Word: blanton
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...Blanton of Tennessee and Julian Carroll of Kentucky urged the Federal Government to take over the nation's 199,411 miles of roadbed and restore it to good condition. Transportation Secretary Brock Adams rejected the idea. Said he: "Such a move would produce protests from the railroads and the unions, and I personally do not favor it." But he promised to increase the number of federal track inspectors (present total: about 300) and to ask Congress to vote more financial aid for state inspection agencies. Further, Adams pledged to convene a panel of experts to devise safer ways...
...past, present and future seem to have conspired to keep Henry Blanton in a permanent state of arrested development. Burdened by an impossibly demanding sense of manhood, the brutal economics of cattle raising and a changing world in which his wife wants to take an outside job, Henry wraps himself in nostalgia. He dresses in black, restores his grandfather's chuck wagon and watches westerns: "Henry, deep in his bedroll, shoring up courage against the river's dead, called on John Wayne, Gary Cooper, and Glenn Ford. Especially Glenn Ford. He was convinced then that for 'expressin...
...Blanton is knowing in the uses of loneliness. He suffers pain and disappointment without the crutch of self-pity There are always whisky and opportunities to commit mayhem in the name of cowboy justice. When a cow in Blanton's charge is gang-raped by three bulls from a neighboring ranch, Henry and his boys fall on them with castrating knives. But when Blanton's boss breaks a promise that could lead to a measure of financial independence, Henry submits in proud silence...
Cowboys, as someone said, don't cry. But their wives do. As Henry grows more remote, Betsy Blanton grows more depressed. "I'm tired of grieving when no one's died," she tells her preacher She seeks an answer to her problems in literature. "She tried a novel called The Bell Jar, which was shocking to her and difficult to understand, and when she returned it, asking for another, the librarian said that as far as she knew The Bell Jar was the only serious book about grieving women the library had." Instead, Betsy finds solace...
Jane Kramer, who originally wrote The Last Cowboy for serialization in The New Yorker, sets Henry and Betsy Blanton in a determinist context of history, geography and economics. Her sympathetic sketches of modern cowboy life are framed by facts - about beef consumption (Americans ate 27 billion lbs. of it in one year), ranching technology, federal meat-grading standards and the quirks in Texas law. Cattlemen, for example, don't have to fence their animals in. Farmers who want to protect their crops have to fence cattle out. Kramer achieves the intended effect: to show the American cowboy riding...