Picnic

            Few people today realize it but the entire concept of the church picnic is a product of early media manipulation. The first picnic was a fictitious event which took place in the novel, Clean Corn and Clean Minds published in 1910. The novel was the opener in a series of fifty-six books which comprised The Dumple Family Saga, the ongoing story of Wilbert and Dour Dumple and their many offspring, all of whom worked the Dumple Family Farm. The novels first appeared in serial form in The Saturday Evening Post.

            The author of the series, Graham Walden, (He never would tell anyone his real name.)had at first intended for the books to be a realistic portrayal of life on the farm. Walden never lived anywhere except Chicago but he did take a drive out of the city one day to do research on the rural life. He arrived at a farm house at around five-thirty in the evening only to discover that everyone there was too tired and grouchy to talk with him. In fact, every family in the area went to bed at seven PM in order to be awake at three in the morning.

            Walden surmised that such a regimen would translate into a limited commercial appeal in novels. He returned home determined to create a farm life that city folks would find appealing.

            The author’s first challenge was to think up an engagingly quaint activity in which the rustic folk could wile away the hours in innocent fun. In an interview conducted in 1939, a year before his death, Walden admitted that he had been trying to duplicate the success of the famous western writer Zeke Lariat, who, in a bizarre flight of imagination created the practice of square dancing, thus adding a touch of whimsy to the otherwise violent Buckshot Callahan series.

            Walden always claimed that he had little confidence that his own creation, the church picnic, would be accepted by the public. This assertion is backed up by his coining of the word “picnic”, a variation on “panic”, which is what Walden thought any intelligent person would do when confronted by the notion of eating in filthy conditions surrounded by vermin.

            Surely no one could have anticipated the incredible response that the first chapter of Clean Corn and Clean Minds would engender when it first appeared in The Saturday Evening Post. The novel opens with the Dumple family preparing to shake hands with Pastor Isaiah Gideon at the conclusion of a Sunday morning service. But the Dumples’ youngest child, the “rambunctious, golden haired” Doxy stampedes by the reverend and runs outside to reserve her favorite picnic table in the church’s vast front yard. The girl’s mother is appalled but Pastor Gideon responds with a warm hearty chuckle. “I cannot fault the child’s enthusiasm, for there is no better place to enjoy the blessings of God’s good earth than under the canopy of God’s heaven.”

            Walden’s readers quickly learn that the good citizens of Purebutter, Illinois spend every Sunday afternoon of the summer socializing at a church picnic. The author then establishes the criteria for an ideal picnic. 1) The food is homemade, delicious, and carried in a basket. 2) There are a few bugs flying about but they only bite those characters designated for comedy relief. 3) Everybody laughs a lot for rather vague undefined reasons. 4) There are plenty of birds around but they all behave themselves. 5) Children speak rarely and then come up with adorable one liners.

            The day after the magazine hit the stands the American Federation of Farmers issued a press release condemning the story as “...presenting an insulting stereotype of the contemporary farmer. Particularly offensive was the scene in which farmers were portrayed as flocking together like pigs to eat without dishware or cutlery and to behave like idiots.”

            But the A.F.F.’s protest was forgotten  the next Sunday, when the dirt roads of rural America were clogged by city dwellers in cars with kids jammed in the back seat and a basket of food stuffed in the trunk. They were all searching for a church on whose yard they could picnic. At first, the situation threatened to become a disaster. Potential picnickers found that most country churches were surrounded by graveyards, not picnic tables, and most country pastors lacked Isaiah Gideon’s good humor. This first wave of tourists was hounded and almost repelled by bombastic preachers who insisted, for a variety of arcane theological reasons, that picnicking was sinful.

            Fortunately, all this took place before the time of government farm subsidies, so

farmers were always looking for ways to turn an extra buck. Enterprising men of the soil quickly slapped together pieces of scrap lumber to make objects resembling tables which they placed in fields laden with burs, weeds and insects, where no self-respecting cow would graze. They designated this a picnic area and charged visitors a “maintenance fee” to dine there.

            The enterprise was a huge success, creating numerous spin-off industries. Ma Dumple’s Picnic Treats spared tourists the agony of having to prepare their own picnic baskets, and Wilbert’s Country Lodge promised “A Peaceful Haven For Harried Folks.”

            The men of the cloth quickly came around. Country pastors worked at developing a warm hearty chuckle, and they would frequently stroll through the picnic areas spouting rustic homilies in the stilted flowery language of Isaiah Gideon.

            For ten years picnicking remained almost exclusively a group or family activity practiced by members of protestant churches. But in 1920 the situation took a drastic shift when, after turning out twenty-two Dumple Family novels, Graham Walden was told by an editor that, “The apple pie is getting stale.”

            Walden responded to the changing times by allowing the character of Doxy to grow up. Doxy, who had remained a child through the first twenty-two novels, suddenly blossomed into a “voluptuous, golden haired” girl of seventeen. In the same novel the author introduced Steel McKay, a “mysterious, brooding wanderer”, who became a hired hand at the Dumple farm and walked around a lot with his shirt off.

            The twenty-third Dumple novel, Hot Sun and Hot Blood, shocked the nation and changed the face of American Protestantism. The bombshell hit in the fourth installment where, in one sizzling chapter, Walden secularized the picnic. Doxy and Steel escape to a wooded area for a private lunch. It is Saturday, there is no other member of the Dumple family present and the whole episode is certainly not a sanctioned church event. There are no tables involved; the couple sit and later lie on a blanket. In the one concession to tradition, the food is carried in a basket, is homemade and presumably delicious.

            But little actual attention is paid to the food. In this, the first of many such picnics, Doxy and Steel are primarily interested in frolicking about in the woods to the extent that

The Saturday Evening Post editors of that era would permit their fictional characters to frolic.

            This new development was a boon to the farmers, most of whom were no longer farming, but running amusement parks which had grown out of the slapdash picnic areas of a decade earlier. Soon no amusement park was complete without a “Doxy’s Daring Tunnel of Love”. During the off season, Wilbert’s Country Lodge would offer the honeymoon suite at bargain prices for a “Steel McKay Weekend Special.”

            The church’s response to Hot Sun and Hot Blood divided along denominational lines. Liberals generally approved. Professor Corneilius Lotus of Princeton noted that “Walden has liberated the picnic from its oppressive ecclesiastical surroundings in order that it may go into the world and there attain a deeper, more profound spirituality.” Evangelicals organized a letter writing campaign to The Saturday Evening Post demanding that Doxy be returned to the innocence of childhood and threatening a boycott of the magazine should their appeal be rejected. (The Post’s circulation tripled during this period.) Meanwhile, Pentecostals prayed fervently for Graham Walden to be struck by lightning.

            The debate raged for over forty years until the sexual revolution of the sixties diminished the picnic’s importance for the secular world. The number one song of 1969,

Let’s Do It In The Street went so far as to make picnics unfashionable.

            But many conservative churches continued to observe the traditional picnic. Today, with our current era’s obsession with nostalgia, the practice shows definite signs of rejuvenation as people once again gather in parks to eat spoiled food, defend themselves against black flies and fret over vomiting children.

            And some pastors are even practicing their warm hearty chuckle.