Ep. 44: Where the Red Fern Grows (Part 2) - Character and Manhood

On this episode of the Bear Grease Podcast, we’re on part two of our look into the cultural impact of the book, “Where the Red Fern Grows” by Wilson Rawls. He drove the bus to the game where the coonhunters showed pop culture what was up, and made us all proud. We’ll talk with the childhood actor, Stewart Peterson, who starred in the original 1974 Walt Disney movie and learn how he got into acting and why he got out. His reason might surprise and challenge you. We’ll talk again with redbone coonhound man, Ronnie Smith, to get some perspective on the real dogs used in the movie. We’ll have discussion around a key emphasis in the book with Dr. Sean Teuton of the University of Arkansas as we look into that period of life when an adolescent boy becomes a man (and we’ll talk about crying). Lastly, we'll talk with Misty Newcomb about the development of boys and how the system is sometimes rigged against them. If you haven’t watched the original movie or read the book, you ought to go check it out, but regardless you’re not going to want to miss this one. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
They said, Stuart, we've got it narrowed down. We've gone
through about six hundred other young man, we've narrowed it
down to four. When you're one of those four, I said, oh,
well cool. On this episode of the Bear Grease Podcast,
we're on part two of our look into the cultural
impact of the book Where the Red Fern Grows by
Wilson Rawls. He drove the bus to the game where

(00:29):
the coon Hunters showed pop culture what was up and
made us all proud. We'll talk with the childhood actor
Stuart Peterson, who starred in the original nineteen seventy four
Walt Disney movie and learned how he got into acting
and why he got out. His reason might surprise and
challenge you, and he'll tell us if that mountain lion

(00:50):
fighting the dog in the movie was real. Well again,
talk with Redbone coonhound man Ronnie Smith, and we'll have
a discussion with Dr Sean Teuton about the key emphasis
of the book, which is that period of life when
an adolescent boy becomes a man, and we'll talk about
crying boys. If you haven't watched the original movie or

(01:13):
read the book, you ought to check it out. But
regardless you're not gonna want to miss this one. And
the irony is that his lack of education actually makes
him a bed a person. He can get his education
from the woods itself. It's mythologized in the life of
Abraham Lincoln. This is what Teddy Roosevelt thought. That's why
he went west and reinvented himself. He really wanted to

(01:34):
reinvigorate his masculinity in the practice of frontier life. And
that is really an American thing, it is. My name
is Clay Nukelem, and this is the Bear Grease Podcast,
where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant, search for insight

(01:58):
and unlikely places, and where we'll tell the story of
Americans who lived their lives close to the land. Presented
by f HF gear, American made, purpose built hunting and
fishing gear that's designed to be as rugged as the
places we explore. It makes me mad. Folks like that

(02:28):
getting such a fine hound who as I'm alive, it'll
wind up being as mean as they are. Billy and
his grandfather are watching the Pritchard brothers ride away with
a hound pup, so I would like to buy it
for you. Billy, I ain't much better off than your part.
You'll have your own hands before long. I don't know, Grandpa.

(02:51):
Sometimes I think God don't want me to have any Yeah,
so what well, I've been asking him for dogs as
long as I can remember. Nothing's happened yet. It could
be that you ain't doing your fair share. What do
you mean, Well, if God was in mind to get

(03:12):
you dogs slick as cutting line, and he'd be doing
all the work, that wouldn't be good for your character.
I don't want character. I want dogs. You want dogs
bad enough, Billy, You're gonna get dogs, But you want
his health. You're gonna have to meet him halfway. In

(03:35):
part one of the series, we introduced the American literary
classic Where the Red Fern Grows, and we celebrated how
the obscure pastime of raccoon hunting with hounds did a
three sixty slam dunck on mainstream culture. It's a wild
case study because the book has sold over six million
copies and has been mandatory reading in elementary schools from

(03:56):
Seattle to Miami since the nineteen sixties. The book was
also made into two major motion pictures, and we already
met the childhood actor Stewart Peterson, who played Billy Coleman
in the original movie. We learned a ton about Woodrow
Wilson Rawls, the author, and how he wrote the original
manuscripts on brown paper bags, and late in his life

(04:17):
he finally got the book published. He only wrote two books,
and both of them were after he served multiple prison
terms in two states. Our interest in his criminal life
wasn't to point fingers, but rather to paint on the
canvas of redemption as we looked into the life of
an ex convict that became a beloved children's author and speaker.

(04:40):
Fist bump to Wilson Rawls. American literary classics are heavy hitters.
They go deep and you can't cover it all in
a short time. I want to continue digging into the
book with literary expert Professor Shaun Tuton of the University
of Arkansas. He's about to give us insight into by
such an obscure place and lifestyle could have such general

(05:04):
appeal and will learn something about novels. I've read that well.
It was in the preface of this book Claire Vanderpool,
and she spoke of that Wilson Rawls clearly established a
deep sense of place. Why is place so significant if

(05:25):
you've never been there, Because most people that read this
book have never lived in the Ozarks. Why do we
why do we like that? Well? This goes back actually
actually the history of the novel itself and the rise
of the novels were written as early, I mean in
our European tradition as early sixteen o five with with
Servants wrote Doute. Robinson Cruso right by Daniel Dafoe was

(05:45):
written in seventeen nineteen. Both of those novels. You think
about that, what what drew? What draws readers? And the
why are they time? This classic? Still today we make
movies about Robinson Cruso. It's the difference, right, It's the
unusual life being offered to us. And we learned as
we as we encounter something utterly beyond our world. And
that's the reason why we call it the novel itself.
It means something that's new. Right. So this the novel

(06:06):
emerged during the These were the first novels that humans
ever wrote. Some say their earlier novels in China, but
in Europe this is some of the first novels during
the Industrial Revolution in England, when people had the division
of labor grow where they wouldn't really know about the
other lives people had. You wouldn't work in the same
place anymore, and it alienated labor. And people were dying

(06:27):
to know how other people live, right, And so they
saw the novel take off in that moment because people
would finally get a window into the daily life of
someone living completely different. Yes, so the whole point of
why place is so significant is if you've never been there.
That is the point is that you've never been there,
And so if you can really dive in and see
the rootedness of this human in that place, that's the

(06:51):
beauty of it. See that that wouldn't have been intuitive
to me. If you think about the introduction of the
novel was probably as powerful a moment for humanity as
the introduction of the Internet, maybe even more powerful. The
idea that made up stories written as words on a
page that could be read anywhere and could create an

(07:14):
out of body experience for the reader who had been
trapped in their own mind and world their whole life
was a wild concept. They didn't have television's, radio, or
video games. Imagine a world with no fiction books. I
don't think I've realized how much identity and instruction we
get from novels that have impacted our culture. Even if

(07:37):
you're not a reader, your life has been influenced by
fiction writing and Professor Teuton's book called Native American Literature,
he said this, in reading, we enter a world where
actual people or characters relate experiences, perhaps extremely different from
our own. Through that process, we may come to understand

(07:59):
or even are some views or values of another. In
literature is the power to transform end of quote, Professor Tuton.
Part of the book that Wilson Rawls I think did
such a great job of showing just a window into
Billy Coleman's life was when he went to Talaqua. He

(08:22):
traveled thirty something miles upriver from where he lived, and
he went to the big city of Tallaquah, Oklahoma, which
is a real city, and it is not a big
city at all. It says that there are eight hundred
people in the city of Talaqua, which to him was
this massive place, and there's a series of things that
happened that It's just such a powerful literary mechanism because

(08:45):
by showing us the city and Billy's response to it,
we see his world and One of the things that
happens is he walks in front of down an old
downtown street where there was shops and stores and big
glass windows, and he's dops in front of a window
and he sees for the first time the full reflection

(09:05):
of himself in a window, and he just kind of
becomes a little bit self conscious about that. I mean,
where did Wilson Rawles come up with this? I mean
that is such a powerful moment there, because you just think,
holy cow, these people were so poor they didn't have
even have a mirror in their home. It's also humorous, yeah,
it's it's it's a genius passage, you know, excellent, right,

(09:26):
because the way that works as a piece of irony
and literary theory, that'd be irony. What happens is we
are drawn into into Billy's world so seamlessly, they were
not really unaware of it. We get a little description
of him, but it's a literary device to put something
in front of a mirror, and you're not gonna have
a mirror, you know, in the frontier kind of home
like that. When he finally sees himself, we're kind of
jarred by this, you know, and specially the ladies who

(09:48):
were on the sidewalk. We see that he's wild, right
because again, like I was talking about wilderness in the
notion of being uncivilized, you know, in a good way, right,
you're also innocent and you're uncontaminated by society or right.
And then becomes clear when when he walks along very
politely and runs into the kids from the school. That
school is a two story schoolhouse. It's got a fire

(10:08):
escape that they're playing down going down the tube, so
it's a it's a big school. And they're not nice
to him, and and he doesn't care. He shrugs it off.
You know what, what do they what slang derogatory term
did they use when they see him? They called him
a hillbilly? Oh, cut through the heart. They called him
a hillbilly. You know what's interesting to me about that

(10:29):
is that these were these were kids from Taliquol who
were rural kids by every estimation anywhere in the world. Yes,
these quote city kids from Taliquo would have been viewed
by anybody outside of this region as hillbillies themselves. They
were familiar with that term, and in a derogatory way, obviously,

(10:50):
because the way they used it and then they see
a real hillbilly in their mind and they're like, you hillbilly,
And I love that term. I to me, it's a
term of an dearmant now, but it urped Billy Man. Hey,
he's got to check it down. Dog business, down these

(11:10):
dogs along to a rich manor and he's holding for dogs.
This is the classic scene where Billy Coleman fights the
city kids. Mine let me buy. Hey, this guy's trying
to escape. Don't do that again. You want to fight?

(11:31):
Uh no, don't touch my dogs again. So in the
movie they didn't use the word hill billy, but Wilson
Rawls did in the book. I would have probably been
offended if Walt Disney had said it. At some point.
I'm going to dive into the deeper meaning of the term,

(11:53):
because it's different than some of the other descriptors used
to define rural people. But in my book, it's got
a touch of nobility. And it sure was a fast
way to take off Billy Coleman, which was not something
you wanted to do. I had some advice that I
would have given to Wilson Rawls, but let's see what
Dr Teuton thinks and we'll cut right to the heart

(12:16):
of what this book is about a boy becoming a man.
As I read this book and looking at it from
a literary perspective, I'm amazed at the amount of stuff
that's going on that's really intriguing, From the dogs fighting
with the city kids, to the Pritchard's to win the

(12:38):
championship coon hunt, to the dogs dying and a red
fern popping up at the end. I mean, it's just
like it just stacked with these little subplots. If you
would have told me that, I would have advised Wilson Rawls, well, buddy,
you might be getting a little too complex. This is
just weaving people like in and out of so many
ups and downs. You know, you may be you may

(12:58):
want to simplify this a little bit. How did he
pull that off? Or is there and obviously it's that
would have been terrible advice. Is it common to have
that many ups and downs that we even to a
to a story. You can map a novel, you know,
and scholars have done this, and a good writer you
can get books on how to write a novel and
they'll tell you how to map it out. Often, if
you read a novel and you put it down, it

(13:19):
doesn't keep your interest. It's because they didn't honor that
the continuum in the novel. Novel has to have a
crisis action and a falling action. That means you have
to have conflict, and usually that conflict occurs somewhere in
the middle, and then you have maybe one more minor
conflict and then everything is resolved. And then the other
point is that characters have to can be flat. Around.
If they're flat, it means they're just um. There's people
walk in and out like the sheriff and can never

(13:39):
see again. But around character is a character that has
to grow, so by the other novel they're changed, there's
something different about them. At any rate. When you map
this novel, it fits perfectly to that crisis action you
got certainly you got you got the Pritchard's, you know,
the terrible death. Then you have the competition, and then
of course you have the cougar. But the way that
the novel ens in a beautiful resolution, if you will,
is is the dog's buried on the hillside. Is that

(14:01):
kind of what makes it what it is? That the
resolution at the end that it's like a bitter pill
to swallow, but also really redemptive. Yeah. Yeah, And his
father even tells him right here at the end it's
it's not He's Papa tried, Billy. He said, I wouldn't
think too much about this if I were you. It's
not good to hurt like that, I believe. I just
try to forget it. Besides, you still have little aunt.

(14:23):
That's of guys. From a man to another incipient man.
You know he's gonna become a man soon. This novel
is so full of tears. I mean, Billy cries at
anymore all the time. I thought that was a little unusual.
I did. I thought so too. But as a as
a writer, I think Wilson Rawls is trying to make
it clear there's a contrast, you know, between what a man,
how a man experiences emotions and deals with loss, from

(14:44):
how a boy experience emotion deals with lost. When his
father says it's this is not good for you. You You
shouldn't do that, it's kind of a bitter, like you say,
bitter sweet, right. His father is saying, like my father
would tell me, you can't cry like that. So that
that's another aspect of this novel. It's very uh, Like
I said, I found a little. I have to say,
if there's a critique in the novel, meanbe a little overdone.
The crying. Yeah, I had the exact same thing. I thought, again,

(15:06):
he's crying again, man, Yeah, he was crying at stuff
that I wouldn't have thought a kid would cry at.
But I I cried my fair share as a kid.
But I don't think I would have been known as
like a crier. But I didn't know some people that
were quote criers. I look back at a period in
a boy's life when he would be a few steps

(15:27):
away from tears at any moment, and that's pretty. That
is a really vulnerable, beautiful, unique period of a man.
You know what will become a man of a man's life.
And that's kind of the whole point of this book.
I think Wilson Rawls was just like trying to pound
at home. This is a boy. He acts like a man,

(15:47):
he does things that a man would do, But this
is a boy. As a father, it's painful to watch,
you know. And I remember my father telling me, and
he was kind of rough about it. He'd say something
to lip in you, you can't cry. I'm a little
more gentle with my kid. My son's and yet I'll
tell them then you know, there's there's other ways to
handle this, you know, because sometimes they'll cry out of frustration.
I said, you gotta take deep breaths and we'll make

(16:08):
a plan. We're gonna fix it, you know. And I
try to be practical with them. But I think about
the same thing about how dad's handle boys crying, because yeah,
it evokes something in us of like, boy, you better
stop that, because that's not what a man does and
what we're in this mentality and movement of bringing them
to manhood. But yeah, it kind of made me wonder
if I was too hard on my boys, because you

(16:29):
know they're going to grow out of it, But in
the moment, you're like, man, what if this guy's years
old and still crying, and so you feel like you
gotta do something. You know, you better suck about kid.
But then you see, uh, Billy's dad probably manage him
the way you would hope to be managed. But I
bet a real ozark dad probably would have been a
little rougher on him. Yeah, his mom is one's getting

(16:50):
the whippings though too. Yeah she gets a switch and
she's she's whipped him before It's always a question in
fatherhood whether your son changes it gets be on a
difficult point his life and you think, was it because
I said stopped crying or did you just grow out
of it? Yeah? Exactly, because if you didn't say it,
maybe crying his whole life. So you know, you don't
have to be a perfect father. You just got to

(17:11):
be a present father. I think, yeah, that's the important partner.
And I never would have known that novel will be
about fatherhood. But I'm also thinking about the father. You know,
I have a feeling these good, incredible works of the
literature find us where we're at. Good writers find us
where we're at, and that's exactly what old Wilson Rawls did.
But why do a bunch of coon hunters like us

(17:33):
care about literary mechanisms. If I am irrationally moved by
something to the point of an impact in my life,
I want to understand why a fundamental and constant in
our lives is media. And by media I mean books, television,
social media, podcasts, basically any type of human communication that

(17:54):
isn't human to human. And don't say I don't take
in media clay, because your and to a podcast, right now.
Our lives are full of media different forms, and it
uses natural forms of human communication to draw us into
being interested in something for better or worse. News agencies

(18:17):
often use hype and hysteria to get people fired up.
Podcasters use long form conversation to make us feel like
we're in the room. Television uses radical and often underalistic
circumstances to draw us into a captivating stupor. Sports engages
with our love of competition and delivers a magnetic pool

(18:38):
towards tribalism. The point is this, there are great powers
at work, and if we are aware of ourselves and
those powers, we can choose where to spend the energy
of our life. I'm very interested in things that control
us beyond our recognition. Personal awareness and responsibility is powerful us.

(19:03):
Back to the central idea of this novel, which we've
declared is a boy becoming a man. I think this
issue of bringing boys in the manhood is extremely relevant,
as it seems manhood in our culture is up for
grabs on its definition of all people. To speak on
the subject, I'd like to introduce my wife, Misty Newcomb.

(19:25):
You would have heard her on the render. She's an educator.
She runs a private school. She's a mother of boys,
and she has some insight into the development of young boys,
which is the theme of our book. So I run.
I run a private school, a K twelveth private school
at the seventh twelfth grade level. We have a student

(19:45):
population that male. We found that parents were bringing their
young boys to us because of concerns about how modern
Western culture treats young boys. And there was concerns about
how they're being brought up to kind of loathe certain
aspects of their just natural identity. And these young boys

(20:06):
have a very unique biological developmental trajectory and a lot
of what we consider bad, not well behaved, not good
is actually really normal. So they're they're actually even been
studies where and just so that you understand a little
bit about academics, test scores, standardized test scores are not
subjective at all. They that's the idea behind having a

(20:27):
standardized test is that there's no human opinion. Grades at
school are very subjective, and so a teacher's opinion matters
on how they respond to essays, how they respond to
participation points, and things like that. Studies have shown that
even though boys and girls they've they've looked at a
group of boys and girls, and they don't have any
difference on their standardized test scores, but the grades that

(20:50):
teachers give them are different based off of whether they're
a boy or girl. And I don't think teachers are
sitting back there saying, you know, I don't like boys,
I'm gonna mark them off. I think that there's behaves
that boys naturally have that are less desirable in a
traditional classroom. And that's a problem, like that's that's a
problem because it's communicating that these characteristics are bad. What

(21:11):
you see inside of the red Fern grows, for example,
you see Billy just kind of running wild, working with
his hands and having to think through complex situations with
these these k dogs. And you know, there's not really
a lot of experiences or environments that young boys have
to develop those types of skills in modern society. So
Billy's development, now he lacked on the academic side, we

(21:32):
do know that. But but this idea of letting a
boy be a boy, yeah, is a good thing. And
now that I think we could get confused and we're
not saying let a kid be rebellious and not do
what you say. No, no, Billy didn't do that. But
we're not saying tell all the little guys to sit still,
put their papers, never run around, never move rocks, never

(21:54):
chase the cat. Never. Instincts are always something to be suppressed.
Sometimes they should be suppressed. Really, there's a lot like
if you think about just the wildness of Billy's life
and of his experience, that is extremely valuable. It's not
the only thing that's valuable. It's not the only thing
that should be emphasized. But there's an aspect of of

(22:16):
his upbringing that you, as a young man look at
and say, man, I'm glad I had parts of that,
or I wish I had that, And you want it
for your sons. You probably want it for your daughters
to hey, hey, let me say one more thing. I
will say that we had two girls and then two boys,
and everyone I ran into always told me, oh, your

(22:36):
middle school years are going to be so hard with
those girls. They're gonna cry, They're gonna be so emotional.
No one, no one told me about middle school boys.
And I remember being an absolute shock, more emotional than
any girl guys I think he was. I mean, I'm
just saying it is it will shock you how much

(22:56):
boys cry. I don't think I don't think he was
overplaying his hand at all. I think that he was
tapping into he was he had to have been a crier.
The conversation right now about the definition of manhood is
very interesting. There's got to be an accurate definition of masculinity,
and when it's right, it's healthy and productive in the

(23:18):
life of the young man and everyone around him. Kind
of like Billy Coleman. He respected his mother and father,
he respected and took care of his little sisters. He
worked hard, he told the truth, he admitted fault, he
took responsibility. Pop culture has declared manhood as dangerous, incompetent,

(23:40):
and self focused, which I take offense at. But I
think that many know that true manhood is defined by
sacrifice and service to our family. It's about leading by
example and living a governed life, a life guided by
principles outside of our self interest. Seems like it would
be difficult for anyone to find fault with this. That's

(24:03):
some good stuff, all right. If we were on a
coon hunt, the dogs just struck a track in an
unexpected direction, and we're gonna head toward him. On the
last episode, we met Stewart Peterson, the childhood actor who
played Billy Coleman. We've already heard his voice on this episode. Ironically,

(24:26):
Mr Stewart has been on the show Meat Eater and
you can watch him on Netflix season nine when he
guided Steve Ronella Janice would tell us and Adam Weatherby
on a mule deer hunt and Wyoming. That was him.
The episode is titled Wyoming Mule Deer. His story is
a winding road and I want to try to connect
the dots from Hollywood actor to backcountry guide. So, Mr

(24:51):
Stewart Peterson, you have no idea how neat it is
for me to see you, and how kind of shocking
it was a years ago when I learned that this
boy in this movie. It was real impacting to me
guided my friend Steve Ronnella in Wyoming for mule Deer
and then to be here in Wyoming with you now

(25:13):
it's pretty neat. So my my main question I want
to start off with is how did you get into
acting as a child? How did that start? Um, Well,
it all really started with my mother's brother who was
in the motion picture production business. At some point he
had had the idea that he wanted to do a
film based on the book Where the Red Fern Grows.

(25:35):
And when he finally got the rights to do that,
at that point in time, he was had begun kind
of feeling out what, you know, how he was gonna
cast and who who he might cast. So he was
the was he He was the producer, the producer of
the show. Now where did he live? He lived in
California at the time. Of course, growing up here, all

(25:56):
I knew was ranching, so the film industry and even
and he asked spirations for that, never ever and still
don't enter my mind. But when he got ready to
do the film, he had had a script put together
and had taken it up to Wilson Rawls, the author
of the book, who lived in Idaho Falls, And on
his way up he had kind of put out to

(26:17):
somebody here in coke Field might have been a fourth
grade teacher, because she was the one that actually made
a reference to someone in Cokefield that she thought might
fit the part. Someone that wasn't you, wasn't me. On
my uncle's way back through on his way back to California,
he thought, well, I'll just stop in and see if
I can't meet this other young man as he came through.
I happened to be at my grandparents home and this

(26:40):
young man shows up to be introduced to my uncle,
who then took him into my grandpa's dan and and
proceeded to interview him. Slash let him read out of
the script to see what he was going to be like. Meanwhile,
I was just out messing around out there, you know,
in the living room, probably talking to grandfather. I don't know, barefoot,
wearing over I never went bear fit in this country.

(27:03):
This that was really a new one for me. But
in any case, when he got through with my uncle, uh,
this friend of mine, why my uncle came out and
he said, hey, Stewart, why don't you come in and
read for me in the den? And I said, I'm okay.
He says, it's not a big deal. He said, just
come in and read a few He says, you know,
there's no pressure. I thought, okay. Well, so he brings

(27:25):
out a script and and he thumbed through some pages
and he said, well, here, why don't you just read
Billy Coleman's part here and read it as if you
were gonna you know, you're gonna say him to somebody,
and I did a little bit of that. And it
was kind of a half hearted attempt when I did
it initially because I wasn't really interested this. Just read this,
and so I did. There was never an aspiration that

(27:48):
was a burn to say, please, uncle lyman, why don't
you let me do this? I I just left it.
I just did. I walked away from it as if
it was just something that I had no interest, which
I didn't. After this initial imprompt to read through with
his uncle, Stuart's mother got a call a few weeks
later asking if he would fly to Los Angeles to

(28:08):
audition in front of the director, which he did. After
that trip, he got a third call and a few
weeks later they said, Stuart, we've got it narrowed down.
We've gone through about six hundred other young man, we've
narrowed it down to four. When you're one of those four.
And so I said, oh, well cool. But that's again
as far as my thought process went, I just didn't

(28:30):
have any inclination. Ended up uh. In the last phone call,
they said, we'd like to do one last set of
screen tests. We'd like you to come to Tulsa, Oklahoma.
We'll fly you there will be these other three young men,
uh down there. You know, gosh, little league, a little
league football was gonna be coming up in a few
short weeks. Was this like a high budget movie for

(28:52):
nineteen seventy four? You know, I thought it was high
budget because I've never heard of those kind of numbers.
But I think it was just under a million bucks.
But but it was a high quality product. It was
a hYP was like it was. It was like a
first rate movie for yeah, and and for the you know,
the people that the director, he was very well known.
He had directed a lot of Disney films. The impression
that I got as an adult, as I've gone back

(29:13):
and watched that movie, we just we gathered up the
whole family watched it just the other night. It was
really neat. The impression I got was that it was
actually a really well put together film for the time.
And I was trying to make a connection of I
think as I understood it, you know, based on the
casting of the other people that were fairly well known
and and the interests that they had, because as I
went to Tulsa, I did the screen test and there's

(29:35):
four four guys, so they had us all there and
there was something that kind of clicked in me that said, Okay,
I became very competitive from the standpoint I wanted to
win the part, and I could have cared less whether
I did the part. After that, understand, I started trying
to pay attention to what they were trying to do
to help coach me maybe how to express myself in

(29:56):
this scene or that. When it was all said and
done in my own was carefully. He knew that with
the production of financials that they put into it, he
needed to try to remove himself from from the decision
making process. He turned it over to the director and said,
you know you're you're gonna be the one working with
the the young man, so you need to make the decision. Uh.

(30:16):
When they came in and told me that I had
the part, I didn't know quite how to feel, other
than the fact that I was already now starting to
feel homesick because they told me they said. My uncle
came and said, well, Stewart, you've you've earned apart. We're
gonna start here probably next week, and so for the
next week, I'd like you to start toughening your feet up,
So you need to start going of my questions was,

(30:38):
how did you get it. I didn't have tough feet,
because you know, and I tried, I truly tried. I
took my shoes off, I went and tried to walk
on the rocks, and I just never went barefoot around here.
We we just didn't. But there was somebody that worked,
you know, that was a little more creative thought out
of the box. They said, hey, why don't we just
put some duct tape on the bottom of his feet,

(30:59):
And so if I had to run in the stubble,
if I had to run on the on the gravel,
they would just get the duct tape and they'd go
over there and they just slam it layered on the bottom.
But anywhere in the movie where you can see that,
I don't think so. I think it was all so quick,
you know, with the stride that was my introduction, and
I was thinking I wanted to be home so bad.
I I really didn't want to be out there doing

(31:20):
the field, you know. And of course Mom and dad.
Dad was in the middle of the in this in
the hay, and and Mom had five other kids at
home that she was busy with. So she just basically
assumed that uncle, my uncle Lyman was gonna be and
he did. He took he washed over me. But I
thought it was for me. It was it was kind
of a chance to be independent. That was my first

(31:40):
experience ever. They gave me a per diem for the week,
and I remember my They brought a little binna envelope
to me and it had cash and it was like
eighty eight dollars for the week, and that's what I
was to use for my meals. And of course at
that age, I don't need to eat that much. That
was a lot of money for thirty. There was I say,
a real Billy Coleman story going on inside the set

(32:03):
of the Billy Coleman Story. Yeah, because I just wasn't
used to that. Being raised on the ranch, we never
saw that kind of Well, this is the responsibility of
a young man with money and stuff. So how long
a period? How long did it take to shoot? It
was two months filming time, Is that all? Yeah? It
was two months. Took two months to film and then
the production it came out in the spring with the premiere.

(32:25):
Where was the movie actually shot. The movie was actually
filmed in Tallquah, Oklahoma, within miles of the old Homestead
and the in the same places that Wilson Rawls roamed
as a young boy. It's interesting to get a behind
the scenes look at how all this went down and
will continue to see the parallels between Mr. Stewart's real

(32:47):
life and Billy Coleman. In the last episode, we talked
about some redbone coon hounds, which played a significant part
in the book and movie. We're Coon Hunters, so this
kind of stuff is interesting. Here's what Mr You had
to say about the actual hounds in the movie. And
how about that dang mountain lion scene. Man, I need
some answers. We had for that film because of the

(33:11):
age groups. There were thirteen dogs, you know, because they
had the pups and then they had the half groans,
and then they had the adults dogs different thirteen different
dogs because you considered the two month period of time
that we filmed. You see him as pups, and then
you see him as a half groans, and then you
see him as as adults. But they also they had
some when they were doing the scene where the mountain
lion where he's you know, coming back with the dogs

(33:34):
for the first time. He's nestled down for the night
there and that mountain lion comes in. When they had
those dogs, those older dogs going again, they had they
had a tame when and they had a wild mountain lion,
and that the wild when they had a cable tied
to a caller on that cat. The cable you couldn't see.
I was able to watch those scenes at night as
they were filming it because it was at night, and

(33:56):
I was just constrolled by how those dogs would go
in there and you know, keep that cat at babe.
But they they had a few different dogs because there
were a few dogs that they send in and they
got smacked and they'd yiping off camera and they'd have
to send another one in. Wow. So so I wanted
to ask you about that because that wouldn't fly today,
you know, to have and when I watched it just

(34:19):
as an adult, and now that we see all this
uh animation and everything in Hollywood that has to do
with animals, a lot of it is fake and computer animated.
When I watched that last week, I was like, that
is for real. These are red bone hounds being a
real live mountain line. The winning of the Gold Cup
brought me and my dog even closer than before we

(34:41):
became an in separate Bouteau, and although I'd always known
their love for me was great, I never realized how
deep it win until the night of their greatest sacrifice.
As we hunted together in the psychone camera, I don't

(35:06):
see anything. Do you think the Hollywood world would frown

(35:27):
on a real mountain lion and the dog fighting today? Clearly,
in nineteen seventy four, this wasn't an issue. If we're
talking about historical revision, which is taking today's value system
and placing it in a different time. This brings up
some interesting questions about what has changed. But we're in
the weeds, boys, and we gotta get up out of here,

(35:48):
and we'll do it by talking to Mr Ronnie Smith.
He was the red Bone man from Arkansas we went
hunting with on the last episode, and his grandson bat
me fifty two dollars that there was a in a tree,
but it was a dentry complicated situation. Mr Ronnie has
some information on the real hounds used in the movie.

(36:09):
I've always wondered if those were just Hollywood dogs or
real coon dogs. So you have some intel on the
dogs that were in the movie. So there there are
two movies that were made what do you know about
those dogs that were in the mill at the time.
I was a young fellow in the seventies, not seventy four,

(36:31):
you know. I graduated high school in seventy four. So
the movie came out and was no big deal really,
but we went we watched it. Of course, did you
watching the movie theater? Do you remember? Yeah? But being that, uh,
there's one in the town of Rogers if it's called
the Victory and it's open for plays now it's not
open for the movie pictures. But but the original dogs

(36:53):
and they were local dogs in Tallqua that the owner
of the male dog was Glyn Davis now and and
I didn't know Glenn personally, but I've been in this
Red Bone Association since night. So it's good good while,
you know. And he had the mail dog and he
called it dog rambling read. The dog that they called
Dan was rambling, just rambling read, that's all. And Glenn

(37:19):
got paid to use his dog. He got five hundred dollars.
They could have probably got the dog and some feet
along with that if they had one before. That's a landslide.
Five hundred bucks, you know, now, are you saying that's
a lot that was a lot of money in nineteen
seventy four. That was five was rambling read a good conduct.

(37:39):
The local fellas, and I've talked to a couple of
them recently since you and I spoke. One of the
fellas hunted with the dog quite regularly, said he was
sure enough a top and channel mystery solved. Quote sure
enough a top notch hound means a lot coming from
Mr Ronnie. Now that we've got the dog situation and

(38:00):
squared away, let's talk to Mr Stewart. I want to
know how he pulled off being such a great actor
with no experience or training. So had you, at age thirteen,
had you read the book? I had not. They encouraged
me too, but you know I was never an avid reader.
I I just assuon been outdoors. It's not like I

(38:20):
was again so interested in trying to become Billy Coleman
that I was living my own life of the outdoors,
so to speaking. You know, Mr Stewart, what's so unique
about that movie? And I I said this before I
knew you, I knew that I would ever know. It's
what a good actor you were. I mean that was

(38:41):
pretty because there's all you know, all of us have
watched movies where there's a kid actor and they're kind
of the the weak link of the thing. Then that movie, man,
you just carried it so well and we're such a
natural actor, Like, how were you able to pull that
off well? And see, in my mind when people I've
had people tell me that before, I'm still saying, are

(39:02):
you sure? Because I was telling Steve this the other day,
when Steve Ronnella had called me, I told him I said,
I really didn't know that I was acting. I think
I was maybe reliving a lot of what I who
I am. I honestly don't know, other than I believe
that a greater power, which I firmly believe in God,

(39:22):
was how I was able to do what I did
annoyingly because it wasn't something I I thought about, Okay,
I need to do this this way or that way.
I did it the way I felt, And I guess
if that's that was you know, they say, well, that
was good acting. I'm thinking, well, I don't know if
it was good acting or just portraying what the emotion
of I felt at that time. Well, I think what

(39:42):
you just described as a good acting, I mean to
to be able to live a character because you're so
familiar with that character. I mean, it was just one
of those things that you didn't have to act like
a country kid. You were, and you the genuineness that
you came across inside of it, even inside kind of
the moral issues inside the story. I see that today

(40:04):
inside of you sitting here talking to character matters to you,
and in that movie that was such a strong theme
of it. It really was if I had to do
a part that was different than that that maybe wasn't me.
I don't know what I could do it. It's clear
to see that character mattered to the real Stewart Peterson
character also mattered to the fiction character. Billy Coleman character

(40:29):
mattered to the author Wilson Rawls, who created this story.
But what's ironic and redemptive is that in the last
episode we learned that Wilson Rawls served time in prison
in his younger days for what we can pretty much
say was a lack of character. And by the way,
Mr Wilson pleaded guilty to those charges, so it's unlikely

(40:49):
he was wrongfully accused. My intent in speaking with Mr
Stewart was just to get a look behind that period
of his life and to see how it affected him.
I asked him what it was going back home to Copeville,
Wyoming as a movie star. All through my the rest
of my junior high in my high school years, I

(41:09):
was very aware of the fact that my competitors, whether
it was football or wrestling, they knew who I was.
That was a little bit of a challenge for me,
because I've never forgotten the story of we had a
little tournament here in Cokeville, and wrestling tournament, and I
had the fellow who was in my weight had just
moved there, I guess from California. Was supposed to be

(41:32):
somewhat of a big deal. And when we got there,
he'd sent one of his little buddies over and said, hey, you,
so and so wants to want you to know that
you were going to be counting lights, which is a
terminology used in wrestling. You're gonna be on your back,
you know. And I thought, wait a minute, I'm not
going to let that happen just because they think I'm
a movie star that I should be, you know, some
kind of a badge of honor. If they can beat me,

(41:54):
you're kind of a target. Then I became a little
bit of a target, and I kind of I wouldn't
have wanted to watch you if you're anything like Billy
Cullman from Well. I just I just didn't want that
kind of a you know, I didn't I didn't want
them to think just because I was in the films
that they were gonna be I was gonna be easy pickings.
And it was just it was it was kind of

(42:15):
a poetic justice for me because I was extremely nervous,
but I was so excited when you know, when when
it all said and done, you know, he was the
one counting the lights instead of me, so I won.
You know, I just thought, well, you know, that's uh,
that's what I dealt with him. I thought a lot
about that, and it just kind of felt like it
was a little bit of a ball and chain in

(42:36):
many ways, because I never wanted I never wanted to
to to be and receive the accolades because I've been
in a film I wanted. Accolades has come because of
my efforts, like in my wrestling and my football. That's
where I wanted. And the movie would have been widespread enough.
I mean, the same was released stor you probably had
people recognizing you on the street. I mean, and and

(42:57):
even today as I get you, even losing my hair
a little bit. And you know this many years down
the road, really you still have people that recognize. Somebody
that might have recognized Mr. Stewart was Mr Ronnie. Ronnie
was in the target audience for the nineteen seventy four
release of this film. However, you might be surprised by

(43:19):
his response to it. What year were you born? Okay,
So Wilson Rawls wrote the book Where the Red Fern
Grows in nineteen sixty one? Would you have read that
book as a kid. I have read the book. I
might have been, but now I'm an avid reader. Most
folks that was up that I knew never read books

(43:40):
in their life, that didn't go to school very much.
To be honest with you, but I've read a little
bit of everything. But I would have read it. I
don't know that that book was readily available to me.
I mean, your dad was you had red bone hounds
at that time. Did you think much about it or
just it was it just normal? It wasn't kind of
like m well, you know what I mean. It was

(44:01):
just like an everyday kid would have done. Here, Okay,
so the book it was like life to us. You know,
really we literally made money picking up soda bottles, you know,
for five cents deposits, you know, I mean we really
did to buy hound puppy was you know, it's just
we're just like the deal, you know, we do that.

(44:21):
That's what we do. You know, getting to the train
station you would have been a big deal for us,
more so than buying the puppies. You know, any any
book you read, if you're a good reader, you and
you've had a good author, then you're you become part
of that book in my mind. You know, I read
a Western novel literally almost every night, one complete novel

(44:44):
before I go to bed, uh, you know, Louis Lamore
and Zane Gray. And I've been that kind of reader.
I mean, I've read The Red Fern Grows, you know,
I read the book, you know, probably a couple of times.
But it wasn't that big a deal because it was
life in the Hills and truthfully was which that's not
far from here, talk, it's not very far. How far

(45:06):
as a crow flies away from Taloqua. I mean, yeah,
it's it's an hour and hour in minutes driving. It
was interesting for me to hear the impact of a
movie on a person who was almost play by play
living out a version of Billy Coleman's life. The literary
mechanism of connecting a far away place and a foreign

(45:29):
lifestyle didn't hook Mr Ronnie. The truth of it is
this living in some version of hard times in the Ozarks.
Wasn't that romantic of a life. It was just life.
If you listen, this next section is the most impacting

(45:49):
of my interview with Mr Stewart. I asked him if
he did any more movies, and his answer surprised me.
So after the movie, did you do any more movies?
I did? My uncle, who was into family valued movies,
he we did about three or four more. So how

(46:10):
long did your acting career span in terms of years?
You know? It tell about nineteen and then and then, uh,
I had opportunity and have had a few other little
I guess check backs with me and I just haven't
ever been compelled again to want to say yeah really so,
so when something like that, like you've kind of got

(46:31):
a fuel it by just like going and trying out
for parts and taking the chance of flying somewhere for
I mean, I guess I guess somebody in movies like
stuff just comes to him, but that's not That's how
everything for me, it all came to me. It was
never an aspiration or my saying I'm I want to
do it. I'm an aggressively approach it. When I got

(46:52):
through with Pony Express, writer and I did I mention
that one anyway, there was one called Pony Express, right,
I think that was one of the last ones I did.
The director of that at he later did a film
called The Sackets. It's a Western, and he wanted me
to play one of the Sack brothers. And as I
read the script, there were just some things that we're
kind of went against the grain of my values and

(47:15):
that I told him. I said, I just really don't
think this is a part from me as as for
my person. And I've always felt that way that if
you act and you are into the part, you're gonna
feel a lot of the same things that you would
in real life. And uh, in the case of this one,
this The Sackets, you know, there were some things where
they'd been out on the range for a while and

(47:36):
then they came into town and it was party time,
and you know, with the women and the alcohol, and
I just said, that's just not me. I can't portray that,
even though it's acting. I can't do that and didn't
want that to carry over in any way, shape or form.
And as a result, you know, once I got married,
I understood exactly why I didn't want to do that,
because I didn't want to have to feel anything that

(47:59):
would be contrary to what it should be, and that's
fidelity and commitment to my wife. The mind and body
don't know the difference when you're faking it and when
it's real. So was that was that a factor in
closing down it was? I love it, man. It's bizarre
to me how media portrays human life. They often prey

(48:22):
upon our extremes and in turn promote the normalization of
those extremes. I think as a society we could almost
universally agree that infidelity degrades people in families. However, you
can hardly watch a sitcom, movie or program that doesn't
portray it in a compelling way. Think about it, and

(48:44):
think about how bizarre that is. I absolutely love it
that Mr Stewart had the fortitude and wisdom at age
twenty to see the potential pitfalls in the life as
a Hollywood movie star, and he intentionally navigated around it. Rows.
That's some high level stuff. This is the part of
the Bargarase podcast where we proclaim that having character is

(49:09):
cool around here. You're not the cool kid because you
do dumb stuff. You're the cool kid because you do
wise stuff and having a value system that you live by. Nope,
none of us are perfect. But you got to stand
for something or you'll fall for anything. Que the errand

(49:30):
tipping not really, don't do it. Phil Mr Stewart truly
was an up and coming Hollywood movie star. The road
was paved before him. He received the Star of Tomorrow
award in the nineteen seventies, and he purposefully walked away
from a lucrative future. I love it. He went on

(49:51):
to build custom homes, running outfitting business called Cricket Sky
Outfitters and Wyoming and have a wonderful family. So you
after they are in the early twenties, you were done. Yeah,
and you went off to have outfitting business and build homes.
You know. I do some rustic furniture, right. I like
to be creative with my hands, and I'm I'm a

(50:13):
person who likes the physical aspect of life and not
merely an entertained part of life where you know a
screen or you know some of that stuff. And I'm
not saying I'm just glad there's there's all types to
make up the world, because I wasn't born to be
able to make things happen on a screen or or
that you know, that kind of stuff. Let's get back

(50:36):
with Professor Tutan for a final look at Wilson Rawls
and some of the American ideals that shaped this book.
I'm interested in why we are the way we are,
and I'll reveal what the saddest part of the book
was for me. Now, biographically, we know that Wilson Rawls

(50:58):
did return. I mean not just to go to prison.
You know he did return. He returned. Uh. I know
that he returned because I know I know some Cherokee
folks over in Oklahoma that said he came with their
classroom back when they were kids. So he did come back.
It makes me feel good. But even if he didn't play,
that land has been sanctified. It's sacred now and there
will always be some of him there in that land.

(51:18):
The saddest part to me in the book, even more
sad than the dogs dying is that he had to
move away, and that's that line that he never came back.
Because what makes me pound the table is, I mean,
I just love rural life so much, people's connection to place,

(51:38):
and just modern the modern world just disintegrates that in
so many ways, and it's just part of life. And
the fact that Billy's the winnings of his championship coon
hunt where the thing that gave them the money to
be able to move away and never come and in
the book they moved to Tulsa and presumably never come back.
That's what got me. Man. Yeah, this is the genius

(52:00):
of of literatures is we continue to read it and
people say, why would you want to read that again? Well,
some some say that literature reads us. You know, when
we read it, we read it, and every time we
read it, especially at the years have gone by, you
read it differently. When I was a kid, what struck
me most was the death of the dogs. But like you,
when I read this recently, when they're the wagons packed

(52:20):
up and they're gonna leave, and he's looking back at
that land one last time, and that that humble cabin
where they work so hard, it's a tear jerker in
that moment. It is because you know he'll never be back.
And all of us have that tied to home. And
many would say that when they dream, When we dream,
we have a childhood home that's in our dreams, and
it's always the same house. For me, it's always the
same house, the same place. I know, the smells, you know,

(52:43):
and that's home. You Know what's wild too, is that
in the movie you can actually see this cabin, you know,
and where they lived. It's like, oh man, that's I
want to go there. Back in those days for those
people that really lived in that kind of poverty, that
kind of isolation, that wasn't a dream like and so
them going to town was like major upgrade in everything.

(53:06):
So right now, when all of us live in cities
and have these urbanized lives, we dream of going back
to the country. And so you know, you kind of
have to switch it around. And where they were seemed
like paradise and they were leaving to go to this
thing that we now all know, which is it's just interesting. Now.
You know, what makes a great great work of art
in literature is his irony. Right when something turns out

(53:28):
to be the opposite what we assume. And in this novel,
when Billy finally goes to Talaqua, which is the big city,
he runs into some kids who were in school and
they're not nice to him. Is that city living? Is
that what it means to get in education? Is is
Billy going to turn out like that? You know? And
the irony is that his lack of education actually makes
him a better person. That he can get his education
from the woods itself. And that's very much an American

(53:50):
theme right in our literature, is that the land itself
can teach us something right and we can get you know,
it's mythologized in the life of Abraham Lincoln. You know,
he he learned right with a piece of charcoal on
a on a wooden shovel by firelight in a cabin,
you know. So we we really value that kind of
education that um that can that can occur in the
woods without much technology or or or city living. There's

(54:13):
even an assumption that city life will uh will weaken men.
This is what Teddy Roosevelt thought. That's why he went
west and reinvented himself, you know, and started hunting, wearing
bear skin coats and Indian looking clothes. Yeah, you know,
he got riched glasses. You know, he didn't he want
he really wanted to reinvigorate his masculinity in the practice
of you know, frontier life. And that is really an

(54:35):
American thing, is you know, I'm I'm trying to understand
this rural American identity and what interests me is specifically
where it's connected to hunting. And so that's why I
ask you, is it really an American idea that we
learned from the land and and you know, we we've
done series on Daniel Boone where we've seen that this
idea of solitude and the wilderness is really an American idea.

(54:59):
Like much of much of the world. Prior to a
couple hundred years ago, we were doing our very best
to get away from wilderness because the wilderness is where
you died. You know, there's themes inside the Bible of
wilderness being separation from God and all this. But then
when we get here to what is now America, it
was different. I guess I'm trying to understand. Even the

(55:19):
the European settlement of America and all its trouble and
wild stuff that happened, it was pretty unique to the
world and that it was it was the last big
block of the world that was kind of modernized, if
that's an appropriate word, but a lot of for some
unique stuff to happen in terms of the way we
interacted with the land. And and I'm also interested in

(55:41):
how Native American culture deeply impacts kind of rural American
culture today in ways that we don't understand, and this
book shows that strongly too. Definitely, when Europeans arrived here,
they invented the notion of the frontier. You think about it,
it's probably obvious, but you know, Indigenous people didn't think
of the front They didn't have a frontier. This was
just where they live. Yeah, didn't have a notion of
wilderness either. They said, you know, there was nothing wild.

(56:04):
I mean, they say Luther standing bearrom than reading him
right now. He's a famous suit chief, and he said,
and he lived in a time before even saw a
white person on the plains, and he said, uh, it
was not wild, it was tame. Because they were so
comfortable in their ancestral land. And it's taken centuries for
Americans to become comfortable in this land. When the Puritans
arrived here in six two. They were in armor, breastplates

(56:26):
and muskets and were you know, are armed and ready
for that great threat of a wall of forest and
beyond it. They knew nothing, just that they were already
stories of savage people that would kill you, and they're
absolutely terrified. And the first thing they wanted to do
was clear path. I mean, get some of the trees
down so they can get see. We were talking about
the fear of the dark. You know, it's taken Europeans

(56:47):
in North America were absolutely terrified of a forest, you know,
I mean the imagination runs wild with you know, indigenous
people ready to kill you and scalp you. Absolutely terrified.
And it took, like I said, centuries for people to
move Europeans and move into the woods and understandably adapt
some of the ways of Native Americans who knew how
to do it, and slowly became more American in that process.

(57:09):
And that's something I didn't come up with. That. Fredis
Jackson Turner, the famous historian, said that long ago. He
called that a frontier thesis. And that's what makes us
uniquely American. If you look into the accounts on the frontier,
as Europeans would call it Native Americans and frontier people,
you know, white settlers were living side by side. Often
they were neighbors, you know. But what's important members these
people knew each other. They knew each other my name,

(57:31):
and would live within you know, a gunshot of each other.
That was the rule back then is you had to
be able within a gun far enough that you could
barely hear a gunshot. And so it's a process that
we're very proud of, right and still today. Those are
the values that many of us, whether we're thinking of
becoming a back to the lander or you know, wanting
to you join the Boy Scouts and take hikes, all
of that. We're kind of, in a healthy manner, were

(57:53):
re enacting that, that frontier spirit. And sometimes it can
be corny if we're not self conscious of it. Reflective,
like like you said a moment ago, we can romanticize
tough living in a cabin something that you know, like
I mentioned my father, they had no running water, you know,
they had no electricity, and as a child I romanticized that.
But he was very happy to escape that life, you know,
although never quite comfortable in a suit, never and as

(58:16):
soon as he retired, he was oddly regained the Southern
accident came back to him. Yeah. Yeah, I've never been
back to the old arcs. All I have left are
my dreams and memories. Yes, some day, if God is willing,

(58:40):
I'd like to go back and walk again in the
hills I knew as a boy, And I'd like to
touch the heart that's carved in an old sycamore tree,
just says Dan. And An and I look for that
sacred spot by the river where the red fern grows.

(59:13):
Sometimes it's hard to put your finger on it. But
whatever culture you're a part of, you've been impacted by
its literature and stories. Going back into deep human history.
Since the beginning, stories have been inoculated with a live
value system that is looking for hosts to carry it onward.
It might be pertinent to ask which came first, the

(59:35):
story or the value system. Do we create stories to
carry values or did the values create the stories. A
famous Native American author named moment Day said, quote, man
tells stories in order to understand his experience and achieves
the fullest realization of his humanity in literature. End of quote. Undoubtedly,

(59:59):
the book Where the Red Fern Grows is one American
classic that I can fully get behind. Aside from Billy
hunting them red bone hounds, the story is replete with character,
and it also has a fundamental component of spirituality that
I believe is an important and vital part of the
human story. I still marvel at the widespread reach of

(01:00:22):
a book about coon hunting. Surely Mr Wilson tapped into
an awareness of his own humanity and was truly gifted
in his ability to connect us to place in such
a seamless way. We all felt like we were there,
regardless of our past background, geographic location, or economic status.
The story is a humble human story, and therein lies

(01:00:47):
a pattern for those of us interested in seeing our
lifestyle of living close to the land persists through time.
Nobody cares about coon hunting, but they're moved by people's
story and their connection to place. Thank you all so
much for listening to Bear Grease. All the things we

(01:01:09):
talk about on this podcast are deeply personal to me,
and me and the team at Metator work hard to
bring you quality content every week, and I can't thank
you enough for the support and for listening. Please do
me a favor and share our podcast with friend and
foe this week Thanks to you guys, the demand for

(01:01:30):
our bear grease hats is off the chart and we're
sold out again. Our apologies, but we should have some
new hats by May. When they come in then you
better get them quick. But we do have some of
those black panther believer hats on the metator dot com
right now. See you next week on the Rent