15
Jan
One day Mrs. Fretag gave us an assignment.
“Our distinguished President, President Herbert Hoover, is going to visit Los
Angeles this Saturday to speak. I want all of you to go hear our President. And I want you to write an essay about the experience and about what you think of President Hoover’s speech.”
Saturday? There was no way I could go. I had to mow the lawn. I had to get the
hairs. (I could never get all the hairs.) Almost every Saturday I got a beating with the
razor strop because my father found a hair. (I also got stropped during the week, once or twice, for other things I failed to do or didn’t do right.) There was no way I could tell my father that I had to go see President Hoover.
So I didn’t go. That Sunday I took some paper and sat down to write about how
I had seen the President. His open car, trailing flowing streamers, had entered the
football stadium. One car, full of secret service agents, went ahead and two cars
followed close behind. The agents were brave men with guns to protect our President.
The crowd rose as the President’s car entered the arena. There had never been
anything like it before. It was the President. It was him. He waved. We cheered. A band played. Seagulls circled overhead as if they too knew it was the President. And therewere skywriting airplanes too. They wrote words in the sky like “Prosperity is just around the corner.” The President stood up in his car, and just as he did the clouds parted and the light from the sun fell across his face. It was almost as if God knew too. Then the cars stopped and our great President, surrounded by secret service agents, walked to the speaker’s platform. As he stood behind the microphone a bird flew down from the sky and landed on the speaker’s platform near him. The President waved to the bird and laughed and we all laughed with him. Then he began to speak and the people listened. I couldn’t quite hear the speech because I was sitting too near a popcorn machine which made a lot of noise popping the kernels, but I think I heard him say that the problems in Manchuria were not serious, and that at home everything was going to be all right, we shouldn’t worry, all we had to do was to believe in America.
There would be enough jobs for everybody. There would be enough dentists with
enough teeth to pull, enough fires and enough firemen to put them out. Mills and
factories would open again. Our friends in South America would pay their debts. Soon we would all sleep peacefully, our stomachs and our hearts full. God and our great country would surround us with love and protect us from evil, from the socialists, awaken us from our national nightmare, forever…
The President listened to the applause, waved, then went back to his car, got
in, and was driven off followed by carloads of secret service agents as the sun began to sink, the afternoon turning into evening, red and gold and wonderful. We had seen and heard President Herbert Hoover.
I turned in my essay on Monday. On Tuesday Mrs. Fretag faced the class.
“I’ve read all your essays about our distinguished President’s visit to Los
Angeles. I was there. Some of you, I noticed, could not attend for one reason or
another. For those of you who could not attend, I would like to read this essay by Henry Chinaski.