Snapshots: May 2015

“More often than not in history it was small towns that made the greatest contributions. The relatively small towns of Jerusalem, Athens, Florence, Amsterdam and Antwerp gave us our religion and most of the elements of our culture.” ~ Eric Hoffer from a 1978 newspaper column published in Bartlesville, Oklahoma

I was researching Eric Hoffer (1898-1983), the San Francisco longshoreman-philosopher and author of The True Believer, when Bartlesville, OK, popped up in my Google search.

What’s this?

Bartlesville, population 36,258, was an oil boomtown at the turn of the 20th Century. Still the home of Phillips Petroleum Company (now ConocoPhillips), the town is about 50 miles north of Tulsa where I live. On regional cable television here it is mostly known for two blond identical twin daughters who advertise a Toyota car dealership by intoning in unison: “There’s a better way to buy in Bartlesville.”

So I’m wondering how Eric Hoffer, who rarely left his spartan ~ not so much as a telephone ~ apartment in San Francisco, played a role in the cultural history of a small Oklahoma town near the Kansas border.

As I read the Google search results referencing “Hoffer + Bartlesville,” I discovered an obscure column by the working man’s philosopher.

Considering what Hoffer wrote in his popular philosophy books, and said in television interviews, he was in many ways a perfect fit for Bartlesville.

While he once held some sort of adjunct philosopher-in-residence position at U.C. Berkeley and his papers are archived at Stanford University, Hoffer was not an academic or stereotypical intellectual. He was a self-taught philosopher. He didn’t earn any college degrees. He had no high school diploma. There is no record that he ever went to grammar school, or even kindergarten.

Somewhere in his lost youth he learned to read and write English and German, and later in life developed a working knowledge of Hebrew while living on Skid Row in Los Angeles.

Used bookstores and public libraries provided him with an ad hoc self-selected Great Books-style reader’s education.

I remember him telling a PBS interviewer how much he loved Michel de Montaigne, the 16th Century French essayist. But Hoffer didn’t take a course on Montaigne. He fell in love with the essays, which he bought in a used bookstore because at 1,300 it was the biggest book they had and he wanted something the would last if he got snowed in while gold prospecting. He got snowed in and read the Collected Essays of Montaigne twice.

While he never had a driver's license, he had card for all the public libraries serving the small towns of California’s Central Valley where he was an itinerant farm worker during The Great Depression.

Much of Hoffer’s self education probably took place in rural hamlets not unlike Bartlesville. So it may not be surprising that unlike academic philosophers and intellectuals from Ivy League schools, Hoffer loved small town America.

Sometime after President Eisenhower’s praise and Eric Sevareid’s CBS interviews made Hoffer a national figure, the longshoreman-philosopher also attracted the attention of Charles M. Kittrell, a Phillips Petroleum executive vice president. Kittrell invited Hoffer to the company headquarters in Bartlesville. Hoffer, who rarely traveled outside the Bay Area, visited the Oklahoma town twice and fell in love with the Andy Hardy atmosphere.

Not a writer to drip sentiment like a wet mop, Hoffer’s friendship with Kittrell ran deep, inspiring the old longshoreman to say: “Isn’t it nice that before I should die that I have a truly good friend.”

On his second visit to Bartlesville in 1978, Hoffer wrote a column for the local newspapers extolling the virtues of small towns as cultural centers throughout the ages. He eluded to a barefoot philosopher prowling around Athens, a carpenter in small town Jerusalem, and a lens grinder in Amsterdam.

“Now, when you consider these fabulous small towns that gave us so much, you realize that they had one characteristic in common,” Hoffer told Bartlesville readers. “They each had a central place in which inhabitants could meet and mix, where the old and the young, the rich and the poor, the wise and the ignorant could come together, tell each other what they were doing or thinking, ask or give advice, argue and vie with each other.”

In 1978, Bartlesville civic leaders were working to get a sales tax increase approved to build a cultural center for the town.

At the end of his column, Hoffer, with his characteristic enthusiasm wrote: “And let Bartlesville set an example for the thousands of small towns scattered over this continent.”

Hoffer’s newspaper column is “credited with helping to win approval” for the tax that funded the construction of the Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired Bartlesville Community Center with its 1,700-seat performance center.

A bronze bust of Hoffer, can still be found in a secluded corner of the center commemorating his contribution to Bartlesville culture. And the center still has a small brochure that includes the article that helped inspire a small town to build a big-time concert space that hosts, among many other events, the OK Mozart International Festival each June.
~ Rich Seeley