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| Roger Welsch | |
Roger Welsch, a writer and storyteller who was best known for his biweekly "Postcards from Nebraska" segments on CBS Sunday Morning, died on September 30, the New York Times reported. He was 85. Welsch "was more than a raconteur. He was a noted scholar of American folklore and the settler culture of the Great Plains. In his popular anthropology classes at the University of Nebraska, he impressed upon his students the deeper truths lying within tall tales, urban legends and family lore."
He wrote more than 40 books, including Everything I Know About Women I Learned from My Tractor (2002); Why I'm an Only Child and Other Slightly Naughty Plains Folktales (2016); The Reluctant Pilgrim: A Skeptic's Journey into Native Mysteries (2015); Weed 'Em and Reap (2006); Busted Tractors and Rusty Knuckles: Norwegian Torque Wrench Techniques and Other Fine Points of Tractor Restoration (1997); Diggin' In and Piggin' Out: The Truth About Food and Men (1997); and Uncle Smoke Stories: Four Fires in the Big Belly Lodge of the Nehawka (1994).
Welsch treasured the history of the hardscrabble immigrants who had moved to the state after the Civil War, including his German grandparents, but "he also recognized that white settlers had merely been guests of the Pawnee, Omaha and Oglala, whom they pushed aside. He took the Pawnees' side against the Nebraska State Historical Society in their demands that the government repatriate Native American remains, a battle they ultimately won," the Times noted. Welsch and his wife also deeded their 60-acre property to the Pawnee Nation in exchange for a lifelong tenancy, "an act of generosity that inspired other nearby white landowners to do the same."
"Only in folklore, curiously, is there a wider reliability," he wrote in Great Plains Quarterly in 2001. "An individual may tell any story he wishes or knows, but a widely told and known narrative--folklore--is under the constant pressure of communal memory, still fallible but with an internal mechanism of constancy and accuracy the popular or high culture story can never enjoy."