Al McIntosh didn’t broadcast from rooftops in the Battle of Britain. He didn’t file stories while slogging with the infantry through North Africa. He didn’t report for readers back home the bombing missions over Germany or landings by Marines in the Pacific.
Instead, during World War II McIntosh wrote from the safety of a newspaper office and chronicled life in little Luverne, Minn. The owner-editor of the weekly Rock County Star-Herald serving Luverne and nearby towns, he penned vivid front-page columns about the gossip of Main Street and the comings and goings of local people in the war. He also saluted poignantly those lost to battle.
He seemed to have had few pretensions about the column, naming it “More or Less Personal Chaff.” McIntosh died 28 years ago at age 73, and he would be all but forgotten, even in the southwest corner of Minnesota that was his home, were it not for “The War.”
That seven-part, 15-hour World War II documentary, starting Sunday night on PBS, exhumes and treats McIntosh’s columns as historical treasures.
The film liberally features his words, read by Tom Hanks; a companion volume devotes whole pages to his columns. Another book, “Selected Chaff: The Wartime Columns of Al McIntosh,” was just published by Zenith Press of St. Paul.
McIntosh mania is the result of happenstance. It required Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, the film’s directors, to pick Luverne as one of the four cities in which to explore wartime experiences of ordinary Americans. Then they had to discover McIntosh while digging through yellowed newspaper clippings.
McIntosh “is sort of one-man Greek chorus of our film,” said Burns when he and Novick were here in July, “a kind of home-front moral background who helped us contain the tragedy in an intimate sense.”
Novick said they scoured newspaper files in the other cities — Waterbury, Conn., Mobile, Ala., and Sacramento — but found no voice so compelling and in step with its community.
Burns said he hopes McIntosh “becomes the hero of newsrooms around the country, for the generosity of spirit, the poetry of the writing and the sense that he does make a difference.”
McIntosh’s only child, Jean Vickstrom of Bettendorf, Iowa, said her father could write “the most mundane things along with the most perceptive.” She acknowledged that her father would be “dumbfounded” by the adulation he is receiving.
North Dakota native Alan Cunningham McIntosh had been an up-and-coming newsman at a daily in Lincoln, Neb. He spurned offers from bigger papers because he wanted to be a “country editor.” He bought the Rock County Star in 1940 and the rival Herald in 1942, then merged the two.
Most of the 3,100 people in Luverne were in sync with the newcomer’s conservative Republican politics and appreciated his civic involvement. Some were dismayed that he put their encounters at church or market on the front page.
“Some people would duck into a store when they saw him walking on Main Street,” said Betty Mann, president of the Rock County Historical Society.
After the nation went to war in December 1941, McIntosh served two audiences: the Rock Countians at home and those serving far away who hungered for word of friends and families.
He might write about a man digging fish worms, a new film in town or the windows on Main getting soaped on Halloween. He would urge readers to buy war bonds, run servicemen’s letters and commiserate with families receiving the grim War Department telegrams.
He wrote in a 1943 column, “I think in times like these it would be much easier to be a newsman on a city daily where news of this type doesn’t have so often such a deep personal meaning — it’s when you know these gay hearted, laughing youngsters and their families that your heart really aches when you have to record in cold, black, type, that they are ‘missing in action.'”
McIntosh was held in regard in the community newspaper field and achieved national attention in 1964 for “A tired American gets angry,” a column in which he proclaimed his pride of country and distaste for the cynicism of the day. He sold his weekly in 1968 but stayed in Luverne until his death in 1979.
Today, Luverne is a city of 4,600, still reliant on agricultural, though the farms are bigger and the farmers fewer, said local Chamber of Commerce chief Dave Smith. Sioux Falls, S.D., 20 minutes away by interstate, continues to draw away shops.
The Rock County Star Herald (the hyphen is gone) still contains news of locals at war, though the fronts are in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Like Luverne, the paper is dealing with the celebrity of starring in a Ken Burns film, said Editor Lori Ehde. She has been running “Chaff” columns, introducing younger readers to McIntosh and irking some older ones who didn’t like the man.
Ehde doubted that a column as intimate as McIntosh’s would be acceptable these days.
“Ethics, even in community journalism, have come into play so much that our writing is watered down,” she said. “We have to be so sensitive to how we affect our families that sometimes we end up saying very little.”
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cstorch@tribune.com
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War words
Excerpts of some columns written during World War II by Al McIntosh, who died in 1979 at age 73:
June 8, 1944
“When we sleepily stumbled down the hall to answer the clamorously ringing telephone we made a mental note that it was shortly before 3 a.m. We picked up the receiver, thinking it was Sheriff Roberts calling to say that there had been an accident. Instead it was Mrs. Lloyd Long, playing the feminine counterpart role of Paul Revere, saying ‘get up Al, and listen to the radio, the invasion has started.’ …
“[W]e still couldn’t believe that the long awaited ‘D’ Day had arrived. We sat by the radio for over an hour listening to the breath taking announcements of eye witness observers of the assaults. And then we went back to bed — to lie there for a long time, wide eyed in the darkness — thinking ‘what Rock county boys are landing on French soil tonight?'”
July 20, 1944
“Somehow the gossip ‘grape vine’ had heard that there was a telegram coming thru after 6 p.m. last Friday for Mr. and Mrs. Ray Lester of Magnolia. Ray Lester heard about it and his heart was heavy.
“He started walking down the street — on the way he met ‘Scotty’ Dewar, the depot agent.
“‘Which one is it?’ asked Lester — because there were four boys [in the service] to worry about in that family. After being told he went sorrowfully home to break the news to his wife.
“It must be a hard job handling those death messages. Dewar had known Kermit since babyhood — it was more than he could do to carry that message to the home — he took and left it in the Lester box at the post office. And the family understood why.”
May 10, 1945
“We believe the men overseas would have been mighty proud if they could have seen the way the folks ‘back home’ reacted to the news of Victory in Europe.
“From time to time shallow minded observers from other sections of the country, utterly unable to comprehend the stoic calmness of the agricultural midwest, observed that out here ‘they don’t know there’s a war going on.’ They can’t understand that the patriotism of midwesterners like still water, runs deep and isn’t manifested by orgies of emotional exhibitionism.”
Reprinted with permission from “Selected Chaff,” MBI Publishing, Copyright 2007
