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Just Plain Folklore

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

Thirty years ago, students at Cal State Northridge discovered that folklore was more than tales of Paul Bunyan.

They learned it included the creepy stories they swapped about a killer with a hook who terrorized couples on Mulholland Drive. They learned that the dirty jokes they told at fraternity parties were folklore and so were the lines guys used to pick up girls in the CSUN cafeteria.

They discovered that stories told in the Latino community about a weeping woman who haunted the San Fernando Mission were folklore. So were singing games played by African American children in Pacoima, the way different Valley families handed out their Christmas gifts, Yemenite songs and rumors of local caves populated by mysterious albinos.

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In 1996, student papers on these subjects became the Bess Lomax Hawes Student Folklore Archive. Stored in 24 boxes in CSUN’s Oviatt Library, the archive was donated by Hawes, a distinguished folklorist, musician and CSUN professor emerita, who is credited with pioneering the community-based folklore that is the norm today.

“A lot of it is not on a very high level in a literary way,” Hawes said of the jump-rope rhymes, urban legends, recipes for kugel and other material that make up the archive, most of it collected when she taught at CSUN during the 1960s and ‘70s.

But however simple the language, local folklore is of enduring value, Hawes believes.

“To me, it’s another way of getting to the human mystery--why people behave the way they do,” said Hawes, now 79 and living in Northridge.

The archive provides a unique window on the San Fernando Valley of 30 years ago, a catalog of local culture at a time when many residents didn’t even realize they had one.

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Much of the material in the collection has both a universal and a local dimension. Take the famous story of the “the hook” that circulated throughout the country during the 20th century’s middle decades.

Wherever in the United States teenage couples did things in cars their parents wouldn’t approve of, teenagers told the story of a couple who heard a noise outside, panicked and drove off, only to find a bloody hook hanging from the car door or window when they got home. It was understood that the fortunate couple had barely escaped death--or worse, in the young woman’s case.

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As the CSUN archive reveals, the local version of the famed urban legend usually involved Mulholland Drive, described by student Ron Bagel as “everybody’s favorite Lovers’ Lane [where] there is an eight mile stretch between Reseda Boulevard and Topanga which is completely desolate.”

But in 1966, student Bruce Lash heard from his younger brother, Lowell, who had heard it from a friend, that the Hook Man, as he was sometimes called, had struck at a lovers’ lane where Zelzah runs into the foothills beyond Granada Hills. In another version, the couple had been parked near the Griffith Observatory.

In 1971, student Christine E. Hold received a much deserved A for her collection of legends about such mythical bad guys as the Hook Man--stories Hawes believes may reflect normal teenage fears.

Hold heard from a 15-year-old Birmingham High School student--who had heard the story at a slumber party when she was in junior high--about the time the Hook Man “put on a woman’s clothes and knocked on someone’s door in those houses up by Mulholland in Encino. He pre tended that he was a Fuller brush saleslady and had a wig on and a dress and high heels. He asked if he could use her bathroom for a minute. Just as he was getting his hook ready to slash the lady, a neighbor came over. He heard the other woman in the house and fled.”

His true identity was revealed when the bag he left behind was found to be full of hooks, not brushes.

The woman who taught her CSUN students that their own communities were worthy of careful study is a towering figure in American folklore, said Daniel Sheehy, who succeeded Hawes as director of the folk and traditional arts program at the National Endowment for the Humanities. He describes Hawes as the visionary and inspirational matriarch of American folklore.

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Hawes is the daughter of John Lomax and the sister of Alan Lomax, whose taste and vision transformed the Archive of Folk Song at the Library of Congress from a musty repository of traditional songs to a robust collection of every kind of American music, from cowboy ballads to the songs of Southern prisoners and striking miners.

Hers is “pretty much the premier folklore family of the 20th century,” Sheehy said.

As a member of the Almanac Singers in the 1940s, Hawes sang and played the guitar and banjo alongside Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and her now late husband, Butch Hawes. She also co-wrote “MTA,” the song about Charlie’s eternal ride on the Boston subway that was a hit for the Kingston Trio during the 1950s folk revival she helped create.

“At the NEA, she was the architect of what we call public folklore today,” said Sheehy, who worked with Hawes at the Smithsonian Institution, as well. “Like her brother Alan, she was a pioneer in letting the voices of America’s folk genius be heard, in all its diverse glory.

“Folklore is basically local, Sheehy said.

And as head of the Smithsonian’s folklore program for the United States Bicentennial, Hawes worked to get virtually every state to recognize the importance of its own folk arts and to create a public folklore program.

She was awarded a National Medal of the Arts by President Clinton in 1993.

Before and after she became a national force in folklore, Hawes was at CSUN, encouraging her students to collect the rituals and stories of their own families and neighbors. She couldn’t bear to throw out the papers describing their collections. So for a long time she kept them under her bed, as certain of their value as she and the other Lomaxes had been of the work of Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie.

Several of the papers document the local twists on another widespread urban legend, sometimes called the Fatal Hairdo.

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In this one, which dates back to the era of big hair, a young woman of questionable hygiene chooses not to shampoo her hair but simply to tease or “rat it” with a comb into a beehive shape, then apply lots of hair spray.

According to legend, a black-widow spider, or in some versions a rat, a snake or a cockroach, crawls undetected into her hair, where the creature reproduces. In most accounts, the babies subsequently bite the girl to death.

Locally, the supposed victims lived in Canoga Park, Van Nuys and other Valley neighborhoods. One was said to be a parishioner at St. Genevieve’s Catholic Church on Roscoe Boulevard in Panorama City.

In 1968, student Barbara Rosen interviewed 117 people on the subject and discovered such common threads as frequent descriptions of the shampoo-averse girl as “cheap.” A number of Rosen’s informants, most of whom were Anglos, said the young woman with the Fatal Hairdo was Chicana.

Indeed, the archive is sprinkled with racial and ethnic slurs and other offensive material.

“There’s a lot of things in there that are not very nice,” Hawes pointed out. “That’s one of the values of this collection or any folklore collection. It gives you a sense of how things really are.”

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Some of the nastiest stuff is contained in a collection of pickup lines that student Richard J. Hoag put together. The year was 1967, as reflected in one Lothario’s relatively innocuous come-on: “I just got a new Andy Williams album. How about coming up to my apartment and listening to it?”

Hoag talked to women as well as men. One of his informants, 19-year-old Sandy, had encountered a come-on probably first used by an ancient Athenian who figured no woman could resist a guy about to ship out to face a Spartan sword. In 1967, it was the threat of Vietnam that men at CSUN and elsewhere used in hopes of weakening the resolve of attractive women.

“Everybody gets the soldier going off to war,” Sandy told Hoag, “but this one had a poem to go with it: ‘But at my back I always hear Time’s winged chariot hurrying near.’ He can’t remember who wrote it.”

Sandy had apparently heard a lot of pickup lines in her day, “from the awfully suave to the very crude.” The paper does not report whether the quotation of poetry worked in Sandy’s case, but it does make clear that Hoag chose the topic of pickup lines as a way to approach pretty strangers.

Also preserved for all time are the stunningly cruel come-ons favored by Vance, another of Hoag’s interviewees. A part-time student at CSUN, Vance would lie to girls, saying they couldn’t become pregnant if they had sex with him because he was sterile. Another of Vance’s favorites: “My wife is married, I’m not.”

Hawes urged her students to analyze what they collected. Jane Nozzi, who interviewed visitors to a spooky spot in Canoga Park called Mother’s Grave, speculated that these legends gave “the boys a chance to say they were downright terrified without fear of losing their masculinity.”

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Donald Malloy, who collected pickup lines from campus women in 1971, noted that many reported hearing fewer come-ons since enrolling at the Northridge campus. Malloy attributed the decline to its being largely “a commuter school.” Perhaps, he reasoned, it was difficult to establish a genuine community on such a campus: “People will attend class and go home or to work, and will rely on high school or neighborhood cliques for companionship.”

In a 1997 speech to a group of archivists, Hawes expressed her conviction that folklore is essentially community-based.

“Any good folkloric collecting project requires some degree of closeness and some degree of reciprocity,” she said. “A good CSUN student whose collection of--I don’t remember anymore (baby games? wart cures?)--came to me and said, ‘Mrs. Hawes, you taught me how to collect, but you didn’t teach me how to stop collecting.’ ”

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The student complained that one of her informants continued to pester her with additional examples long after she had finished her paper. Too bad, Hawes told the student. The persistent informant had helped her get an A and now it was time for the student to give back.

“No collector ever, ever stops,” said Hawes, who still carries a little notebook and jots down what she hears and observes on the bus and elsewhere.

Hawes said she learned much about the nature of the Valley while teaching at Northridge.

“The main thing I learned was that the Valley was a haven for immigrants and it had always been that. It was an end point, and it was a rich and culturally varied place as a result of that.”

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Sabina Magliocco, a folklorist and assistant professor of anthropology at CSUN, said Hawes draws people whenever she takes part in a campus event.

“So many people come just because of Bess, because she touched them so and made them aware of the importance of folklore . . . especially folk music,” said Magliocco.

Her students also collect folklore in their communities, and Magliocco said she plans to add their material to the Hawes Archive.

When Hawes talks about her work, she seems most proud of helping the United States develop a policy--unique, she believes--of encouraging new immigrants, such as the Hmong of Southeast Asia, both to assimilate and to keep “the beautiful things they bring along” from their original homes.

“You don’t have to give up anything,” she said.

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