Prologue
“can I ask you something?”
The student, a twenty-year-old male, approached me at the end of class, my course packet in his hand.
“Of course,” I responded.
“Why did you choose him?”
My approach to teaching the research portion of the freshman composition course gradually transformed each semester, beginning with my dissertation of 1998 from a study of student resistance. The second semester of the freshman composition course had the highest drop-out rate of any course in the college curriculum, igniting a search for new ways to inspire students to complete the class. Incorporating research into college writing and doing so correctly is not the most exciting challenge for freshman students. Students sometimes encounter a task master for an instructor who approaches the course and grading with a greater emphasis on failure rather than on success. I remember one such encounter when my class was entering a room where the previous class was still departing. One of my former students, who bailed out of my class at the beginning of the previous semester, now stood before such an instructor, hoping he would accept his topic.
“No! You can’t do that!” the instructor snarled.
“Why?” the young man asked.
“Because I don’t want to read it, that’s why!”
“Well, what about this topic?”
“I don’t want to read about that either!”
“Well, what am I supposed to do?”
“Find a topic for your research paper, and I need to approve it!”
“Well, where am I supposed to find it?”
“That’s your job! Now, I have to leave! And I expect you to have it approved by me on Thursday!”
The student glanced at me and his expression said everything—“Why didn’t I finish your class?”
Research for my dissertation proved that unless students are excited about their research topics, they are not going to finish the class. And yes, it is true that as each semester passed, I discovered certain topics I did not want to read about any longer—cell phone usage, for example. I wanted to see students choose topics that (a) they couldn’t find similar papers for on the Web; (b) would enhance their critical and creative thinking; (c) would empower them in making future decisions. By way of example, one semester I used a career theme in the class, in addition to two other themes students could choose from. In the career theme, students were encouraged to incorporate both primary and secondary research into the class and focus on a career of interest. One young man spent the semester studying the Highway Patrol. “CHIPS” was his favorite television program as a small boy, so he grew up planning to become a state highway patrolman. At the end of his project, he decided that becoming a state highway patrolman was the last thing he wanted to do. He wrote in his final self-assessment: “I don’t know what I want to do. In fact, I’m going to take a year off from college and think about it. I want to thank you for this project because you saved me a lot of time and money in pursuing something I would end up not liking.”
The other two themes consisted of a genealogical study and an ethnographic study where students spent the semester focusing on a group. The genealogical study yielded an interesting project. One of my students told me that she was of Scottish ancestry. As she pursued her Scottish line, she encountered a distant cousin who lived in Scotland. They began corresponding. Four years later, I ran into this same young woman on campus. She was about to graduate and her graduation present? She was going to Scotland to visit the distant cousin she met while doing her research project her freshman year!
By Winter 2000, I was looking for something else to include in the course. I worked as an adjunct faculty member for three colleges: two community colleges and one four-year institution. One of the community colleges focused entirely on online instruction. The syllabus was pre-designed and we were all doing the same thing. The other two schools allowed adjuncts to select their own textbooks and create their own syllabus. And by Winter 2000, I felt that my three-year focus on primary and secondary research needed a new injection. Students will always be students. I always wrote my own course packet and I discovered that some students passed not only the packet along to their friends, but their papers as well. I always had to stay one jump ahead of some of them! I was thinking about what I could implement into the course when a film catalog for teachers arrived in my mailbox. As I leafed through the pages, I began thinking, “Why not incorporate films in the freshman composition research class?”
Why not! The campus had spent a fortune on new media equipment in the classrooms and in most classes, that equipment remained idle. Why not put it to use?
Then my speculation quickly led me into a new concern: what films could I use in the course? I had already been yelled at because a previous textbook contained an essay using profanity—that complaint from a female student who didn’t like my direction of the course at all and who withdrew without giving it a chance. My complaining friend was representative of a number of students who resisted any change to their perception of what the course should be. That group wanted to memorize, be assigned a traditional topic, and did not want to do collaborative work. How would freshman students respond to the implementation of films in the course, I wondered? After all, films are primary research, and watching the film with the group is an example of a social setting and interaction. But what film or films would I use?
Modern films were out of the question, so I started looking at the classical section of the catalog. I read through the descriptions, thinking about the depth and themes of the films and their possible use in the course. Then I spotted a familiar title and paused to study it for a minute before turning the page. But each time I flipped the page, something kept drawing me back to the familiar title I had just seen:
“Rebel Without A Cause.”
What follows is the description from the cassette tape, a portion of which appeared in the catalog:
“Jim Stark is another good kid gone bad – and no one knows why. Not his teachers or the cops who arrest him on drunk and disorderly charges. Not even his parents. To all, Jim – like thousands of other middle-class kids – is just another “Rebel Without a Cause.
Legendary James Dean, in one of screen history’s most influential roles, stars as Jim Stark, the new kid in town whose loneliness, frustration and anger mirrored the feelings of many postwar teens – and still reverberate 30 [56] years later. Hoping to find among his peers the love and understanding missing at home, he must prove himself in a violent world of ritualistic switchblade duels and over-the cliff ‘chickie runs,’ an influential sequence extolled by moviemaker Allan Arkush in ‘American Film’ as ‘…an absolute classic of car action that has never, ever been surpassed.’
Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo (in his screen debut) both received Academy Award nominations for their achingly true performances as Jim’s lonely, suddenly-one-night girl friend, Judy and insecure, tagalong friend Plato. Together, they and Dean bond to form an us-against-the world surrogate family.
Director Nicholas Ray adds rich, kinetic visuals to this heartfelt but disturbing classic that introduced middle-class America to an enemy of its own making: its children. For in ‘Rebel Without a Cause,’ Dean became the archetypal rebel for every cause.”
James Dean! I remembered him. I was in sixth grade in Iowa the spring of 1955 when “East of Eden” appeared in local theatres. I had seen him in television shows: one—“The Dark, Dark Hours”—in which he appeared with future President Ronald Reagan—I distinctly recall.
I was in seventh grade in September 1955 when he was killed on a Friday in an auto accident near Cholame, California. I didn’t hear about it until the next day after returning from our Saturday visit with my maternal grandparents in Marion, Iowa. I turned on the evening news. James Dean’s picture was on the screen while the announcer told the story of his death. I remember my father entering the room. He asked me what happened. I responded by saying, “James Dean was killed yesterday.” And, of course, I thought my dad wouldn’t know anything about James Dean.
“He was related to your grandmother,” he told me.
I don’t remember responding. I just remember thinking that Grandma had a lot of cousins. Then I filed that remark away for a future time when I would undertake genealogical research.
My friends all talked about his death at school the following Monday. Some of them kept his picture in their lockers. One of my friends did that all the way through junior high and high school. I once asked her why she kept his picture there.
“I like him!” she told me.
There were those who loved him and who wanted to look like him. By eighth grade, Elvis Presley arrived on the scene, giving our conservative preacher some new kindling for the fire he was building. He heaped coals of fire on James Dean, Elvis, and any other entertainer who captured the attention of teens. But then, our whole generation was headed for “hell in a hand basket”, according to the preacher.
Magazines carried articles about James Dean, and I remember reading some movie magazine articles at the local drug store. One magazine stands out vividly in my mind. It was a Look Magazine dated 1956 with a close-up cover shot of James Dean wearing a western hat. We didn’t subscribe to “Look”, but we did exchange our magazines with my aunt and uncle. Our “Lifes” went to their house and their “Looks” came to ours. So for about six months, James Dean lay on the top of our magazine rack, staring out at me each time I passed the rack. Then one day, it was my turn to burn the trash.
We could burn in an open-air container in those days. I was hauling the trash out the door when my mother told me, “Here! Take these magazines as well.” As I headed down the yard toward the incinerator in the alley, I noticed James Dean riding on top of the stack, and he was the last item inside the barrel. I struck the match and stood there watching him burn. His eyes were the last to be consumed by the fire, and it was almost as though he was saying, “Later!”
“Later” came during the spring of my sophomore year of high school and my Driver’s Education class.
Driver’s education was taught in high schools in those days. We had to take the course the semester just before turning 16, the time when we could get a driver’s license. First thing on the syllabus: we had to watch a horrible slide show called “Death on the Highway” produced by a group from Ft. Meyers, Florida called “The Suicide Club.” We had to get our parents’ signatures in order to watch the slide show, and we had to watch the slide show in order to take the course. I remember walking to the underground location of the driver’s training room, dreading what lay ahead of us. My friend, Susie, had watched the show a few days previously and described what she had seen on our way home from school that afternoon.
“They even have James Dean!” she informed me.
As the horrible images appeared on the screen, we closed our eyes or looked away. And then about half way through the show, James Dean’s image appeared.
It was the same photograph that I had burned about three years before.
“This is the actor James Dean, as you remember him,” the voice said. “The next photo is also James Dean, and you will not recognize him.”
The image appeared on the screen. I turned my head. And while the horrible image remained on the screen, the narrator told the story of his death.
Years later, I mentioned having seen that picture on an internet discussion board, and was attacked by a number of people who said it did not exist. My husband Howard verified that it did. He was taking driver’s education the fall of 1955—his senior year--the same semester when James Dean died. He remembered seeing the same photograph! A number of my friends also recalled having seen it.
In an effort to prove I was not imagining things, I searched the Internet for information on the old driver’s ed programs from the 1950s and 1960s. I stumbled across a filmmaker who was making a DVD called “Hell’s Highway” using photos from those old driver’s ed programs. I contacted the people, telling them about the James Dean photo, and their contact person responded by saying, “I didn’t know we had James Dean!” Then I described some of the pictures I remembered from the “Death on the Highway” slide show, and that’s how I was able to identify the program I had actually seen. But what I saw was the original slide show. Photos from the slideshow were reproduced in 1971 as a film, but James Dean was no longer included. In fact, James Dean disappeared completely from the slide show three or four years after I saw the photo. It is possible his family learned about the picture and put a stop to its inclusion in the program.
I did not see “Rebel Without a Cause” until I started using it in class! I saw “Giant” in the early 1970s on television. Because of the law suit that kept “East of Eden” under wraps, I did not see that film for many years. In the winter of 2000, however, I sat staring at “Rebel” in a film catalog, wondering whether I could successfully use it in a class of college freshmen!
By Spring 2001, I embarked upon my experiment and chose three films to show in my classes. “Rebel Without A Cause” was one of them. I no longer remember the names of the other two. They were not successful. “Rebel” grabbed the attention of the audience and held the students captive. And something else happened during my showing of that film. After sitting through it several times, I found myself being drawn into it. And when the film ended and I no longer had a need to show it in class, I thought, “Oh drat!” But my interest in James Dean grew. After that semester, the theme of my course became “The Influence of the Media on Society.” I used James Dean as a model for that influence and for one or two semesters, showed all three of his films. Students could take the topic of media influence and run any direction with it, designing their own research projects. Looking back on it now, the experiment was 98% successful: 100% successful among serious, creative students who loved the challenge and freedom to explore, and 0% successful among the linear thinkers who wanted to memorize, avoid collaborative work and primary research, and who wanted to be told what to do. And the linear group generally involved some higher-level authority who had no idea what was going on in the class and who was more concerned with the fact that some student had complained about it. Fortunately, such encounters with students were few and far between. Some higher-level authorities proved to be greater thorns.
By Spring 2003, I scaled back my use of film to one: “Rebel Without A Cause” and I rewrote the course packet to shrink that usage. A new dean had come to power at one of the schools. The original dean was a wonderful man who promoted harmony among faculty, staff and students. Then he retired. The woman who replaced him sat back and watched the situation the first two years and by the third year, began meddling with everyone. The school became a cesspool where bickering and blame replaced harmony, and everyone looked over their shoulders. The new dean did not like James Dean in my course packet, and she wanted him removed. I remember wishing May 2009 would arrive quickly—the semester I planned to retire—and did! But in Spring 2003, I completely revised the packet and submitted it to my students and to my supervisor for their feedback prior to using it.
And it was in the fall of 2003, that I had a twenty-year-old man questioning my use of James Dean in the course at all.
“Why him?” he asked. “Why not use someone else? Why not use someone more recent?”
__________________________________________
Introduction
In Summer 1995, I traveled to Pennsylvania to take my written comprehensives and orals for my doctorate, something that required me to stay there for five weeks. Howard and I were heading back to Colorado and decided to route our return trip through Fort Wayne, Indiana. Friends in Colorado told us that if we really wanted to visit an excellent genealogical library, we needed to stop at the Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne.
“They have everything!” we were told.
“We might as well stop on our way home,” Howard said. “Who knows? This might be our only chance.”
It was by no means a quick stop. Howard investigated the stacks, while I investigated some family names I had been working on. In those days, I focused on my mother’s Spence line and in
1995, I was just beginning to penetrate that background.
After an hour or so of searching, we left Fort Wayne. We were heading for Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and we hoped to get as close to it as possible that day. Altogether, we spent six summers traveling between Colorado and Pennsylvania, and we learned quite early that we didn’t want to get tangled up in Chicago area traffic. So we were always looking for ways to avoid that city.
“We can take Highway 69 south to Indianapolis. And then we can jut over from there.” Howard said, as he studied the map.
Highway 69 was a new experience for us since we had never driven it. Prior to the trip, I had been searching for a third great grand aunt’s background in Putnam County, Indiana. As I studied the map, I noticed that we would be jogging through there on the other side of Indianapolis.
“At least I can say I’ve been there,” I said. “That family left Putnam in 1843 and moved on to Missouri.”
We drove along in silence, until I noticed signs for a town up ahead.
“Fairmount,” I said, aloud.
“What’s it noted for?” Howard asked.
“I don’t know. Something about antiques and a museum.”
Just as we approached the Fairmount exit, I saw a huge sign.
Home of James Dean! James Dean Burial Site! Where Cool was Born!
I read all of that aloud as we passed the exit.
“He came from here?” I exclaimed.
“And he’s buried here?” Howard asked.
“That’s what the sign said. I thought he was buried somewhere in California.”
As I glanced back at the exit, I remember thinking how strange it was that I kept running into that guy in different places along the road in recent years!
The first experience was eleven years previously in 1984 when we took our kids on our one and only trip to California. That was a spring break expedition which started in a snow storm and ended in another snow storm. California was warm and sunny, however.
We traveled the full length of the state and were on our way down the coast to Los Angeles. I remember stopping in Salinas—long time Steinbeck fan that I am. The road was closed at Paso Robles due to a rock slide. We were forced to take a detour through Cholame—and that’s where we saw the sign.
“Oh, my!” I exclaimed. “This is where James Dean was killed!”
“Who’s James Dean?” our son Brian asked from the back seat.
He was a young teenager at that time, and he had never heard of him.
“Kind of doing it backwards,” I muttered, as we now drove down Highway 69 in Indiana.
“What do you mean?” Howard asked.
“Oh, we saw where he died eleven years ago. Now, I guess we are seeing the area where he grew up! Then pausing for a moment or two, I added, “I guess I knew that! Remember Peetie—my friend from school? She’s from Marion, Indiana, and she said something about it last summer.”
“James Dean?”
“Oh, it was at the beginning of the class. We had to go around the room and introduce ourselves. Then we had to say something unique about the place we were from. Peetie said, ‘I’m Peetie, and I’m from Marion, Indiana, and I’m not related to James Dean!’ I asked her why she said that and she told me, ‘Oh, he was from there, and people ask me that all the time!’”
By now, we were more than fifteen miles past the Fairmount exit.
“Too late to turn around now,” Howard said. “If we travel through here next year, maybe we’ll stop.”
* * *
James Byron Dean was born February 8, 1931 in Marion, Grant County, Indiana. He died at the age of twenty-four in a car crash near Cholame, California on September 30, 1955.
The End!
The end for most people, that is, but not for James Dean!
A friend of mine has been compiling a list of books that have been written about James Dean. If all the books written about James Dean could be assembled in one room, they would probably fill a small library. They certainly cover a wide range of perspectives beginning with scholarly analyses to filthy trash!
This book, which will hopefully appear on my friend’s list at some future date, has been a project of mine for many years. I suppose the initial seeds were sewn by my father shortly after James Dean’s death in 1955: “He was related to your Grandmother.” I didn’t spend years thinking about that statement, but I certainly remembered it when I noticed similarities of features between James Dean’s family members and some of mine! (Actually, I connect with James Dean on two different family lines making him both my fifth cousin once removed and eleventh cousin once removed. He is also Howard’s eleventh cousin on one of his lines, a discovery I recently made. I joke about Howard’s connection from time to time by saying, “So, maybe we can go back to Fairmount again?”)
I started this manuscript about ten years ago, and then put it away, deciding that it wasn’t time to complete it. I actually forgot about my earlier endeavor until rearranging my research notebooks for the book I put out in 2010: The Sum Total—A Search for Levi Clay (1843-1917) and Jesse James (1847-1881). This current book extends the thesis from my 2010 endeavor—that we are all more or less the sum total of our ancestors. I also believe that we have their memories.
This book has been divided into the following Sections and Chapters:
Section One--Rebels With a Cause: James Dean’s Ancestors: Chapter 1—The Early Deans focuses exclusively on the Dean line; Chapter 2-- The Puritan Dilemma: A Contest of Wills (an Overview) provides a general discussion of the Puritans and their identities; Chapter 3-- Man of His Own Undoing: Hatevil Nutter examines one of James Dean’s tenth-great-grandfathers and his treatment of the Quaker community; Chapter 4-- Jesse, Frank and Jimmy: The Cole/Coale Connection looks at James Dean’s connection with Jesse and Frank James through the Cole/Coale line; Chapter 5-- To The Tune of a Different Drummer: The Rev. Stephen Bachiler (Batchelor) provides a thorough examination of James Dean’s most influential tenth-great-grandfather, The Rev. Stephen Bachiler; Chapter 6—Seeds of Dissent: The Husseys and the Wings presents two family lines who descend from Stephen Bachiler: James Dean’s Hussey line and the author’s Wing line; Chapter 7—From Cavaliers to the Amish: The Ancestors of Mildred Marie Wilson focuses on the ancestors of James Dean’s mother—Mildred Marie Wilson.
Section Two—From Penrod to the Madman: An Artist in Studio: Chapter 8—On the Bank of Back Creek looks at the region surrounding Fairmount, Indiana, where James Dean was raised; Chapter 9—The Adventures of Penrod Schofield, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn focuses on James Dean as a child; Chapter 10—“Perfect for Long-mont!” looks exclusively at the 1949 Speech Contest in Longmont, Colorado; Chapter 11—“Three Long Mountains and a Wood” looks at James Dean’s decision to become an actor as well as two significant people in his life: Rev. James DeWeerd and Bette McPherson; Chapter 12—“The Road Not Taken” focuses on his return to Santa Monica to live with his father and new stepmother, his stint at Santa Monica College, his short stint at UCLA and his decision to move to New York.
Section Three—The Creation of “James Dean”: Chapter 13—“New York! New York!” looks at James Dean’s early experiences in New York and some of the people he encountered; Chapter 14—Filmography lists the radio, television, Broadway, Off-Broadway and film performances of James Dean; Chapter 15—Looking Through a Glass Darkly profiles See the Jaguar and some of James Dean’s television roles; Chapter 16—The Immoralist focuses specifically on James Dean’s last Broadway play; Chapter 17—East of Eden: The Essence of Cal Trask discusses Steinbeck’s novel and the movie version. It also examines the relationship between James Dean and Pier Angeli; Chapter 18—Rebel Without a Cause: In Search of Jim Stark looks at the overall variety of teen movies in the 1950s and the political situation involving the Kefauver Senate Committee. It provides a special focus on the Greek tragedy elements in the film; Chapter 19—Giant: The Enigma of Jett Rink profiles Glenn McCarthy, the prototype for Jett Rink’s character. It also provides background material for Edna Ferber’s novel and the making of the film, with a special emphasis on the town of Marfa and its citizens; Chapter 20—“Death is My Neighbor” discusses the death of James Dean.
The Conclusion provides an analysis of the character of James Dean. An Epilogue follows the Conclusion, which returns to the event in the Prologue. The Photo Section contains photographs from our first and second trips to Fairmount, Indiana in 2003 and 2005.
