Why I'm an Only Child and Other Slightly Naughty Plains Folktales by Roger Welsch (review)

As a first-year student at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln during the fall of 1958, I enrolled in a beginning German course to apply toward the foreign language requirement of the College of Arts and Sciences. The course not only helped me meet the requirement, but it also changed my life. The instructor was a young, bespectacled, crew-cut teaching assistant, standing in front of his first class ever. His name was Roger Welsch. The teaching approach was the traditional grammar-translation method, but with a twist. Instead of the dull, boring, tedious lectures about grammar that many of us twenty-seven students might have anticipated, we were regaled with fascinating stories about how human language works. Roger demonstrated that grammar didn't have to be dull and boring at all. For us, it became vital, exciting, and even fun. I went on to major in German, acquired two graduate degrees in linguistics, and completed a fifty-year teaching career, forty-nine of those years at Hastings College.

Roger's intellectual focus shifted over the years from language to folklore, but that was hardly a stretch because language is the medium of folklore, and linguists and folklorists share a keen appreciation of how ordinary people talk in ordinary situations. Welsch begins his forty-fourth book with three introductory chapters—one autobiographical and two scholarly—about his philosophy of folklore. Roger defines folklore as "that part of culture that is transmitted primarily from person to person by informal means . . . word of mouth, example, demonstration, daily activity . . . rather than through formal conduits of knowledge like classrooms, books, galleries, or concert halls" (22).

The most delightful part of Why I'm an Only Child is the collection of dozens of Slightly Naughty Plains Folktales, which are best described by Roger's oxymoronic term "civil ribaldry"—stories that are only "slightly naughty," suggestive without being explicitly dirty, bawdy but with little or no offensive language. These are stories that might be heard around the table over coffee at the Chew 'n' Chat Café or around the table over drinks at the Dannebrog Tavern. "As are the Plains, the ribald tales are [mostly] rural, agricultural, subtle, and civil" (23).

I read the whole book in one day and experienced several chuckles, quite a few laughs out loud, and even a few tears. I'd heard some of the stories before, mostly at Roger's speaking engagements that I had attended, and there might also have been others from his "Postcards from Nebraska" segment on CBS News Sunday Morning with Charles Kuralt. In any case, even if I was experiencing the tales for the second or third time, I was totally captivated by them. I couldn't put the book down. I was having too much fun. Of all the stories collected in this volume, my favorite is Roger's father's answer to his son's question referenced in the title of the book. I was tempted to repeat it here, but thought better of it because I don't want to spoil that one for prospective readers.

My conclusion is that Roger Welsch is a superb writer and folklorist for the same reasons that he was a superb classroom teacher in our German class back in 1958. He has mastered his subject, he admires and respects his audience, he has an extraordinary sense of humor, and he is a thoroughly gifted storyteller. Those of us who value the language and culture of the Great Plains are indeed fortunate that he has created in Why I'm an Only Child such a fitting capstone of his productive and distinguished career.