Woody Guthrie

Last night, American Masters featured Woody Guthrie. I realized that I really didn't know that much about him. I knew he was a folk singer/song writer, who had written some of the most influential songs about the dust bowl, unions, communism, war, anti-war, etc., etc.. I had no idea about the tragedy connected to his life.

"He was born in Okemah, Oklahoma, on July 14, 1912, 12 days after the Democrats nominated his namesake for the presidency of the United States.

Woodrow Wilson Guthrie -- "Woody" almost immediately -- was Charley Guthrie's son and like his father ever the optimist. He was Nora's son too, hers the gift of old songs, and a dreadful fear he would inherit her madness.

Together they raised Woody, his two brothers and two sisters in a middle-class, foredoomed home the neighbors judged one of the finest in that farming community turned oil boom town.

Life in Okemah might have been comfortable, with cotton prices up and beef down, but for the fires.

Fire was to dog Woody, boy and man. A kerosene lamp shattered - the OKEMAH LEDGER reported it as an accident, while folks in town whispered otherwise - and flames consumed his beloved older sister Clara, the one who called him "Woodblock," when the boy was just months shy of his seventh birthday.

Another blaze leveled the family home, sending the Guthries to live in the weathered London house, high on the weedy hillside overlooking the Fort Smith and Western depot at the foot of Columbia Street.

There were other fires, unexplained. Woody was not yet 15 when his mother hurled a kerosene lamp at a dozing Charley, searing his chest from neck to navel. Members of Charley's Masonic Lodge arranged to send Nora to the state asylum in Norman.

Years later, and half a continent distant, a short circuit in a newly repaired radio sent flames racing through the child's bedding, and took the life of Woody's charming daughter Cathy Ann, "Stackabones," the youngster who inspired so many of her father's magical songs for children.

And near the end of his wanderings, Woody splashed gasoline on a Florida campfire; it flared and severely burned his right arm. The puckered scars would leave him unable play guitar. He was left mute, the once restless youth turned rebel now a man resigned to his mother's fate.

Guthrie was just 42 when he entered the hospital for the last time in 1954. His period of true creativity had spanned no more than eight or nine years, though in that time, he had traveled far, seen wonders and known defeats, and written as many as 1,400 songs. He had traveled Route 66, he boasted, enough to run it up to 6,666, back and forth, across the county as whim and winds took him.

All the while, he never seemed to find what he was looking for."

According to the Huntington's Disease Society of America:

Huntington's Disease is a devastating, hereditary, degenerative brain disorder for which there is, at present, no effective treatment or cure. HD slowly diminishes the affected individual's ability to walk, think, talk and reason. Eventually, the person with HD becomes totally dependent upon others for his or her care. Huntington's Disease profoundly affects the lives of entire families -- emotionally, socially and economically.





The program was a wonderful reminder to be thankful for my life, but not to grow to complacent in comfort.