Ernie Raney hails from Dogpatch USA

Ernie Raney hails from Dogpatch USA

Monday, October 31, 2005 10:50 AM CST

Written by: Chris Houston, LCL staff writer

BROOKFIELD - While scores of baby boomers have been to the place from which Brookfield R-3's Elementary Principal came, few of them have made his epic journey from the stereotyped hollows of hillbilly semiliteracy to the summit of formal educational attainment.

Ironically, although his ancestral home was constructed so deep within a rural "holler" its television could only receive one station, the local public school administrator learned some of life's most fundamental lessons sitting atop "a bluff that overlooked the entire park."

Ernie Gene Raney was born and raised in Dogpatch USA, a theme park developed within a thousand acre tract of Ozark splendor and based on a comic strip that satirized Northwestern Arkansas's threadbare hill folk.

In a day before political correctness would have otherwise hushed cartoonist Al Capp's humorous tales of simple-minded caricatures like Li'l Abner, Ernie was more interested in exploring nature than lingering around Dogpatch's man-made amusements.

"What do you do for fun as a boy in the middle of a theme park?" he asks already knowing the answer full-well in his heart. "Well, I enjoyed riding the train and seeing the skits hillbilly characters like Mammy and Pappy Yokum and Daisy Mae and Abner would put on, but I realized they were real people just playing fictional characters, doing a job and leaving the park to go home somewhere else when they were done."

As Ernie explains, the true joy was to be had after the theme park shut down for the day.

He recalls, "You would walk through the silence of the woods and hollows, and it was then that the natural sounds would reveal themselves."

Describing the vast expanses around the park that were never tamed and commercialized, Ernie continues, "There were two streams flowing through the park, and one came out of the mouth of a cave. You could sit on this big rock at the mouth of that cave, getting cooled on warm summer evenings by the mist that would blow out. Then I would go down to this waterfall called Marble Falls, watch the rushing water and immerse myself in the total feeling of freedom and wonder."

Reflecting on his beginnings that were humble but free of want, Ernie says, "We didn't have name-brand clothes or fancy cars. We could rarely eat out and only went on one vacation I can ever remember, but we had so much of what nature could provide us... And we had each other."

Explaining "there are some things you just feel that provide you with support your whole life," he says he and his kid brother, Scott, "had a love-hate relationship" but shared many memorable adventures in their Ozark paradise.

"In the summer,' Ernie recalls, 'he and I would inflate our [rubber] raft and float down the big stream...We would catch crayfish, pull their tails off and boil them. Not a meal fit for a king, just a few victuals that also made great bait for catching trout. And in the winter until well after dark, we would sled down the ice-covered hill the stream would freeze into, the steel sled rails throwing sparks like Halley's comet when they would strike rock."

He continues, "We didn't have backup electricity and our little two-bedroom house was heated by a wood stove. When it snowed a lot and the power went out, the fireplace, wood stove, and candles worked just fine."

Ernie remembers cutting wood every weekend, his dad, Ernest, wielding the axe while he tossed cut logs into the bed of their truck and his brother stacked them, singing all the while. "Dad and I would try to keep the pace brisk to distract Scott from his singing," he recalls.

In the idyllic wilderness of their childhood, Ernie and Scott explored every cave, hill, and hollow, narrowly avoiding the peril of falling into one seemingly bottomless sinkhole and crawling through forbidden subterranean dens to collect ancient Indian arrowheads and "soda straws" (stalactites).

Other potential dangers included a few bears and a mountain lion only glimpsed on occasion. "We didn't really worry about them," says Ernie. "We belonged there with them. It was our home."

Always more intrigued as a boy by what he could find off the beaten path than by what attracted tourists to the developed area of Dogpatch, the now-grown elementary school principal observes, "The whole art of teaching a child involves gaining access to the backroads of his heart and mind, allowing him to be what he is and waiting to help him take that next step when he is ready."

That sentiment hearkens back to the educational romanticism of philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau as well as the importance of schooling Ernie's own father patiently stressed during his formative years.

Like the naturalism that permeated the principal's boyhood, the "state of nature" the 18th Century philosopher equated with childhood has provided the educational foundation upon which the biography of the Ozark lad and the history of all modern children-at least in the Western world-has been built.

Modern American educators from John Dewey forward have taken account of Rousseau's admonition to allow a child to be what he naturally is at his present stage of development, and that lesson hasn't been lost on Ernie Raney.

Never straying far from his roots, Ernie still often returns to the hills of his fabled childhood.

The remnants of Dogpatch, the theme park, rest silently in ruins after years of disuse. Gone are the tourists. Gone are Lonesome Polecat and Hairless Joe, although the cave where they were supposed to have brewed Kickapoo Joy Juice can still be found there.

But what is left of the old attractions that have since been eclipsed by more technologically sophisticated parks like those at Six Flags and in Branson aren't important to Ernie.

"I like to take my boys to see the clubhouse my brother and I built by stacking limestones and the bluff my granddad once fell off of," he relates. "I want them to see the land my family homesteaded, the place where I couldn't imagine living right next door to someone with a tiny yard."

The boy reared in the lap of so-called hillbilly ignorance-the man who has since earned five college degrees, the principal who is presently leading the way in implementing a literacy improvement program at Brookfield R-3-is still carefree when he pauses at memory's doorway to the past.

"I have consumed myself with work as an adult," he confesses. "But all that labor has helped me appreciate the freedom to play I had as a child in Dogpatch."