AMERICANA American Dreams: Lost & Found, by Studs Terkd, 1980, 470 pp., $14.95 from: Pantheon Books 201 E. 50th New York, NY 10022 Studs Terkel's latest book is composed of 100 oral histories gathered from around the country. The interviews are accounts of the American Orea experience-good and bad, fulfillment and disillusion. Many of the ac- .counts are about the hopes and aspirntions of working class people. The book continues in the best of the Terkel tradition of letting people plainly express themselves, much like Working or Division Street: America. Most Americans will be able to recognize at least a quarter of the people Terkel interviewed in Dreams. They run the gamut from a former Miss America to insurgent Union activist Ed Sadlowski to Detroit Mayor Coleman Young to anti-nuclear activist Sam Lovejoy to 79-year-old Appalachian song writer Florence Reese ("Which Side Are You On?") to'community technologist Karl Hess (interviewed in RAIN, Nov. '80). Two people who stood out in light of my own experiences were Romona Bennett, Puyallup Indian from Franks Landing in western Washington, and Bob Ziak, logger from Knappa, Oregon. Terkel readers know they can usually find people in his books that sound "just like" people they know. Dreams reminds us that if we just look in our own backyards we will find a Bob Ziak or Romona Bennett with a story worth preserving and learning from. Romona Bennett: ."I think of Indian.people who, at treaty time, offered to share with a few men from Boston. They never knew there'd be a Boeing Airplane Company or a Weyerhaeuser. They never knew there would be a statue in the harbor inviting wretched masses and that those masses . would come like waves of the sea, thousands and thousands of people seeking freedom. Freedoms that those Indian people would never be afforded. With all those waves coming at us, we were just drowning in the· American Dream.'' Bob Ziak: "You're always aware of the scent of trees if you're a logger. It turns yoft on. You know you've struck a cedar that may. have been in the ground for a couple of hundred years . . . they take on character. . . . The timber companies don't want a single tree standing any more. . .. I dpn't think they have any feeling for beauty, for something that is old." . Ziak breaks the stereotype of the logger with his 4-wheeler, .30-06, and "Sierra Club: KISS MY AX!" bumper stickers. He expresses his common sense thinking from the struggles in his community, talking of the early days of his family when the Wobbly organizers came to town, recalling his mother's comments when the Wobblies tarred and feathered in company towns. Now they have a unfon, but the struggle for health and safety goes on. He als,o fights for . the cougars, the wolves, the geese, and the bears. Ziak, like Bennett, speaks about his people, his community, and what the American Dream means to them. Terkel expertly brings out Ziak the logger, ecologist, and union man all wrapped into one. Terkel's Dreams is for all our friends who are still losing and finding, finding and losing the American Dream. • -Steven Queener Steve gr~w up in northern Idaho,. t'he son of a logger. "The lips that touch Welch's ~re aH that touch mine" From Welch's Grape Juice January 1981 RAIN Page 19 Welch's Grape Juice: From Corporation to Co-operative, by William Chazanof, ,1977, 407 pp., $9.95 from: • Syracuse University Press Syracuse, NY 13210 '• In 1869 Dr. Thomas Welch, a teetotaling dentist1 developed unfermented grape juice. His son Charles determined to popularize the non-alcoholic beverage "to make money on God's behalf, using his profits to enhance temperance and support Met~odist missions abroad, which he did." Charles was quite the philanthropist in his day, so long as you were in the right church. He signed his checks £qr charity: "Charles E. Welch, Trustee." Explained a relative, "He said he was Trustee for the Lord." • From Charles' death in 1926 until 1945 the company was under the control of a syndicate in Nashville. In 1945 self-educated Russian immigrant Jack Kaplan bought out the company and totally revitalized the operations. In the.same year, with Kaplan's influence, the National Grape Corporation was sold to,the newly formed National Grape Cooperative Association, Inc. "Clearly the primary and sole goal of National-Co-operative was profit; the purpose was ndt a mutual concern with the individual welfare of the growers. Organizing into a co-operative was simply a legal tool to increase mat.erial rewards." In 1956 Kaplan sold Welch's for $15. million to the Nation~l Grape Co-operative, transforming a national company into a subsidiary of a cooperative with 2,000 members. This lucid, detailed study weaves the history of the tongue-purpling drink from 1869 to 1969, showing tl}e intricate relationships between natural resources, growers, viticulturists, individual pers·onalities, market demands, and entrepreneurial talents. It's a juicy story, and bubbling to its surface are the conflicts of Social Darwinism vs. co-operatives, of nativist habits vs. democratic practices. One is reminded of John Steinbeck's lines in The Grapes of Wrath (1939): "in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of W!ath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vi~tage." -MR
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