Growing up in a small town on the lakeshore of Northern Ohio, before General Dwight Eisenhower became President, was like living in another world. Not my America in San Francisco today. One remembers rainy spring mornings, few cars in sight, when a small boy, an only child, tramped in his galoshes after a tiny yellow-green leaf carrying an ant for miles (or at least, for blocks) through entwined tributaries in the silted gutters of Vine Street to a confluence of the waters, and the leaf swirling away before he could rescue it, into the Mississippi of the street which led to school.

It was on such a spring day, a Saturday, that Nathan Nash, the well-named Nash car dealer, took Ma out for a driving lesson, with me in the back seat. All went well, until coming to the end of a road at the South Ridge, Ma crashed into stone lion which, BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN-like, guarded an estate there. I remember being thrown in the air a few inches, and the lion seeming to roar at me. Ma never tried to drive again.

I still feel the summers on Lake Erie, when crew-headed, I dug sand castles where "Indian Creek" splashed home. And the day, virtually alone on the beach, Pa and I suffered severe sunburn, which kept us covered with tannic acid jelly for a hot, humid month of August. Uncomfortable, we agreed -- but (chuckle-chuckle, in those days before the rise in Melanoma deaths), "at least nothing life threatening."

[This morning, I craned my neck in the mirror, trying to see some kind of mole in my hairline.]

Fall brought school and study again; raking the lawn of our fort-like home on Swan Street, piling withered leaves onto bonfires; watching the flames of Halloween rise in the night. Fall was my favorite time of year, even if one evening at dusk, crossing the schoolground, thinking of a Pumpkin Pie that Ma was baking for us, a pal and I ran into the legendary *"Ramblin' Ian" Barr," who approached us with his best buddy, Muggs Wulfert. Ramblin' Ian lived with a haggard-looking woman on the Nickel Plate trackside, and he was a rather fearsome figure. [Another night, I had mistaken the shadow of a mailbox under a street lamp for his form, and run all the way home.] Ian was a scavenger, always rambling about town, and on this evening, his gait was wider than usual. He called out, "Sandy," and clutched me to his damp tweed coat. He whipped off his cap, bent down and with an acrid breath, whispered: "Give your father, Scotty, me regards. Old Ian and Scotty both served and were wounded in the Service of Our King!"

As I was repelled by Ian, I was unaccountably attracted to him, too, for the reason that he must have fought and spilled blood along side my Pa in the Great War. When I told Pa about the encounter, he just nodded his head and grinned. Ramblin' Ian came into money a summer or two later, by the will of a previously unknown relative in Erie, Pa. Shortly after, Muggs Wulfert fell between a bed and the wall at the trackside hut; he strangled on his own vomit. Ramblin' Ian drank himself ruddy, and to death, before the next winter was out.

But winter, when it came, was for me as white as the star on the throat of my cat Angus, as cold and curiously fragrant as his fur when he came into the house. His eyes -- yellow worlds all their own -- he sat by the fire, looking at me with kind . . . malevolence, across all the Christmas presents under the tree. He seemed to long to leap on the packages, chew on their maddening red ribbons, roll in the crinkly, spotted paper, and devour the contents of all the boxes.

But Angus never did. Angus was a good cat.

When he innocently marched one Sunday out of the snow, down the aisle, and jumped up on the pulpit of Reverend Strickler's Congregational Church, someone from our church, it was said -- or at least from the so-termed "Holy Roller" one across the street from us -- possibly decided Angus was a warlock, a Satan's helper, because he was black and was embellished with that white star. One evening in fall, after we ceased going to the Congregational Church, Angus was shot with a beebee gun or a .22 through his white star, a wound from which even his great heart could not allow him to recover.

But Ma and Pa saw me through my grief -- Pa helping me build a model of the Sloop "Baltimore," and Ma baking those pies: pumpkin, lemon, apple, in that shortbread crust of hers. I comforted myself by listening to Tom Mix, Jack Armstrong, I Love a Mystery, Escape and The Mercury Theater on the Air. On account of all the letters I sent, for autographed pictures and "decoder rings," I began the education which makes up stamp collecting.

And one day it was spring again.

Now, in at the end of September, I think of the Death of Angus, as fall comes on, and of rabbit-proud Tippie the Manx Cat, who hopped into my life the next year.

Such is memory and nostalgia.

---------------

Far to the west of my little town, lay sleepy Defiance, Ohio, only 16,500 in population (even today). A place named "by a madman," the Toledo and Akron papers report, Defiance had only two claims to fame until Terry Ryan wrote her best selling book: 1) General "Mad Anthony" Wayne built Fort Defiance, in 1827, at the junction of the Maumee and Auglaize rivers, where he slaughtered the Shawnee, Miami, Ottawa, Potawatomi, Chippewa, Sauk, Fox and Iroquois, in a battle which secured the region around the Great Lakes for the White Man; and 2) General Eisenhower made the town a campaign stop once, in 1952.

In that town of castle-like grain elevators, while I was a kid to the East, a redheaded woman named Evelyn Ryan, a devout Catholic, lived with her ten children. They all grew up, became successful, and lived happily ever after, it is said. And by her Daughter Terry's account, "The Prize Winning Mom of Defiance, Ohio: How My Mom Raised 10 Kids in 25 Words or Less," Mrs. Ryan must have been a stoic of epic quality.

She had met her husband, Leo "Kelly" Ryan, when he had ambitions of becoming a singer with one of the big swing bands that played "sinful fox-trots" (which 1930's and 1940's churches thundered against), at the resorts up on Lake Erie. Kelly used to come in the night and slip Evelyn out the back bedroom window of her home. They danced under moonlight in the pavilion at Sandusky, and soon they were married. Unfortunately, when Kelly got drunk and crashed his car one evening, his vocal cords were damaged by glass, ending his hopes of becoming famous.

In the 1940's, Evelyn Ryan had little choice but to have one child after another. Contraceptives were not generally available (except in disreputable places, where they were referred to, in whispers, as "rubbers"), and in any case, the Church forbade their use. Her children, the end of World War II, and general attitudes of the time kept Evelyn pretty much housebound. Like most American women then, she had never learned to drive, and was discouraged from doing so.

Milk and groceries were delivered by the dairy and stores in town, or shopped for on Saturday, or brought home by the husband after work. [All stores were, of course, closed on Sunday.] There were no credit cards, and Evelyn would not have been allowed to have one, in most states, if they had been invented yet.

In fact, as an ordinary middle class married woman, a housewife, Evelyn would have had difficulty owning anything in her own name. Divorce was very difficult to obtain, and if she had become widowed, before or after World War II, she would have had difficulty finding work to support her ten children. "Unskilled," she would have worked at far less an hourly wage than a man. She would have had to put her family on "relief" (an early day term for "welfare"). A "means test" would have been applied to her possessions, and if she were lucky enough to have been left any property, she likely would have been forced to place it in trust, managed by the friendly local bank or savings-and-loan.

Women in America, fifty -- even forty -- years ago, though they had recently managed to receive the right to vote, were still considered second class citizens, not capable of managing anything of substance except a house and children -- much the status to which Blacks, Native Americans and other people of color were relegated. And for all we tout the freedom of women around the World now, some would argue that women even today are just a Supreme Court decision or two away from becoming second class citizens again. But Evelyn, "happy in her work" -- for what else could she do respectably? -- lived an industrious, sometimes emotionally difficult, often physically exhausting life, raising the kids, cooking, baking, cleaning, scrubbing, washing and ironing.

Her married life was complicated by the fact that Husband "Kelly" worked at a tedious, dead-end job as a punch-press operator. Kelly probably had no other choice because he had likely dropped out of school at 16 with a "work permit," as two-thirds of American children did until the late 1950's. He consoled himself for losing his dreams most nights by bringing home a couple of cartons of Pabst's Blue Ribbon long necks and a pint of Four Roses or Jim Beam, which he drank while listening to the Indians or the Cleveland Browns on the radio. When the home team was not doing well, Kelly tended to blow up in a rage, push his kids and Evelyn around a bit.

All of that began to change, when a device the size of a small filing cabinet, with a tiny porthole-like window in its front (latest Emerson seven-inch screen model), was delivered to the Ryan house. Television, in 1953, was about to change the lives of the Ryans, as it would all American lives -- more and more in the decades following. As the car and all its subsidiary business connections began to alter the landscape outside the home, the TV set brought the World and its products into Mrs. Ryan's living room.

Television, at first, was on only a few hours a day. Stations, in terms of picture transmission, were limited in range to line of sight. People who had a TV set invited others over to watch the "test pattern" in hopes the local station would be able to mount an actual program. Like Radio, indeed more than in Radio, the problem was how to fill up the time and how to pay for the program. And as in Radio, contests and commercial sponsorship were a major part of the answer.

Contests and commercials were almost invented for Mrs. Ryan, and vice verse. While Evelyn's neighboring housewives would have been quilting, knitting afghans, canning, making scrap books, she had gravitated to writing jingles and doggerel. She had a penchant and a talent for it.

-----------------

Writer/Director Jane Anderson's THE PRIZE WINNER OF DEFIANCE, OHIO, catches pretty well with her first theatrical feature movie the feel, look and social issues of Mrs. Ryan's Ohio, from the 1950's through the 1960's. The film begins in that year of 1953, the family in front of their grotesque TV set's round port. The kids are eating and half-absorbed in what they are watching. Kelly (Woody Harrelson), a born Luddite, is in the kitchen listening to "the game," and fulminating against umpires and dumb plays, until he begins to smash things. But Eyelyn (Julianne Moore), working as usual to serve her husband and children, trying to keep the peace, is also constructing a jingle to submit to a contest held by the company sponsoring the program being watched. She writes things like: "Dial is wonderful:/ Sweet young things/Declare that 'Dialing'/Gets those rings."

Well . . . Evelyn was no Edna St. Vincent Millay, happily no Sylvia Plath either, but according to THE PRIZE WINNER OF DEFIANCE, OHIO, she knocked out an astounding number of winning entries, for which she received galoshes, blenders, freezers, cars, etc -- and at strategic moments in the life of the family, important sums of cash.

A theme is established when Evelyn wins enough money to take the family out of their rental house into a home of their own. When she and Kelly sit down to sign the mortgage papers, the banker strongly suggests, and Kelly quickly agrees, that only one name, the husband's, should be on the documents.

Sure frees up time and money for Kelly to booze more.

As the picture progresses, we see that Kelly depends on his wife for everything except his job, but resents her efficiency and her luck in the contests. For instance, Evelyn wins a home freezer. [Big stuff in the 1950's, when every town had a company which would dress, package and freeze food stuffs for this new home marvel.] At first, Kelly calls it a piece of useless junk, but once Evelyn wins a free "run down the aisles" of the local grocery store, he is there to help bring home frozen steaks, vegetables and delicacies. Though he refuses initially to eat the delicacies (caviar, fois Gras), he is eventually won over. But before long, he gets really drunk and attacks with a skillet the large white frosty bin at the back of the kitchen.

When Kelly completely goes off his trolley, and the neighbors call the police, two Defiance police officers spend a few minutes shooting the breeze with him, calming him down, while Evelyn shepherds the frightened children to bed, and labors to clean up the wreckage her husband has created. The officers tell her that Kelly "needs some rest," and that "everything will be fine." Evelyn knows that's not true, but she carries on, like the cheerful, chirping housewives the family watch on their TV set.

Kelly's bug-eyed, ain't-I-cute-alcoholism escalates until he accidentally, if not quite on purpose, knocks his wife down while she is carrying two racks containing twelve bottles of milk. The bottles break on the kitchen floor. She falls on them, badly cutting herself. As a neighbor drives his wife to the hospital, Kelly is immediately contrite. He stands around, befuddled, helpless, as the traumatized children watch their mother's blood swirl in the spilled milk.

Though TV models alter and improve, nothing much changes at the Ryan home except the children grow up, and Evelyn the Supermom continues to meet every challenge, showing but one or two instants of hurt depression. Meanwhile, Kelly's massive problem is accepted, and pretty much ignored.

No doubt, that was realism in America, and in some places may still be.

But did I tell you that THE PRIZE WINNER OF DEFIANCE, OHIO is shot and edited like a dry satire of American family life? Evelyn Ryan is given full credit for holding the family together, making the whole thing work, and seeing all her children succeed, whether it be in the Service, in Medicine, in Banking, or in Terry "Tough" Ryan's case, as professional writer of at least one clear Best Seller. Evelyn is the Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio, who becomes so renowned that "The Alfa-Daisie-Belles" over in Indiana, a group of contest-entering housewives invite her to visit as a guest of honor. After being thwarted by Kelly's fecklessness, and her inability to drive, she succeeds in taking up the invitation, and becomes great friends with the leader of the club, Dorothy Schaefer (Laura Dern).

[One of the finer points which THE PRIZE WINNER OF DEFIANCE, OHIO, illustrates is that Evelyn Ryan was participating in a Golden Age of American Commercial Promotions, a time when some skill was required to win the prizes offered. By the 1970's, skills had gone out of the competitions, for the most part. The contests became perfunctory, massive, and often an activity which might be "gamed."]

Though her husband Kelly died in 1983, her children grew up to be a credit to the Ryans, and Evelyn lived on in the modest home on Washington Street until her death in 1998. It was, according to Terry "Tough" Ryan, Evelyn's sixth child, an American Success Story.

Certainly, Julianne Moore's beautifully controlled performance as Evelyn is winning. Woody Harrelson, in spite of the cartoon-like nature of his character, conveys some of both the obvious All-American charm and partially hidden menace which must have made Kelly Ryan seem like a regular, normal father of his day. The children are played adequately at various ages, herded around at the service of the plot, leaving little impression, except for Ellary Porterfield, who plays "Tough" Ryan from ages 13 to 16 and 18.

Writer Jane Anderson (THE POSITIVELY TRUE ADVENTURES OF THE ALLEGED TEXAS CHEERLEADER-MURDERING MOM, [screen play] TV-1995) synthesizes an entertaining story from Terry Ryan's memoir, and directs her film surely. Cinematographer Jonathan Freeman's catches the Ohio seasons (although the whole thing was shot in Ontario, Canada).

If John Frizell and Brian Kirk's corny country-western score is inappropriate for Northwestern Ohio, Art Director Andrew M. Stearn (CHICAGO, 2002) and Production Designer Edward T. McAvoy (GHOST WORLD, 2000) have a Betty Crocker good time mixing product placement satire with the real thing, and accurately recreate the interiors and changing decor of the Ryan home.

[The sunporch, known as a lanai in the West, is a nice touch.]

And Special Effects Man Martin Malivoire (MY BIG FAT GREEK WEDDING, 2002) and Film Editor Robert Dalva (THE BLACK STALLION, 1979) are both brilliant and diverting when they line up a number of blenders Evelyn is scoring on a quadrant of the screen; or have the "cool" Evelyn stand to one side of a harried Evelyn as she tries to diaper a baby while thinking up a new jingle.

THE PRIZE WINNER OF DEFIANCE, OHIO, is in a number of ways a winning movie.

And yet, knowing small town Ohio, as I recounted in my vignette at the start of this review, I could not quite shake off the awful feeling that this story was, to considerable degree, a fairy tale.

---------------

The big Metreon Theater in downtown San Francisco was full fans.

It turns out that Terry Ryan did not hang around Ohio, or even Kansas, but came to San Francisco, and became the partner of the San Francisco Chronicle's longtime book editor, Pat Holt, and an impressive group had been brought in to introduce THE PRIZE WINNER OF DEFIANCE, OHIO. [Even Ellary Porterfield, the crop-headed, bespectacled young Terry of the movie, took a bow before evening's end, as the blonde beauty she had become, or always was.] Suze Ormond, the well-known personal finance advisor, leapt to center stage, in a chik apricot Italian leather vest, to proclaim: "Terry Ryan's book was the only one I ever wrote a foreword for, and the movie you are about to see is the best movie you will see this year. Perhaps the best movie that you will ever see. Because it is a movie which says, "YOU CAN DO IT!"

The crowd of women in the audience roared with feminist pride.

That hype, admirable as it might be in terms of raising "self-esteem" was a little deep.

After the movie, Jane Anderson appeared to straightforwardly answer questions, and then, Terry Ryan, the author of the original best seller, came on. She proved both charming and brave -- "tough." Nearly bald and very thin, she thanked her make-up artist with a devilish glance, and fielded questions on about every subject but one she was not asked.

[During the time the production was in preparation, she was diagnosed with cancer, but has maintained a schedule of appearances in support of the picture.]

Her final question was an implied criticism of THE PRIZE WINNER OF DEFIANCE, OHIO, and she handled it beautifully. A woman in the front row asked: "Terry, your mother was a plain Midwestern housewife. When you see an elegant woman like Julianne Moore playing Evelyn Ryan up there on the screen, do you believe she is actually your mother?"

To which, Terry replied: "Oh, no. Julianne Moore does a fine job in the movie, but she is not my mother. I knew my mother. I loved my mother!"

----------------

That answer sums up THE PRIZE WINNER OF DEFIANCE, OHIO. It is an entertaining fairy tale, based on the life of an admirable woman, wife and mother, a picture which gives hints of what must have been the whole truth.

For instance, we know that an abusive, drunkard husband, who does not get treatment for decades -- and there was little to be had in 1950's and 1960's, when alcoholism was considered by many amusing -- tends to become more brutal and out of control as time passes. He often physically, emotionally and mentally harms not only his wife but his children. That the Ryans evidently survived so well is a testament to Evelyn Ryan.

But it is not frankly the story told by THE PRIZE WINNER OF DEFIANCE, OHIO. The subterfuge makes the picture creepily uneven.

-----------------

For a story of a heroine mother from an earlier day, remarkably similar in some respects, you might try Michael Curtiz's ROUGHLY SPEAKING (1945), with Rosalind Russell and Jack Carson. Louise Randall Pierson wrote the screenplay from her own autobiography, showing her literary talent in a larger arena. The resourceful Mrs. Pierson (Russell) shows how she meets various setbacks for her family, in several states, from 1928 to near the time she finished her book. Carson plays the Woody Harrelson part. Entertaining without many dark touches or social commentary.

-----------------

*All names of characters in my reverie have been altered, to protect both the innocent and "the guilty." The reference to the Congregational Church is not meant to denigrate the sect. And the term "Holy Roller" was commonly used by the more "respectable" citizens of small Ohio towns, at the time.

Before TV, gossip was a major pastime.

----------------

This review was become as part of a "nostalgia write-off," but I have lost the handle of the person who is managing the activity.

Can anybody help me?

-----------------

UPDATE: Thanks to pmills1210, I remember that the nostalgia write-off is sponsored by chelledun. Please visit her Profile to engage in more nostalgia.

Here is her URL for the Write-off, which she kindly left in a comment:

http://www.epinions.com/content_4513374340









Recommended: Yes