High Noon

I’m David Offutt, a student of and teacher of American history and western civilization. I am now retired and living in El Dorado, Arkansas, with my nine cats.

My e-mail address is offutt.david.burton@gmail.com – I welcome hearing from old friends, former students, and from those who like or dislike what I write.

I was interviewed twice for a Sunday newspaper column called Neighbors in the South Arkansas Sunday News. What follows is mostly an updated version of those interviews of 2001 and 2009.

Birthdate: In the tradition of Jack Benny, I celebrate my annual 39^th birthday every December 29.

Why I write these essays – To provide historical and personal perspectives on current events

The one thing I’ve learned in life is AND my trademark cliché or expression is: “Offutt’s Law”: The more important it is for you to know something, the less likely it will be volunteered to you.

Occupation: I retired at the end of May 2014 after teaching at the Adult Education Center of SAU Tech in Camden, AR, for twenty years. Before that, I taught U.S. history and western civilization in various public-school systems and in private college prep schools; I taught for eight years in New Orleans at the Xavier University Preparatory High School, and I taught history in Ecuador two years each at the American School of Quito and the American School of Guayaquil . I taught honors U.S. history three years at Central High School in Helena-West Helena, AR, back when it was a thriving community and had an excellent school system (my first of four years there, I taught 11th grade English). I also taught the honors U.S. history classes for two years at the high school in Wynne, AR. – also back when it was an exemplary school system.  I wasted two and a half years at three schools that were so bad that I’m embarrassed to have ever been associated with them – and they will go unnamed to protect those fine students who were not at fault. Overall, I taught history for nearly 20 years and taught practically everything in adult education for an additional 20 years.

My favorite community volunteer work: I managed, or coached, the Lions Club AA baseball team for five seasons (1968-1972) at the El Dorado Boys Club. It was for youths 14-17 years of age. We won two championships: 1968 and 1970.

Family: Nine cats – Cheyenne (9); Pax (4?) is the mother of Skip (3?); Skip is the mother of Rascal and Fluke, who were born on July 14, 2021; Yeller was born April 25, 2022; Sox (b. April 4, 2022); and Liz and Rock (b. June 30,2023)

Though I was proved wrong, I once said I’d never: Move back to El Dorado, AR. I returned in 1994 to keep an eye on my elderly father, who passed away in early 2001.

What kind of car do you drive? 2000 Nissan Quest minivan which I use on camping trips and out-of-town road trips; 1986 Pontiac Grand Prix (In 2011 it became an antique; and, for the umpteenth time, no, I do not want to sell it).

My favorite presidents: The Great American Triumvirate – George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt

My least favorite presidents: The Three Nixonians or the Diabolical Trio plus 1 – Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush – after four years in office, Donald J. Trump made those three look as though they weren’t as bad as they really were

My favorite kind of music is: New Age, folk, classical, and movie themes and soundtracks

What most people don’t know about me is: I have visited all fifty states in the union. My American history students used to say that there was nothing they could study that I couldn’t show them. That wasn’t true, of course, but it wasn’t for my lack of trying. I provided personal slide shows of our classroom topics.

If I had time, I would write a book about: My four years living and teaching in Ecuador

My favorite author: John Steinbeck

You will never catch me wearing:  a necktie if there is any way to avoid it.

My teenage idol: actress Hayley Mills of Pollyanna, The Parent Trap, Whistle Down the Wind, The Chalk Garden, and The Family Way

My all-time favorite television show: Route 66 with George Maharis and Martin Milner; runner-up would be Naked City with Paul Burke

My favorite comedian: Jon Stewart when he was on The Daily Show (the late Sid Caesar was my original response)

My hobbies are: canoeing, camping, traveling, photography, watching/collecting movies, and writing (due to shoulder and hip issues, my canoeing days are over)

My favorite performer: the late Gregory Peck; he portrayed wonderful characters in such films as The Gunfighter, The Purple Plain, Twelve O’clock High, On the Beach, The Big Country, and To Kill a Mockingbird.

My all-time favorite movies: To Kill a Mockingbird and Judgment at Nuremberg

Below: In my living room on the wall behind my workstation is a portrait of me done in 1979 by a street artist on Jackson Square in New Orleans, Louisiana. 

My heroes are: All gone now. As Angela Lansbury said in Something for Everyone, all that are left are mere facsimiles, if even that.  I do concur with the American Film Institute’s choice of the number one screen hero of all time: Atticus Finch as played by Gregory Peck. Peck was a strong proponent of liberal causes and was listed among Nixon’s “Enemies List.”

The four guests at my fantasy dinner party would be: producer/director Stanley Kramer, journalist Bill Moyers, singer Pete Seeger, and historian Howard Zinn [my real fantasy dinner would include Tarzan, Peter Pan, Bugs Bunny, and Huckleberry Finn] (my original answer was Steve Allen, philosopher Mortimer Adler, filmmaker Stanley Kramer, and Thomas Jefferson) – all three are pretty good lists.

My favorite restaurants are:  Fayray’s in El Dorado, Ark.; Brave New Restaurant in Little Rock, Ark.; and I love the roast duck at the Bavarian Inn Restaurant and the breakfast omelets at the Mud Street Cafe in Eureka Springs, Ark.

My favorite junk food is: slices of salami and cheese for lunch

If there’s one thing I won’t do, it’s: Go bungee jumping or bailing out of a perfectly good airplane

My pet peeve is: Litter bugs

My best asset is: I work hard and do the best I can

I absolutely will not eat: Pickled pig’s feet (My dad used to stink up the house cooking them)

A movie I walked out of was: I Know What You Did Last Summer (I wanted to walk out on G. I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, but I was stuck with a friend who thought it was a great movie!

My mother/father would say I’m: Spoiled (Original answer: Very efficient—that was one of the last things my father said to me)

Below: At my workstation in my living room in El Dorado, Arkansas, November 11, 2016

Books or short works I read or re-read in 2016: The Nick Adams Stories by Ernest Hemingway (1972); My Two Wars by Moritz Thomsen (1996); The Paranoid Style in American Politics by Richard Hofstadter (1964); It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis (1936); The Quotable Intellectual by Peter Archer (2010);  Mr. New Orleans: The life of a Big Easy Underworld Legend by Frenchy Brouillette and Matthew Randazzo V (2009); Eight is Enough by Tom Braden (1975); A Nation of Immigrants by John F. Kennedy (2004); Mission Accomplished, or How We Won the War in Iraq by Christopher Cerf and Victor S. Navasky (2008) – the title is facetious; The Trouble I’ve Seen by Martha Gellhorn (1936); A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway (The Restored Edition by Sean Hemingway); Night by Elie Wiesel (1958); Hemingway – A Life in Pictures by Boris Vejdovsky with Mariel Hemingway (2011); The Imperial Way – By Rail from Peshawar to Chittagong by Paul Theroux and Steve McCurry (1985); Looking for Votes in All the Wrong Places by Rick Ridder (2016)

Books or short works I read or re-read in 2017: It Can Happen Here – Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush by Joe Conason (2007); The Gilded Age – A Tale of Today by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner (1873); The Intellectual Devotional – American History by David S. Kidder & Noah D. Oppenheim (2007); The Virtue of Selfishness – A New Concept of Egoism by Ayn Rand with Nathaniel Branden (1964); After the Blue Hour by John Rechy (2017); The Last Time I Saw Paris by Elliot Paul (1942); The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain – A Book of Quotations compiled by Dover Publications, Inc.; Rushes by John Rechy (1979); Heartthrob: A Hundred Years of Beautiful Men by Donald F. Reuter (1998); Death in Venice by Thomas Man (1912); Maggie, a Girl of the Streets by Stephen Crane (1893); George’s Mother by Stephen Crane (1896)

Books or short works I read or re-read in 2018: The Purple Plain by H.E. Bates (1947); Ike and Dick: Portrait of a Strange Political Marriage by Jeffrey Frank (2013); The Selling of the President 1968 by Joe McGinniss (1969); Teeth and Teeth by Robin Reagler (2018); Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72 by Hunter S. Thompson (1973); Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye: Memories of John Fitzgerald Kennedy by Kenneth O’Donnell and David Powers (1972); Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl translated from the Dutch by B.M. Mooyaart-Doubleday (1952); The Intellectual Devotional: 365 Daily Lessons From the Seven Fields of Knowledge by David S. Kidder & Noah D. Oppenheim (2006); Practicing History by Barbara Tuchman (1981); The Plot Against America by Philip Roth (2004); New York Tales and Sketches by Stephen Crane (ca 1890s); Noon Wine by Katherine Anne Porter (1936); Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter (1936); Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James W. Loewen (1995); The Powell Manifesto – Confidential Memorandum: Attack of American Free Enterprise System by Lewis F. Powell, Jr. (August 23, 1971); 1984 by George Orwell (1949)

Books or short works I read or re-read in 2019: How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (2018); Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (1953); Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932); Pensees (Thoughts) by Blaise Pascal (1844); The Foundations of the Moral Life by Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677); The Natural History of Morals by Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900); Blind Ambition by John Dean (1976); Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969); Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America by Nancy MacLean (2017); Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer (2016); The Vintage Mencken gathered by Alistair Cooke (1955); End This Depression Now! by Paul Krugman (2012); Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else by Chrystia Freeland (2012); City of Night by John Rechy (1963); The Killing of Osama bin Laden by Seymour M. Hersh (2016); The Aeneid by Virgil adapted from John Dryden’s English translation (Classics Illustrated UK 2019); On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder (2017); Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll illustrated by Jennifer H. Robinson (Classics Illustrated UK 2019); American Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West by Nate Blakeslee (2017); The Open Boat by Stephen Crane (Classics Illustrated UK 2016); The Blue Hotel by Stephen Crane (Classics Illustrated UK 2016); Martin Eden by Jack London (Classics Illustrated UK 2016); The Spanish Slaveship from the short story “Benito Cereno” by Herman Melville (Classics Illustrated UK 2016); The March of the Ten Thousand by Xenophon (Classics Illustrated UK 2016); The House of the Dead by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Classics Illustrated UK 2016); Master and Man by Count Leo Tolstoy (Classics Illustrated UK 2016); The Canterville Ghost by Oscar Wilde (Classics Illustrated UK 2016); “The Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats (1920-21); “September 1, 1939” by W. H. Auden (1940)

Books or short works I read or re-read in 2020: A Crisis Wasted: Barack Obama’s Defining Decisions by Reed Hundt (2019); Crime in Progress: The Secret History of the Trump-Russia Investigation by Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch (2019); America and Americans by John Steinbeck (1966); The Stranger by Albert Camus (1942); The Call of the Wild by Jack London (1903); The Plague by Albert Camus (1947); The Fourth Angel by John Rechy (1972); Looking Back on the Spanish War, an essay by George Orwell (1942); Lassie Come-Home (1940) by Eric Knight; The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics by Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields (2019); Of Levees, Lies, and Life: Growing Up on the White Side of Jim Crow – an essay by Steve Phifer (April 11, 2019); On Truth by Harry G. Frankfurt (2006); On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt (2005); On Inequality by Harry G. Frankfurt (2015); A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness by Nassir Ghaemi (2011); “There Will Come Soft Rains” by Ray Bradbury (1950); Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man by Mary L. Trump (2020); A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump’s Testing of America by Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig;  “We and They” by Rudyard Kipling (1926); Escape from Freedom by Erich Fromm (1941)

Books or short works I read or re-read in 2021: Idiot’s Delight – a play – by Robert E. Sherwood (1935); Of Mice and Men – a play – by John Steinbeck (1937); The Time of Your Life – a play – by William Saroyan (1939); The Member of the Wedding – a play – by Carson McCullers (1949); Home of the Brave – a play – by Arthur Laurents (1946); A Streetcar Named Desire – a play – by Tennessee Williams (1947); The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial – a play – by Herman Wouk (1954); Into The The by Robin Reagler (2021); Dandelion Wine  by Ray Bradbury (1946) ; Our Town – a play – by Thorton Wilder (1938); Inherit the Wind – a play – by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee (1955); Spencer’s Mountain by Earl Hamner, Jr. (1961); Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck (1935); Tea and Sympathy – a play – by Robert Anderson (1953); Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe (2020) – Note: This comes under the category of “Anything the Screwball Right Wing Wants to Ban from the Libraries Is Probably Worth Reading” and it was; Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, 2nd Edition by E.D. Hirsch, Jr., Joseph F. Kett, and James Trefil (1993); Boy Meets Boy by David Levithan (2003) – Note: This comes under the category of “Anything the Screwball Right Wing Wants to Ban from the Libraries Probably Should Be Required Reading”;

Books or short works I read or re-read in 2022: Two Boys Kissing by David Levithan (2013) – Note: This comes under the category of “Anything the Screwball Right Wing Wants to Ban from the Libraries Probably Should Be Required Reading”; Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale – My Father Bleeds History by Art Spielgelman (1986) – Note: This comes under the category of “Anything the Screwball Right Wing Wants to Ban from the Libraries Probably Should Be Required Reading”; Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale by Art Spielgelman; Wide Awake by David Levithan (2006); 1,001 Things Everyone Should Know About American History (1989) by John Garraty; William J. Olson’s Memo to Donald J. Trump on how to stay in office (December 28, 2020); An Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen (1883) adapted by Arthur Miller for the American stage (1950); Theresa Raquin: A Drama in Four Acts by Emile Zola (1873) translated by Kathleen Boutall (1956); Miss Julie by August Strindberg (1888) translated by E. M. Sprinchorn (1961); The Seven Year Itch: A Romantic Comedy by George Axelrod (1952); Death of a Salesman: Certain private conversations in two acts and a requiem by Arthur Miller (1949); The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe (1842); The Little Foxes  by Lillian Hellman (1939); The Sea Gull (1896) by Anton Chekhov and translated by Robert W. Corrigan (1962); The Boys in the Band by Mark Crowley (1968); Bryson’s Dictionary of Troublesome Words: A Writer’s Guide to Getting It Right by Bill Bryson (2002)

Books or short works I read or re-read in 2023: The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr. With Revisions, an Introduction, and a Chapter on Writing – 3rd Edition by E. B. White (1979); Night is This Anyway by Robin Reagler (2022); The Portable Curmudgeon compiled and edited by Jon Winokur (1987); The Trump Classified Documents Indictment by Jack Smith (June 8, 2023); Sold by Patricia McCormick (2006); The Trump January 6, 2021, Indictments by Jack Smith (August 1, 2023); If Cats Could Talk: The Meaning of Meow by Michael P. Fertig (2005); Crisis of Confidence by Jimmy Carter (televised speech July 15, 1979); The Book of Vice: Very Naughty Things (and How to Do Them) by Peter Sagal (2007)

Books or short works I read or re-read in 2024: Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism by Rachel Maddow (2023); Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How They Changed America 1789-1989 by Michael Beschloss (2007)