Frankly, I wondered at first whether Andrew E. Durham's letters would arouse much interest in these days of globalization, the Internet and a pop culture centered around sensational audio/video special effects, but I agreed to at least look at a few. Soon an Express Mail packet arrived with the first of hundreds of pages of yellowed onion-skin copies of typewritten correspondence, most of it dating from 1913 through 1954.
It wasn't long before I cracked my first smile over a clever turn of phrase used to describe a domestic scene. The first good laugh followed not long after that, upon reading how a former governor colluded with a livestock speculator to run up the price of breeding bulls. An account of a disastrous summer theater production was downright hilarious. Then I found myself nodding soberly in agreement over witty but forceful arguments about the need to balance the budget and restore fiscal responsibility to government an argument that could have keen made yesterday, except that the deficits quoted were only in the millions, not the billions. Finally, there was a story about an ill-fated love affair of an old bachelor brother that produced a lump in my throat.
I quickly discovered that Andrew Durham had a great wit, an irrepressible sense of humor and untiring interest in his surroundings—the people, the politics, the commerce of everyday life—all of it studied thoroughly and recounted energetically with a homespun irony akin to that of other humorists of his era, such as George Ade, Mark Twain and Will Rogers.
In his day, Andrew was much in demand as a public speaker. A brittle newspaper clipping included with the letters revealed that at a reunion of his college fraternity, in 1929, he shared the podium with legendary baseball manager Branch Rickey and prominent Chicago attorney Roy O. West.
As demonstrated by his letters, Andrew was an irrepressible storyteller who could not resist a jest even when ordering parts for a stove. When writing in pursuit of a payment on an overdue note at the bank, he would ease the bite by asking the debtor's "help" in paying for a daughter's wedding. Andrew wrote incessantly. I suppose everyone wrote more back then, when telephone connections were often poor and always expensive, but stamps cost only 2 cents. Letters were also a form of entertainment in those pre-TV days.
Much of his correspondence was business-related, and Andrew was evidently a very busy man. But he could still find time to type out a five-page, single-spaced letter of advice to the son of an old friend who had landed in jail. He had never even met the young miscreant. In that and other instances, Andrew's prose took on new energy, stressing the therapeutic value of character and principles, as well as a good laugh.
Long before I stopped reading that first day, I was hooked. This stuff is priceless. Some of it might appear exotic or dated, particularly to nonagrarian folks who do not know what it is like to live off the land or reside in small towns where everybody knows everybody else—but even satisfied urbanites may be interested in reading about a different way of life. And they surely will see similarities to their own situations in the many stories about eccentric relatives, surly waitresses, guileful politicians, child-rearing and money woes. Far from being outdated, I decided, much of Andrew's material has a timeless quality—it addresses standards and values, family and community foibles, human dignity and folly—universal themes that still exist, even in our electronic age.
Editing the letters was the easy part. Frank and I never did decide how to organize them for publication. His "Pap" had corresponded with hundreds of people about a multitude of personal and professional topics; several diverse activities and interests would often be recounted in the same letter, sometimes as they occurred but often in retrospect several years later. We finally decided to present the correspondence in chronological order, so as to best reflect the flow of Pap's life, including his memories as well as his latest observations. I found it great reading, and hope you do also.
Douglas N. Hay
Mill Rift, PA
April 22, 1997