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Show 2 IS The Sail Lake Tribune, Sunda, January Bob Greene on slices of American life 12, l)W Cheeseburgers Greene, ly Boh 318 pp The Bust of Hub firt-t-n- Athcnoum, ; Bob Greene, a syndicated columnist (or the Chicago Tribune, is father easily irked So, of course, were such memorable lance-tilter- e ultra-liber- Broun could and did periodically explode in righteous wrath Likewise Buckley, likewise such an wordsrmth as today's William Safire. or mere nags, columnists of such stripe take themselves seriously, are certain our nation or world can be reformed, restructured and reshaped if their readers will consent to accept and act upon their strictures Tosses No Bombs Bob Greene, while easily annoyed, losses no verbal bombs at political enemies, makes no pretense of being seer, prognosticator or re vela tor Which is, assuredly, why Ins columns, appearing in some 200 dailies and , guire, are so widely read and enjoyed (His column appears occasionally in The Suit Luke a d Tribune - t Photo by Mortliu Leonard irur the Internal Hevenue Service, Congress, Khadafy or the purloiners of the MeLellin papers Virtuoso Columnist Bob Greene is a virtuoso among columnists. He writes for guys who prefer cheeseburgers to nou relic cuisine, Blatt's beer to light wines, apd Chicago to Cannes. Fortunately, the best of his collected columns appear in books such as Cheeseburgers. What subjects concern Greene? Take the Alamo as a for instance (and because the letter "A heads up the alphabet). If you, oi yours truly, decided to head for this sacred historical spot to see a structure enshrined in legend would you, or yours truly note that the San Antonio phone-boo- k lists such fine firms as Alamo Accessories. Alamo Aligning Service, Alamo AMU Je o, or even Al irnu Bail Bonds? Near Neighbors the average columnist report that the Alamo's W'ould ) There are those among us who, after, or even bcfoie, a hard day at the office, prefer reading about matters of little or no consequence, rather than mentally coping with the ills of Bangladesh, the evils of the Pentagon, or the woes visited upon us by In Cheeseburgers: The Vest of Bob Greene, syndicated columnist comments on everything from Alamo to book tours. Srilmnr s as Westbrook Ieglar and Ileywood Broun in journalism's palmier days So, of course, is today's William F. Buckley Jr. But Ieglar and the Book Salt ikikt Eljr $13.95. Pearl beer, and bemoan the placestand ment of Vasquez's Snow-Kon- e against the very adobe walls where Texans fought and died heroically to wrest a Mexican province from wicked Santa Ana. Local Color Bob Greene lectures San Antonio's planning commissioners not at all, gives us no analysis of the rights and wrongs of the Mexican War or of Mexicos current debt. Instead, lie calmly reports upon a family he encountered in the Alamo's courtyard. The son was blasting a song called Ride Like The Wind from his tape-box- ; his mother carrying a camera with faces of Mickey Mouse on the bearing strap was wearing a Flvis's face and the words 'The King Lives On . . deep-thinkin- g are that this shrine, enabled by the likes of heroic Jim Bowie, Davy Crockett and Col. William Travis, has been desecrated by the proximity of a billboard praising the robustness of Greene explodes not at all just observes and reports the inanity of it all. Now and again he plays a role, as when he decided to test his "middle age smarts" by taking the SATs. I believe I was the only student to go to the water fountain and a Woolworth's, the GM Steak House, Texas State Optical, or even the Big Apple Unisex Jeans Store? I fear not. But if we noted same, we would decry in fiery prose, the fact high-scho- take an Inderal for high blood pressure," he tells us rather calmly. The result? A very shabby score in math, but not too bad in matters verbal Slices of Life Greene covers quite a slice of American life in the 70 or so columns reprinted herein. He reports Ins boyish delight at being presented with a Louisville baseball bat inscribed with his name; recounts the delights of riding the Eastern shuttle (the infamous aerial cattle car), New is puzzled by the passing of Dick and Jane from the nation's textbooks; explains the strange case of the Beatles' bedsheets. All manner of things set him off the enough to report upon them passing of Playboy founder Hugh the vagaries Hefners mansion-pad- ; of mens fashions; the coming into being of the American Express Plati-nuCard (he refuses to trade in his lowly green card); the inexplicable mugging of Howdy Doody. Superb Interviewer Greene proves a superb interviewer when, in Nixon on Nixon." he gains our sympathy for the resolutely stiff and unbending "victim" of Watergate. He is equally able to make us see and feel the presence of a far lovelier notable, Meryl Streep. And Bob Greene is very readable, of indeed, when explaining the how-tbeing a hotel guest. Do not leave your shoes outside your door when you stay in a hotel that offers complimentary shoe shines. You never York-Bosto- n - o See Column E-- 4 U. professor follows the trail of Billy the Kid mythology Inventing Billy the Kid. Visions of the Outlaw in America, by Stephen Tatum; University of New 210 pp endnotes, Mexico Press, xi bibliography, index, $22.50, cloth; 1881-198- $10.95 paper. Whether the frontier tough who was killed in Pete Maxwell's bedroom at Fort Sumner, N.M., on a July night in 1881 called himself Henry McCarty. William Antrim, Austin Antrim, William H. Bonney or Bill Bon-nethe fact remains that the world has come to know him as Billy the Kid" and turned him into a legend. He used all those names, and more, this or from Hie East, whose murderous score -was 21, a dead according to legend man's notch for every year of his own life, leaving scarcely enough pistol grip to hold on to once the whittling started. Astonishing Durability The astonishing durability of the Kid s legend prompted Stephen Tatum, assistant professor of English at the University of Utah, to examine the whys and hows and wherefores of it..and lie has produced a fascinating book from those researches. Tatum found, for instance, that the Kid has never really been cold dead NQt legally, because no original copy of the coroner's jury inquest has ever been filed in New Mexico. "And even if the Kid were shot by Pat Garrett, or even if Garrett and the Kid buried another person or two bags of sand in the Kid's coffin, the Kid's burial site has been located, variously, in Fort Stanton. Las Cruces. Old Mesilla. and of course -Fort Sumner, where the official tombstone rests," the professor points out. - As is the case with remain the most unaccountable figure in frontier history." Unknown History To which Tatum comments, in one of the more beguiling lines in his book, "Sometimes a burro has a better idea of the beauties of Milton than we have ideas of the Kid s historical record." In perhaps the only known photograph of the Kid (he was using the name William H. Bonney at the time), we are confronted by a dumpy-lookinn gent wearing a high on the right hip and clutching the muzzle of a Winchester lever-actiocarbine with his left hand. He has less the appearance of a gunslinglout. er than a Not Handsome other cultural heroes, there additional uncertainty about just whose remains, if any, are in the Fort Sumner grave there is some evidence, too, that the Kid's final resting place is located under U S. 285 near the Santa Fe Sherais ton. No other character of the old West has so stubbornly refused to be laid to rest. By 1952, nearly 75 years after his reported death, one noted bibliographer had compiled 437 items of Kid material, including several novels, a hatful of motion pictures, biographies and one ballet. In 1965. ,. e same bibliographer estimated the ,ist had swollen to well over 800 items. Across the Screen On the silver screen he has been crossing paths and matching wits with Dracula and Mickey Mouse, and (in 1943) rolling in the hay with Jane Bussell (Howard Hughes' The Outlaw). He was either right or depending on whether or not you believed the Johnny Mack Brown version or the Paul Newman version. Tatum reveals that with a 1903 melodrama Billy the Kid. the Kid has been portrayed in more than Hi dramas in the form of radio sketches for Dcutli 'alley Days episodes, pantomimes, fiesta plays, and television plays. He has been portrayed in films by Johnny Mack Brown, Roy Rogers. Robert Taylor. Paul Newman. Audie Murphy, Jack Beutel. Lash Larue, Nick Adams, Clu Geoffrey Deuel. Michael Pollard, and Kris Kristofferson. In these productions both large and small screen, he has hailed from Texas. Oklahoma and thin air: has fallen in r, g buck-toothe- d six-gu- n back-countr- y He was certainly no Audie Murphy, or embarrassingly handsome Robert Taylor; not the real Kid. In fact, he looked more like a Michael Pollard of baby-face- Stephen Tatum 'Man faces of Billy Bonney snot-nose- love with women and horses; has robbed, killed, drunk, and shot bullets at Dracula; has worked for and against the law; and has been killed or allowed to light out" for a new territory with a lovely woman. "To mv knowledge," writes professor Tatum, we still await a pornographic Kid or a homosexual Kid, but then a new century of Kid bibliography is just now beginning." It was Tatum's intention to create "not precisely a study of who the Kid was, but rather a study of how we have seen the Kid in the century since his death, and why a particular image of the Kid gained currency at a par- ticular time." Arthur Chapman writing in 1911 concluded that Billy the Kid "must d d Dirty Little Billy (1973) or a myopic Bob Dylan than the Kris Kristopher-soof Pal Garrett and Billy the n Kid (1972). penultimate chapter. Understanding the Kid s Interpreters." Curiously, he finds that since 1973, "no major film, television show, novel or biography devoted to the Kid's life and death as appeared to offer any vision of expeironic or otherwise. rience on to the mythical Billy, whether invented as a villain, hero, or as a tragic figure, because the Kid or Garrett as the protagonist of the story opposed the savage forces threatening the establishment of the good society. Because cither heroGarrett in Separating History, Legend the point is that since the ironic visions of the Kid which appeared in the 1973 films by Sam Peckinpah and Stan Dragoti, the Kid bibliography has been dominated by contributions that return again to a preoccupation with distinguishing history and legend. Tatum has other concerns. He worries The question to address now, in other words, is not who the Kid was or how a book like Walter Noble Burns' The Saga of Billy The Kid distorted the historical record, but why and how it succeeded in establishing itself as the standard biography, and under what conditions its explanation of the Kid would fail to satisfy an audience and thus give way to a different image of the Kid. He concludes that America latched the bibliography's first period, the Kid in its second period turned to violence that was legitimized because it 'egenerated both society and the heros individuality, the story of the Kids battle with Western society in a romance story-fordramatized the personal code of honor and sense of justice that were aligned ultimately with society's best interest. Personified Rebellious Youth The Kid personified rebellious youth; persecuted, abused youth; the fight against all odds, the championing of honor, of family, of loyalty and of right." and martyrdom by the forces of corruption. Such is the content of In renting Billy the Kid: Visions of the Outlaw in America, by Stephen Tatum. An absorbing, interestHarold Schindler. ing western. "... As Tatum tracks the Kid's history from bullet to ballet, he analyzes for us the major books, biographical and novel, the important motion pictures among the scores on the subject, and tries to unravel the Gordian Knot of - 1881-198- 1, Billy the Kidism. What he outlines in chapters entitled "We Aint None The Sadder," All Bad." "Through a "Nobody's Glass Darkly," and Into the Shattered Mirror." is that Billy was shaped to fit the times, reflecting the anger or pain, cynicism or naivete of the day. The Kid is labeled the bastard son of Clio, muse of history, in Tatum's THEY'RE ON THEIR WAY!! SPRING IS JUST AROUND THE CORNER AND WITH IT, COMES THE FRESH, NEW BEARS. BUT. WITH ALL THESE BEARS ON THEIR WAY, WE NEED YOU TO TAKE HOME THE VINTAGE BEARS. Allot ,1 atuiat 21 i: i!1om Ik Stcmu.iv i.k mi to ciimiic the ummupimniMim st.uul.iicl th.u k;oic the pi. in ' h u !ik It .ill othcis ,iic ill J 4v.l Hut t mb ti" '. 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