While researching the history of North Carolina’s Lake Norman (as one does) I encountered the story of “the real life Long Sam.” The wikipedia paragraph is so weird that I had to dig up the primary sources, which are ten times weirder.
As presented in a full page spread in the Charlotte Observer on August 4, 1957: Anticipating the upcoming dam-building, a reporter and a photographer were out in the sticks looking at mountain land that would eventually become lakefront land when they discovered a really hot teenage girl. That’s the story. This seventeen-year-old was so tall and so hot that it became national news for at least a few weeks. She seemed to embody exactly the heroine of the nationally syndicated comic strip “Long Sam,” which was a sort of spin-off of Li’l Abner. (Li’l Abner had a daily readership of something like 30% of the US population at its mid-century peak but who today even thinks of it?) The titular character was an extremely tall, beautiful, cartoonishly proportioned young woman who lived out in a remote mountain holler.
The glory of an entire daily metro broadsheet devoted to middle-aged men describing the fine physical qualities of a girl who just turned 17 is hard to capture on a small screen, but here is the pdf. I will also quote at length.
We are stumbling through almost impenetrable thickets and woods and suddenly there is more light around us and we squint through the trees and see a clearing dotted with a hovel and a couple ramshackle outbuildings. This is the most God-forsaken looking place we see in a long time and we wipe the sweat from our eyes to get a better look. We see several hounds. Some children.
Then we see her.
“Gosh-amighty,” whispers Fletcher, “look yonder!”
Slowly winding up the windlass of this old dilapidated well is a statuesque young girl carved from the classical pattern of a Greek goddess.
The well bucket comes up to the top and she straightens up and she is tall and lithe and willowy and very beautiful.
[…]
She is tall–very tall– and her hair is deep brown like the rich earth and her eyes blue like the sea and her teeth are even and shine in the sun. Around the top of her torso she is wearing a man’s frayed black shirt with the shirt-tail twisted and tied in a know at the front for a halter effect and below it she is wearing a pair of black frayed shorts and this is all she is wearing and she is barefooted.
It goes on. You have to read it. There is also a companion column with a more detailed interview with her. She is allowed to speak in her own words and her name, Dorothy Brown, is given.
Is this just a local paper conceit? They had to fill a lot of newsprint every day. Surely there wouldn’t be a national audience for this kind of thing? Enter Life magazine of August 26, 1957:
What are your priors for how this episode would impact Dorothy’s life? It seems like her whirlwind encounter with reporters, talk show hosts, local millionaires and adoring media was a net positive in the end. Her scrapbook is collected at the Mooresville Public Library, where the biography reveals that she did indeed get an education, become a teacher, marry, raise a family and live until 2023.
The foreign country
That America of 1957 was not just a place where comparing a minor to a literal hypersexualized cartoon character was an acceptable journalistic endeavor.
It was also a place where a damming an entire river valley and creating a new 50-square-mile lake was a matter of 4-5 years of work for an industrious power company CEO. As anyone who has read Water and the West and Cadillac Desert knows, the 20th century was all about building dams until it suddenly wasn’t. (The proposed and defeated damming of the Grand Canyon in 1968 is usually cited as the turning point.) In our time you literally can’t build anything. Can you imagine the “community viewpoints” and planning input for a project of that size?
It was a place with true material deprivation and real poverty. Dorothy’s family of ten sibling, living in the woods, drawing water from a hand-operated well, were likely without access to electricity. Dorothy was born in the Depression and reached adulthood before the “War On Poverty.” The newspapermen’s interest in her was of course prurient but there is a hint of real desperation: without “attention” there is no guarantee she ever gets out of that hollow.
It was a place with real urban/rural divide, featuring a rural world where the 20th century infrastructure projects hadn’t yet reached. To be sure there are still rural Americans who love bass fishing and voting red. But to a 99% approximation they drive to work on paved roads maintained by county crews and use diesel-powered agricultural equipment supplied by convenient gas stations connected to an electrical grid. They have social security or county pensions. 100 years ago there were still plenty of people living without roads. From wikipedia’s article on Huey Long:
During his four years as governor, [1928-1932] Long increased paved highways in Louisiana from 331 to 2,301 miles (533 to 3,703 km) and constructed 2,816 miles (4,532 km) of gravel roads. By 1936, the infrastructure program begun by Long had completed some 9,700 miles (15,600 km) of new roads, doubling Louisiana’s road system.
And of course it is a place where print newspaper supplied what we get from social media today. We all know that social media replaced classifieds and became the first filter of hard news. But there was also the huge reservoir in the consciousness of simple art and characters from the comics page that served as the “memes” of the day. And whereas these days exceptionally beautiful and talented teens can of course invent themselves directly through Instagram it doesn’t mean they were above that sort of content in 1957. They just did it in print.
I think about this exchange in Hoosiers (set in 1954 as it happens) a lot in reference to what experiences we try to create for our kids:
Myra Fleener: A basketball hero around here is treated like a god, how can he ever find out what he can really do? I don’t want this to be the high point of his life. I’ve seen them, the real sad ones. They sit around the rest of their lives talking about the glory days when they were seventeen years old.
Norman Dale: You know, most people would kill… to be treated like a god, just for a few moments.
Many boys dream of being heroes for their sports accomplishments. Many girls dream of being famous for their beauty. (And yes, vice versa on those genders.) Many people dream of being rich. As long as it doesn’t consume or corrupt the rest of their lives it’s not necessarily a terrible thing to be treated like a god, especially just for a few moments.