Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, October 14, 1994 TAG: 9411160064
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A17 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BOB WILLIS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
I am not sure how it is in the television era, but it used to be that small boys first enlisted on the side of good by playing cowboys and Indians. Then they moved on to cops and robbers, and finally - in my day - to G-men pursuing and trying to outwit gangsters.
Follow this closely. There is evidence here of cultural, not to say sociological, progress.
The Wild West pitted good vs. evil in a primitive setting. The cowboy wore the white hat mainly because he rode a horse and packed a six-gun, trappings much admired by small boys. The Indian was by nature suspect, if not inherently bad; the cowboy's duty was to gun him down so as to protect the frontier settlement and, one supposes, the womenfolk - even though they represented that scorned subspecies, girls.
Notice, too, that the boy did not ask whether, in shooting the Indian, he was depriving the red man of his land. The rules of the game cast the aborigine as a war-whooping savage and an interloper; it never occurred to us that he could claim to be one of us, an American, let alone have sounder credentials.
It was no act of consciousness-raising or political correctness that took us to the next step: Cops simply were more technologically interesting, even before Dick Tracy came out with two-way wrist radios and TVs. Rather than skip along smacking our backsides as if urging on our horses, we could make howling noises in imitation of speeding sirens on our patrol cars while we aimed deadly cap-pistol volleys at crooks on the lam. These types were, of course, usually swarthy and foreign-looking.
But there was a level of sophistication that, in our minds, went beyond even Dick Tracy and his sidekick Pat Patton. G-men - federal agents - were the ultimate law-enforcers, sedulously devoted, as local police seldom were, to dusting for fingerprints and scooping up bits of dust and hair. They put science to work in foiling criminals.
So I was ripe, in the late 1930s, to become a Junior G-Man.
Those were times of great public fascination with gangsters and their molls. Names like Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, Alvin Karpis, and Bonnie and Clyde rolled trippingly off the tongue. Some people thought of them as Robin Hoods: During the Great Depression, banks symbolized an economic system that had lost our trust, and robbing one could be viewed as justifiable larceny.
But sentiment swings to the winner, and when John Dillinger was shot down in Chicago in 1934 - betrayed by ``the Lady in Red'' - it created a lifetime opportunity for one of the participating agents, Melvin Purvis. He became the embodiment of the brainy, courageous G-man, and his boss, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, encouraged him in his new pursuit.
When a youngster mailed in a couple of box tops from Post Toasties cereal, Purvis would send him a bright metal badge proclaiming him an Operative. My brother Billy had first access to the cereal boxes - he was five years my senior - so he won promotions to Roving Operative and then Chief Operative. I had to be content with staying in the ranks and trying to make a name for myself by ferreting out bad men lurking unsuspected in our midst.
That was even harder than it sounds. In his book ``Being a Boy,'' the late Paxton Davis described his activities as an ``Inspector Post Detective,'' a precursor of Purvis. Davis had a friend in Winston-Salem, N.C., named Freddy who ran the Mekechum Detective Agency, handing out daily assignments to his agents. These were usually ``such mundane duties as shadowing suspicious neighborhood characters, generally our sisters, and logging license numbers of all the cars that passed up Stratford Road between, say, lunch and sunset.''
Davis admitted this soon became boring, but he had an advantage on me in that he lived in a city. I lived in rural Georgia more than a mile from the nearest pavement, and let me tell you: Even sisters, of whom I had two, have trouble looking suspicious in such a pristine setting. There was no crime wave then in Clayton County, and little hope of one; now and then a prison crew would come out to work on our dirt roads, but those men already were jailbirds. Where was a crook for me to catch?
I consoled myself for a while by boning up on the booklet Purvis sent with the badge. It gave tips to the budding lawman; e.g., to disguise your appearance, slouch, walk with a different gait. I tried, but those who already knew me thought I was just being sillier than usual.
There was better advice on how to stake out a house: Put men at opposite corners, and only two of you can cover all sides at once. If I'd had a confederate, that would have worked fine with our home, which was rectangular; not so well with our grandparents', an irregular Victorian structure with many angles and extensions. But I spotted no evildoers going in or coming out of either house, except for my brother, who qualified as a scoundrel because he wouldn't let me read his Big Little Books.
Our rural retreat, you see, was the Junior G-Man's version of Boise, Idaho, where J. Edgar Hoover used to send FBI agents who were in disfavor. I don't remember it, but my siblings tell me that one day, disconsolate at the shortage of desperadoes, I moped: ``I just wish I could say to somebody, `You're under arrest.'''
Alas, that day never came. Finally it ceased to matter. All boyhood games lose their novelty, and after a time as a feckless detective I moved on to being the comics' Flash Gordon, with his ray gun, or (inspired by a movie starring Spencer Tracy) an explorer like Henry M. Stanley in darkest Africa.
My toy pistols weren't retired, of course; they simply were put into another kind of service. You make do with the kind of villains you can find. But - always - you remain on the side of Light.
Bob Willis is retired associate editor of the Roanoke Times & World-News editorial page.
by CNB