Garland in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates

[A Tribute from the Editor of the Rotarian, 1960]

[210] X [A Tribute from the Editor of Rotarian, 1960] Leland D. Case Leland D. Case (1900–1986) was a journalist and the editor of Rotarian Magazine from 1930 to 1950 and of Together Magazine from 1956 to 1963. He first met Garland in 1939 when he solicited an article for his magazine (“Let the Sunshine In,” Rotarian 55 (October 1939): 8–11). In 1939 he helped found the Friends of the Middle Border Museum in Mitchell, South Dakota, and then in 1944 Westerners International, an organization devoted to promoting the study of the American West. Chicago, 10 October 1960 I first saw Hamlin Garland at the railroad station of Lamy, New Mexico, one fall day in 1939. His sturdy frame was buttoned in a black topcoat and his handsome face, with its generously shaped moustache, glowed under a dark slouch hat. We had had correspondence about an article for a magazine I was editing, and he had stopped off enroute from the East to California for a visit to our temporary adobe home on then dusty Camino del Monte Sol in Santa Fe. Rapport was immediate. Though we were of different generations, each had spent youthful years in Iowa and South Dakota, and we were quickly drawn together in the freemasonry of a mood only to be understood by those who have seen and felt and smelled freshly turned prairie sod. Out of our conversations that day came an idea for an organization to articulate and lift up the indigenous culture of the then depressed Upper Missouri Valley. It materialized as Friends of the Middle Border, seated at Mitchell, South Dakota, where it has a museum and has stimulated creative research. But from the ashes of a short-lived branch in Chicago sprang a movement possessing remarkable vitality. “The Westerners,” it is called. It consists of groups of business and professional men with unfeigned interest in Western lore and history. They are loosely linked, chiefly through the Western Foundation of the College [211] of the Pacific in Stockton. They flourish in a dozen American cities and in England, France, Germany, and Sweden. Hamlin Garland would be surprised—and pleased. For, as did few literary men before him, he recognized the texture and sensed the vitality of the West. So it is in the spirit of paying tribute where it is over-due that I am wishing that in front of all Westerners assembled, I could rise and nominate him as our Chief Grand Exalted Lobo! Leland D. Case, from Hamlin Garland: Centennial Tributes and a Checklist of the Hamlin Garland Papers in the University of Southern California Library, ed. and comp. Lloyd Arvidson (Los Angeles: University of Southern California Library Bulletin no. 9, 1962), 17–18. Leland D. Case ...