for him than something to read. Daddy was gracious, but muttered something about “warmonger,” and I knew he would not open it, much less read it. I didn’t know then the other side of John Wayne, his failure to serve in the military himself and yet a fierce supporter of the Vietnam War. The Indian head pottery flowerpot I gave Daddy on another birthday was a much bigger hit, to say the least.

Daddy, of course, made his way up from merely “printer” to newspaper publisher. He had published weekly community newspapers in other little towns around Southeast Arkansas and eventually started one in Pine Bluff called the Pine Bluff News. It was moderately successful for several years, but he was smart enough never to let the print shop go because that was a dependable source of revenue. The Pine Bluff Commercial was his nemesis. He thought it was an awful paper (as opposed to the stately Arkansas Gazette, which had no equal). So he eventually took the moderately successful weekly Pine Bluff News and turned it into a nearly disastrously uneconomical daily Pine Bluff News. I loved being the daughter of such a prestigious publisher, and I particularly enjoyed being able to read the comics a whole week in advance because of my special status in the business. The daily paper didn’t last long, I’m not sure, perhaps a little more than a year, but when he had to let it go, in the last edition, Daddy published a full back page “ad” that said in about 1,000 point type, “War is Hell,” and then following, in a somewhat smaller typeface: “It seems to me we should figure some way to stop it.” The word “hell,” back then, had more cursey connotation than it does in this day and age, so it was a strong statement with strong feelings behind it.

My sister, brother, and I were burning up the email airwaves talking about the shovel and remembering Daddy’s views on the war, LBJ, etc., and my daughter kicked in with a request for a poster-sized copy of the War is Hell page that she could put up in her dorm room. Then, the next thing you know, my brother is wrapping up a shovel and sending it, along with a note echoing Daddy’s sentiments but changing the word Vietnam to Iraq, to GW Bush overnight delivery, Federal Express, because it absolutely, positively, had to be there overnight, because this was Saturday and Mr. Obama’s inauguration was Tuesday. As my sister says, people talk about their family traditions, and they ask us, do you have any interesting family traditions, and we’ll say, oh, yes, the male adults of our families send shovels to war-mongering presidents.