Death Valley Days
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We are in the business of doing business with the Government, but that is going to be hard today. It is the start of the sultry summer here on the Potomac, and our first heat alert of the year. Bu that is not all. The Government is going to shut down at two this afternoon because Dutch Reagan is coming for his last visit. He is going to fly in on a former Air Force One and land at Andrews. He will travel into the imperial city by motorcade, first on the Suitland Parkway, and then onto I-395 to the 14th Street Bridge, and then north of the George Washington Parkway to the gates of Arlington Cemetery. Then his hearse will cross the graceful spans of the Memorial Bridge and then he will transfer to a gun caisson just beyond the World War Two Memorial in front of the spire of the Washington Monument. Then he will ride down Constitution Avenue to the Capitol, where he will receive visitors twenty-four hours a day until Friday. Then he will travel up to the National Cathedral to spend a moment with President Wilson, whose name he bore in life, before taking the plane back to Simi Valley to be buried on the grounds of his library as the sun plunges into the bast Pacific. The Government will close altogether on Friday, and in commemoration of a life, some folks are going to the Beach. I think Dutch would approve. I got back in town Monday after hearing the news of his passing on Saturday, so the dimensions of the national grief came as a surprise. Traffic is going to be a mess. It has been a long time since we did a Presidential funeral. Dwight Eisenhower was the last, and John Kennedy before that. Our last state funeral did not happen here. Dick Nixon did not want to come back to the town that held so many unpleasant memories for him. The bureaucrats politely ask the Chief Executives to submit a plan before they leave office. Dutch complied, or at least Nancy did. Dutch’s plans were already well established, and everyone knew it was coming. I was with some Honor Guard people last year, and they said they were on the beeper just in case. So there was no panic to get things organized. There are reportedly plans on file for Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and George the First. Only Bill has thus far demurred, but of course he is a baby boomer like me and thinks he will live forever. There is some talk these days about just when the Alzheimers Disease began to cloud that nimble performer’s brain, and of course the supposition is that it began while he was still President. That would account for a lot, on some scorecards, but perhaps we should let that die with him. He had a marvelous run, Dutch did. Twice Governor of the Golden State, and twice President of the United States. Victor over the Evil Empire, though we winced when he said it, and wondered if his words might bring down the fires of hell upon us, and destroy us where we stood. But he had it right, and the heavens stood, and the earth turned, and Communism was consigned to the ashbin of history. Which is not to say that the bacillus we released to fester in the Panjishir Valley is not toxic in and of itself. As Dutch would probably have grinned on Death Valley Day, “One thing at a time.” It was before his days of glory that I first encountered him, being a TV generation kid. I didn’t know the young President of the Screen Actors Guild, or his slow conversion to from Roosevelt Liberal to fierce anti-Communist. He had run the career course from bright young thing to declining character actor solidly on the “B” list. But he was a handsome face, and worked as a corporate shill for General Electric, where he honed his skills at the podium, and his natural flair for drama morphed into something else. I first saw him when he hosted a show called Death Valley Days. He was only on the show for three years, 1963-65. The show was sponsored by a soap company. The cleansing industry was instrumental in creating our culture. The term “soap opera” refers to their ubiquitous sponsorship, and the development of the vast desert valley that is daytime television. But they weren’t thinking about that when the Borax company brought the western show to the NBC Blue Radio Network in 1930. The show told mostly gentle and uplifting stories of the old west, and most of them, boasted the writers, had some basis in fact. It ran on the radio until 1945, and then was resurrected in 1952 on the new medium of television. All told, the show was alive in five decades, hawking 20 Mule Team Borax laundry soap and Boraxo hand cleanser. The soap was made from “Sodium Tetraborax Decahydrate” extracted from one of the biggest and richest deposits of the stuff on the planet. It happened to be located in the Golden West. The company was sold to the Dial Soap Company in 1988, when Dutch was sinking into the messy end of his second term in the White House. A multinational mining company called Rio Tinto Borax operates the open pit mine in Boron, California, now. It supplies China with all the refined borates it needs, minerals essential to life and modern living. It is tempting to think that this confluence of commodity and media existed for just one purpose: to seize he moment of discontent against a souring war in Southeast Asia, and transform an actor into the Spirit of the West, the living moderator of a valiant and just America. Dutch told the legends and lore of the Golden West, and in so doing, he became them. Think back, if you can, to the opening bugle call and the image of the mule team hauling the borax wagons out of the desert. Remember a slow Saturday afternoon and actress Rosemary DeCamp doing the homey commercials for Boraxo? That was America we wanted to exist, not the one mired in the disquieting images that were beginning to come to the evening news about body counts, and communists that just kept coming. Hundreds of actors appeared on Death Valley Days, most of them not big names. Just folks making a living and spinning human interest stories. But only one of them mattered. Dutch Reagan became our golden past. They filmed 558 episodes of the show, many of them on location in Death Valley. Life is filled with odd coincidences. Life is stark in teh Valley, and th eliving cheap. In the same years that Dutch was eliminating the California deficit, the Manson Family set up a retreat on an abandoned movie set where they had shot some of the shows. Charlie Manson was the other side of the California Dream, in their dark way just as valid as Dutch’s Morning in America. But thankfully Charlie is going to die in the slammer, and his passing to the darkest circles of hell will not hinder traffic a bit. Copyright 2004 Vic Socotra BORAXO Boraxo, Boraxo Chorus: –Words and music by Malvina Reynolds.
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