Bear Grease - Ep. 214: Gillett Coon Supper

Episode Date: May 15, 2024

Once a year in the small farming town of Gillett, Arkansas, people from the local and surrounding communities gather in the gymnasium of the de-commission high school for a fundraiser to provide scholarships for the towns high school seniors. Throughout the decades, this event has also become an epicenter for state and regional politicians to gladhand with the constituents. In this Bear Grease episode, Clay Newcomb discusses the link between the Gillett Coon Supper and the value of social capital and civic engagement with author, Timothy P. Carney.  Additional interviews with local resident Scott Place and a special appearance by former President of the United States, Bill Clinton. Connect with Clay and MeatEater Clay on Instagram MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube Shop Bear Grease MerchSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. First Lights fieldware collection is made for the work that happens long before opening day and continues when the season ends. Products built for early mornings, full days and real use. Hard wearing where they need to be versatile where it matters. No shortcuts. Just gear designed for the work that earns the season.

Built to perform, built to last. Check out. First Light's new field. Worldware gear at firstlight.com. What are the things you have in your life that are really valuable, but you don't pay for and you couldn't quite sell them? In January of 2024, the Gillette Coon Supper celebrated its 80th annual dinner. This bizarre wild game tradition has made a name for itself as one of the premier political

events in Arkansas, but it's more than that. It's holding a struggling but strong community. D. together. This is one of the most unique bakery stories we've ever told. It's a deep dive into small town America and what makes us what we are. We'll go to the Coon Supper and hear from the cooks, the coon hunters, and some hungry people. We'll interview best-selling author Tim P. Carney about why traditions like this

matter. And believe it or not, we'll also hear from former president Bill Clinton about his interaction with the Coon Supper. This episode will surprise and impact you and will teach you something about yourself and about society. Eating barbecue raccoon has never been so good. I really doubt you're going to want to miss this one. Would you say there's a prime cut on a coon? Absolutely not. It's all prime. It's all prime. It's all prime. It's all prime. All prime. All prime. All right. My name is Clay Newcomb and this is the Bear Grease podcast. where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant.

Search for insight in unlikely places and where we'll tell the story of Americans who live their lives close to the land. Presented by FHF Gear, American-made, purpose-built, hunting and fishing gear that's designed to be as rugged as the places we explore. My name is Scott Place. I'm from Gillette, Arkansas.

I live on Main Street. and I've been associated with the Coonsupper all my life. My dad was a master of ceremonies for it from the beginning up until 1989 or 90. So I had to go to the Coonsupper when I was even a little guy because there was nowhere else to be. You couldn't hire a babysitter or anything like that because everybody was at the Coonsupper. The first recorded Coonsupper took place in 1933. Scott was born in 1954. He's 70 years old, and he was born in the house he's sitting in right now in downtown Gillette.

It's a handsome, well-taking care of brick home with white modern sighting. It was his parents before it was his. Scott is a second-generation rice farmer. My dad was at the first Coonsupper. He was a people person, and he sang and danced on the stage when he couldn't sing and dance. And it started as just a stag gathering from coon hunters around the area. Well, then you can imagine that got a little rough. And so the next year or two, they decided to invite the women.

And then it took off from there. Gillette is a small farming town in the Delta of southeast Arkansas. Their Coon Supper is more than a citywide tradition. It's an event that brings an entire region together, really an entire state. Today, Scott Place, like his father, is kind of the grand marshal of this event. Not officially, and he wouldn't want me to say that, but that's my perception. The Coon Supper's importance to anyone who's been to it is clear, but it's hard. But it's hard to nail down amid the complexity of economic challenges and the loss of population.

People are leaving places like this and not coming back. These are real problems for many small towns in America. Existential, time is moving forward without you kind of stuff that seems to hover over the delta like a biblical plague. Just down the street from Scott's house lives Gillette's top politician. The mayor, Randy Womack. He lives on the corner of Main Street. He and Scott were college roommates. We're going to need some info on Gillette.

Back when we moved here in the 60s, at that time, there was close to 900 people the best I can remember. Now, say, since the last census, I best I can remember around 525, but it's changed like a lot of, Delta towns have changed. As the tractors got bigger and eliminated a lot of the workers, so it's gradually gotten smaller.

This is a road crop farming community where soybeans, rice, wheat, and corn grow in alluvial soils they call buckshot, which is fertile clay that holds water, sticks to your boots, and they say it holds the world together. Gillette is four miles north of the Arkansas River and 40 river miles southeast or 28.27 crow-flying miles to where the Arkansas River flows into the mighty Mississippi River. The bigger name for this bigger region is the Delta. You've heard us talk about it a lot. But more specifically, Gillette is in the Grand Prairie. These soils have been built by 10,000 years of flooding. The Quapal's farmed here from time immemorial until the early 1800s, and modern farming commercial operations have only been practiced here for roughly 100 years. But one thing is certain, if you live here, you're invested.

Something about the flat, muddy ground of the Delta evokes that in people. There's a word for a person's relationship with their community. It's called social capital. just file that away for a minute. And we're about to go to the Coon Supper, but there's still one important piece of the story that we haven't talked about yet. The Gillette school system.

Something happened to their school. Football games, doesn't matter what the record was, stadium was going to be full basketball games. It was kind of the center part of the town. When the consolidation it all comes, And I understand what it was cost in the state and as many school districts as there were. So they went about putting the limit on what the tenants was once you got below that number.

You may have heard Randy grunt right there at the end. When he did, he was shaking his head, as if something died and he didn't want to speak it out loud. The school was central to the town. It was the social glue. Gillette's schools consolidated with a bigger school system in 2004. I wonder what Scott thought about the school closing. Well, that's awful. But one thing led to another, the suspense of whether the school was going to shut down after it was officially consolidated in another district.

How long was it going to stay open? So nobody moves into town and you slow death, it's agonizing. but the way farming, farm economy has changed and the land that we farm in the 50s supported 20 families and now there's three or four and everybody has two kids instead of nine. There's not enough kids to support a school in this area anymore so it's just inevitable. Inevitable is a powerful and intimidating word for rural America. 2004 was the beginning of the end for Gillette schools. They kept them open for five years, but in 2009 they completely closed the high school and junior high.

But the grade school, K through five, stayed open until 2021, when the last of the Gillette schools were completely closed. Today, the kids bused 14 miles to DeWitt, or DeWitt, as some would say. But it's not all bad. It's just a matter of perspective. This is Seth Place, Scott's son. He's in his early 40s, lives in Gillette, but his kids go to DeWitt schools. It got heated there for a while with the school consolidation and all that stuff, and it was no big secret about some hard feelings here and there or whatever. But when I think about Gillette and how it used to be, that's how I feel when I go,

where my kids go to school up here at DeWitt. So it's basically, from my perspective, the community has grown. That's an optimistic perspective, and Gillette does have a history of expanding its reach. On January 13, 24, Gillette held its 80th annual Coon Supper. Despite the challenges, this event is a bright spot on the calendar that brings this community together. It gives it identity and is one of the only anchors that is held. myself, my wife Misty, along with Brent and his wife, drove to the Grand Prairie to see it for ourselves. This is about to get wild, folks, but let's not jump the gun.

The first stop that we made was not at the Coon Supper, but at the Gillette pre-Coon Supper. That's right, the pre-Coon Supper, which starts about two hours before the Coon Supper. We've driven a couple of miles down a gravel road and parked by a large metal building. This is the late congressman, Marion Barry's farm shed. What is this? I hear music. I've never been here before. My name's Clay.

Clay, Leslie, nice to see you. A guy in dark-framed glasses wearing a manly, dad-ish kind of barbecue and apron greets me. He carries himself like a guy in charge. I bet he knows what's up with this pre-Coon supper stuff. Hey, how's it going? How good? Clay Newcombe? Hey, Clay.

Gabe Holmstrom. Give me like a little overview of the Coonsupper, or maybe even this. So, yeah, we're here at the Berry Farm Shop. So this is the pre-Coon Supper reception. So this event, you know, really goes back 50 years. So former Congressman Marion Berry, he used to live right across the street from the Gillette High School. and when people and elected officials and candidates would come down and come to the Coon Supper, they'd stop at his house to have a cocktail before going over to Coon Supper.

That was Gabe Holstrom, and he just told us a very important component of the tradition that has become the political event of Arkansas. Let's see who else is here. My name is Jeremiah Moore. I'm from Clarenham, Arkansas. currently serve as a state representative for House District 61 in the Arkansas State Legislature. My district runs from Amigan in Jackson County

all the way down to Gillette in Arkansas County, and I would be remiss if I did not say that District 61 has the best duck hunting in all the world. You know, we're here right now at the Gillette Pre-Coon Supper. We're about to be confused with the Coon Supper. This is a pre-Coon Supper. We're about to head on to the actual Coon Supper in a few minutes, and I would say that this is

the foremost political event in the entire state of Arkansas. Now, you tell me any state east or west of the Mississippi where the foremost political event revolves around eating a raccoon, and

you'll be right here in Gillette. This pre-Coon supper became a must-attend event in part because of Arkansas's most famous son. A young man who became Arkansas's governor in 1978. This is the guy that Gary Believer Nukin went to high school with, and you may recognize his

voice. We'll step out of the pre-Koon Supper for a minute to a speech this former governor made in 2023. So when I started to run for office, Delette had about 800 people, and there were about, as I recall, the minimum of 1,500 people that showed up at the Coonsuffer over here. This is former president Bill Clinton. Turns out he's a long-time Koon supper guy. And someone said, you know, you've got to do this,

and you've got to call Marion Barry, and you've got to go down there and see him and make all over the deal and act like you think Kuhn is better than Filet Mignon. So I show up, and it was already kind of required appearance that go to Marion's house first

and all the Pals were there and other people, and then we'd mothie over to the dinner. He's talking about the pre-Koon supper. And so I said, Marion, do I actually have to eat this Koon? He said, no. He said, not if you don't want to carry this place ever again. You don't have to eat it at all.

And I said, well, okay, how do I eat it? He said, what do you mean? I said, I've seen it prepared for eating, and I said, there's a lot of gristle and fess. right near the bone. How do I eat it without getting sick? He said, well, most people think they're eat coon meat with a little barbecue sauce.

You should think of it in reverse, thinking you're eating barbecue sauce with a little coon meat. There's no such thing as too much barbecue sauce. Ironically, this is the second time Bill Clinton's voice has been on the Barry Gris podcast. And he was once involved in a plane crash on the way to the Coon Supper, but that's another story.

But Clinton helped put this tradition on the legendary column of Arkansas events. But it's now time for us to go to the supper. We're really about to eat some Koon. This isn't a joke. So we just left the pre-Koon supper party, Brent. What are your thoughts? Well, there was no Koon served, but lots of conversation. But the food was good.

There was duck poppers. That's duck wrapped with bacon and halal. and there was ribs and sausage. So we're driving on a gravel road in the Grand Prairie of Arkansas. It's dark, the sun has set, and there's a light glow on the western horizon, and we're now headed to the Gillette Coonshopper. As we get into the Gillette City limits, the streets are filled with parked cars and people walking towards the school.

We get out of our car. Looks like we're walking up to an old gymnasium. It's dark outside. Stars are out. A beautiful waning gibbous moon above us. This is the old Gillette High School gym. It looks like the movie Hoosiers could have been filmed here. Here we are.

We just got our tickets and the tickets are numbered. We got 158, 159, 126 to 125. Oh, wow. We're going to have to split up. It's all right. All right. It's on. This year they had 800 tickets and they sold out.

The gym is lined with tables with white tablecloths. At each place setting is the annual glass cup with the Coon Supper emblem in the year. Many people collect these. But each table has an aluminum foil tray of barbecue raccoon. I see a guy I want to talk to you. Tell me your name of who you worked. Zach Hartman, Chief Policy Officer for Ducks Unlimited. Why the heck are you at the Coon?

suffered. Do coons eat duck eggs? Well, the most important thing for nest success is Habitat. You're not opposed to eat a few coons. But we are, I am not opposed to eating a few coons, but the really reason that we're here is because this is a great event for a great cause. We're here to raise money for Arkansas State's Foundation and the scholarships that they provide to students that want to get involved in ag policy. And they have an opportunity to learn about agriculture conservation, which is an increasingly important component of our working lands these days. Okay.

Enough all that, man. What do you think of eating coon? My man, Ed Penny over here, who you know, I brought him here for his first time, and I took him to the Coon supper, and I gave him, I sat him down, and I said, you know, you got to eat some Coon, and he ate a piece of Coon, and then he grabbed another piece, and I said, Ed, are you going back for seconds? and he said, yeah, it's good. And I said, really?

And I tasted it, and it was. And it, like, ruined the whole joke. Brent and I both grab a leg of Coon and have a bite. And he's right. It ain't bad. But we've both had it before. We're old Coon hunters, you know. Brent's wife won't even try it.

But Misty took a nibble, and the report wasn't great, though. She was a little embarrassed to show her displeasure. Anyway, I see somebody else I want to talk with. This is an awesome booth, the director of Arkansas Gaming Fish. Why are you at the Coon Supper, sir? Well, it's an Arkansas tradition for us Flatlanders. It's a good way to point out the nexus between public service and young Arkansasans. And also a great way to see the Grand Prairie in its most beautiful time of the year.

Shoot some ducks and eat some Coon. Now, are we also not trying to reduce the Coon population in the state of Arkansas, sir? Always and proudly. This is a good way to do it, right? Absolutely. Popularize, you know, there's a strategy. If we can popularize eating coon meat to the level that every child in America, every man, woman, and child wants to go kill a Coon and eat it,

then we might be winning. Do you agree with this? I think Coon Willington would be an American tradition forever. Austin Booth is a former Marine, a lawyer, a native Arkansas, and our youngest game and fish director ever. For my angle, he's exemplifying some legit leadership while navigating the very complex wildlife issues of our state. Hat tip to Austin.

Oh, look, here's somebody else I'd like to talk with. I'm Leslie Rutledge, lieutenant governor of Arkansas for the past year. I was the attorney general for eight years prior to that. I grew up on a cattle farm. I'm married to a rocrop farmer, so I love being here. Arkansas Farmland, you know, celebrating our way of life, our heritage, and then doing something really awkward, which is eat raccoon. Pardon me, Madame, Lieutenant Governor, but is it really awkward to eat raccoon?

Is that the right word? By the way, when I'm governor, Brent will be my lieutenant governor. You know, we're doing this odd thing of eating barbecued raccoon, but it's really to talk about what the needs are. here in Arkansas County, what the needs are for the farmers in this area. Okay, so here's the real question after all that. How do you like Kuhn? Well, it's best not eating, but if you have to eat it,

I certainly suggest getting like one of the, you know, the backs or something where it looks big, but it's very little meat. Oh, you got a strategy for how to get a big piece but not get much meat. That's right, you know. Strategy. It's all about strategy. you. That was good. I want to get into the nitty-gritty of how they're coming up with all this raccoon meat. This is their main supplier. Tommy Cantrell. And how long have you been

supplying the Coonserver with Coons? Probably six or seven years probably now. Okay. So how many you usually catch for them? I'll put it this way. Last year I carried them like 650 pounds. And they're probably average seven. seven pounds, six to seven pound per coon, so you can figure that. I trap them and also we hunt them with my dog. I got old dog. You got a coon dog. What kind of coon dog yet? Well, she's not actually a coon dog, coon dog, she's about half German Shepherd and half something else.

But anyway, if we find one, you know, and she'll run them up a tree or something, but if we shoot him, if you ain't got a dog, he's going to get away, but she will catch it. She will catch her. Yes, sir. So I did the math and that's about a hundred dressed raccoons. But that's just what Mr. Tommy brought in. They had a few other suppliers. Now I want to know how they cook it.

Guess who the head cook is? Yep. Scott Place, the guy whose dad was the first master of ceremonies. So are you, you're the main coon cook around here? Well, I guess I'm the oldest cook. Okay. So tell me about the process of how you're cooking these. My son Seth buys the cocoon, and we got freezers in the old field house.

We keep it in, and then on Thursday we'd come get it out and let it thaw for a day. And then on Friday morning, we got a bandsaw, and we cut it up in the pieces and put it in the saltwater brine and soak it 24 hours. And then today is our longest day, and we boil it in the big pot. with a special recipe of stuff that we put in the boil water almost like a crawfish bowl. Yeah, uh-huh. And we boil it and then we immediately put it on these smokers.

How many coons do you think y'all cook today? Coons, I don't know, but it's right, it's just under 800 pounds. Now at one time it was a lot bigger than that. Y'all cooked like 2,000 pounds. Yeah, back when we just served coon, well, we just served, We've had well over a ton before. How many people you think were here tonight? It was sold out of tickets.

It was right of 800 tickets, I believe. 800 people. We used to have a thousand tickets, but we took a table out back probably 20 years ago because maybe Americans are getting a little bigger. Eating too much coon. Yeah, maybe eating too much coon. And it was just so crowded.

I think they've got this coon cooking process dialed. On Blood Trails, the stories don't end when the hunt is over. They just get darker. I've seen something in the road. I instantly thought it was a sleeping bag. And there was a full of blood. Oh, my God, he doesn't have a hit. Blood Trails is a true crime podcast born in the outdoors.

Where the terrain is unforgiving, the evidence is scarce, and the truth gets buried under brush and silence. indications where he should be right there, but he wasn't. This season, we're going deeper. From cold case files to whispered suspicions, from remote mountains to frozen backwards. Each story begins in the wilderness and ends in darkness. Because out here, there are no witnesses, no cameras, just fragments and the people left behind trying to piece them back together. He's not an honest person. He's incapable of being honest. Somebody somewhere knows something.

I'm Jordan Sillers. Season 2 of Blood Trails premieres April 16th. Follow now on Apple, Iheart, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. I shuffled a sit down quickly as the main speaker is about to start. The room quiets as a man in a suit approaches the stage. Behind the podium is a giant orange handmade mural, paper mural, commemorating the 80th Coon Supper. On it is a raccoon as big as a picnic table.

On the lookers left sits eight high school seniors. These kids go to DeWitt schools now, but they're from families that live in Gillette. The night is all about them. I want to thank you all for traveling in its cold weather to come and enjoy yourself tonight. We're really happy to have you here. This is the 80th time this group has met.

This cooombe has been put on. The speaker's demeanor changes and the room quiets as everyone knows what he's about to say. Many of you know that we lost Pastor Chad Phillips this past year. Pastor was a great icon of Gillette, the surrounding area, and the Coombe suburb. Let's remember Pastor Chad. Pastor Chad was a big player here for the last. several decades, but he's not the only one being remembered this year. As many of you may know, we've lost another icon of Gillette and the Coonsover this past year.

Without a doubt, the most famous person from Gillette, Representative Marion Berry. Mr. Marion loved the Lord, he loved his family, he loved his farm, and he loved Gillette, its people in the Coonsover. Mary devoted his life in service to his family, his country, and his community, and set an example to others on the impact that a man from a small town could make when seeking direction from God and being in service to others. Let's remember Representative Marion Barry. I hope you can feel the sense of community and connectedness in this gym. And to think, the mechanism that it's built around is eating a raccoon. This isn't a joke. And it's being done inside the context.

of a town that by measurable statistics might seem like it's wilting. But wait, there's more. Here's Senator Tom Cotton. Good evening. It's great to be back at the Coonsuffer again. You know, we always join at this time of the year. It's the darkest and coldest time of the year. We have a night of festivities and the warmth of community and fellowship.

As we've heard, though, we have heavy hearts to degree this year because of the passing of Pastor Chad and Mary and Mary. I think they would want all of us to be here where we are tonight and they're looking down on us and they're proud that this community is continuing with this unique distinctive tradition. I think it's a testament to their legacy that we're all joining here together as we always do to help support the great students and kids of this community. Thank you all. God bless. The evening comes to a close after every senior is recognized for their academic achievements.

They each address the crowd and tell what their plans are after graduating. One young man is going into his family's pest control business. Another is heading to the University of Arkansas. Another is going into nursing school. Scholarship recipients are announced and each senior is met by voluminous applause. Despite the town's population shrinking, the school's closing, the place is riding high on a deep sense of community pride. This is really something special.

As the Coonsupper adjourns, I'm standing outside the doors of the event. I ask a passing guy his thoughts on what just happened. This is Johnny. You've come to this quite a few times? Yes, sir. Where are you from? I'm from Palm Bluff. So what do you like about this?

I love it because it's just good people. One thing about it is it's constant. Ain't nothing never change. It's going to always be the same. You do not have any problems. You're a commercial fisherman. Yes. Where do you fish, a white river?

White, Arkansas, and the pond. Awesome, man. All three. But you're a fan of the Coonsuppers? It's beautiful. It's beautiful. It's beautiful. It's good people, stays the same, and it's beautiful.

I think that's a pretty good synopsis. As I'm leaving, I see Seth Place, who's the second in command cook behind his dad. I'm a little late in asking him this, but he seems to be a coon meat expert, and I have a burning question. Would you say there's a prime cut on a coon? Absolutely not. It's all prime. It's all prime. It's all prime.

All prime. Okay. All right. All right. He asks me if I want to see the cookers. So we walk out further into the yard right by the gym. So y'all cook them all on this big smoke? right here.

Well, we boil them first. But these are the smokers. Do y'all bring these in or? No, they stay here. These are permanent smokers. They are now. Now, used to. Since the school's closed.

So, and then they basically donated the, these buildings to the Farms and Businessmen Club so we can have this indefinitely as long as we can sell tickets. Really? But yeah, we just keep everything here now. So this used to be Gillette Public School. This is Cole Counts. It consolidated to DeWit, but this year's the first year the elementary has been gone.

So this is kind of like a ghost town down here, I guess. It is. At least in the sense of the school. Yeah. I got to go to school here until I was in the seventh grade, and then my eighth grade year we consolidated and had to go to DWitt. Okay. Amid the excitement and energy of the event, it's easy to forget this community is struggling to stay together. More people were in that gym than live in this town.

They leave their giant built-in cookers outside the gym because it's not a functioning gym anymore. Just keep that in mind. We're going to go back to that. But first, I've had something on my mind since that first bite of raccoon. We're now in the car heading home, and I think it's possible that we've all broken the law. I decide to confront Brent on his hypocrisy. I'm trying to understand how I'm not the only person who thought of this. Okay, so the one problem that I've foreseen is that they're buying this Coon meat, and it is illegal to buy or sell wildlife meat.

There is an exception. Really? Yeah, for a hundred percent. Exception with Coon. Yeah, let me tell you something. Are you holding on to that mic? Because this is a mic drop moment. Okay.

My brother, Tim, skins coons and prepares them to be sold, and his nephew sells them out the window of their pharmacy in Fort As, Arkansas. Are you serious? You can go by there, drop off a gun to get picked up, to get cleaned and repaired. You can pick up your prescription, and you can buy a coon. Ready? Raise yourself because I got the AGFC. Okay, what's the AGFC say about it, Misty?

We've just left the Gillette Coon supper. It is unlawful to purchase, sell, offer for sale, barter, or trade any species of wildlife or portions thereup, period. Exceptions. A. Furbearer pelts and carcasses taken during a fur bearer season may be sold. Wow. That's the first one. Maybe sold by person that was valid hunting our fur dealer licenses.

Legally taken squirrel tails and pelts, rabbit pelts. This is a second, this is a like. a different bullet point. I've heard all I need to hear. Red fox. It's legal. Baby, we're going into business. Alligator hide.

Alligator meat. I stand corrected. Sounds like Brent's off the hook. Somehow the legality of selling fur bearer meat has eluded me. But I'll tell you what else has eluded me. The real understanding of why something like the Koon Supper is valuable. I mean, it's easy to see and fill the value when you're there. It's undeniable.

Anybody sees it. Everybody sees it. but how could you explain it to someone? I got the opportunity to talk with author Tim P. Carney, who's written multiple bestselling books. One is called Alienated America. He's an expert on this kind of stuff. And to be more specific about what that stuff is,

a lot of the Coonsuppers value could be summed up by people gaining social capital. Remember, I told you to hold on to that word, file it away. This is incredibly interesting. Here's Tim. Social capital is this term that like sociologists use, maybe historians. And it's a weird word because capital is kind of a financial term, right? You're talking about money. Social is showing us that we're talking about something very different.

So one way to think of social capital is what are the things you have in your life that are really valuable, but you don't pay for and you couldn't quite sell them? Do you have a next-door neighbor who you're just best friends with? That's social capital. Do you have extended family who will bail you out if you get into trouble? That's having social capital. And so the truth is there's real inequality in social capital across America in ways that sometimes parallels and sometimes deviates from kind of wealth inequality. But one way of thinking of social capital is valuable things that you might or might not have in your life that are social. They're not financial.

to do with your connections and interactions with other people, and they usually explicitly are not something that you could pay for or sell or directly buy. Our society is good at measuring external things that have monetary impact, so social capital is hard to measure, but it's primarily a function of our relationship to other people. Whether you're conscious of it or not, every human on earth has some level of social capital. Now, this next observation about American society is kind of mind-blowing. The greatest work on United States of America, I think, that was ever written. It was written by a French guy and was written 100 years ago.

Yeah, it was Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America. You know how sometimes somebody shows up at your house and they notice something that you don't notice because you just, you've come to take it for granted. Americans, he was saying, 200 years ago, take for granted how much they kind of, to just rely on, not themselves as individuals, but themselves and their neighbors, their fellow countrymen, their brothers, or whatever, other people they know to solve problems. He said, in England, again, this is 1830s, in England, people, they turned to the big landlord. I mean, it was semi-futable at that point. There would be a big, rich landholder, and they turned to him to solve their problems.

In France, they turned to the government. In the United States, if there's a problem, people will form a ditch-digging organization to keep the town from flooding when the runoff is coming down from the mountain. So that idea, it's both that were self-starters, but were not just individuals. So it's still a sort of self-reliance, but it's a self-reliance in fraternity, in neighborhood, in community. and that that was unique to America is what Tocqueville argued. We have self-reliance inside of fraternity, inside of community, and this thing was unique to America, kind of from the beginning. A different term to describe what the Tocqueville saw here is civic engagement.

That word sounds pretty scary to me, but it actually determines a lot about our communities, And to equate it back to the Koon Supper, attending or volunteering at a community event like this is civic engagement. Turns out that stuff is quite important and it's on a dramatic decline in America. So you could look at, you know, how much do people vote? How much do people participate in the census? That all matters. How does that relate to social capital?

Well, if you're the guy who took it on the chin and coach kindergarten girls basketball, If you're the guy who you didn't even think about it, but you sent your sons over to shovel the neighbor's yard sidewalk when he was away, it is a little bit like finance in that you put a bunch in and then when you need it, you can draw it out. But there's not like a ledger being kept. That's the real thing about social capital and community. There's just an understanding that we have an obligation to look out for other people. So we're going to do it. We're going to be civically engaged. And the more civically engaged you are, the more capital you have.

The main way I would say that works is the more things that you belong to, then the more things you can rely on. That is, I belong to my local church. I belong to my kids' schools. I don't just cut the check and send my kids there where I serve on the board of one. My wife's a substitute teacher at another. We show up at things. I belong to my employer. I work to get to know my neighbor.

So I belong to all these things. So a common word in this area of study is reciprocity, which again, it's just relationship. The understanding, I'll take care of you, you take care of me. And community was always built on the fact that we had needs. It wasn't just, hey, I want to hang out with my buddies. It was, oh, I need to go into town to get something. Oh, I need to call on my friend to lift this one thing. And if you take away some of those needs, then we lose the stuff we didn't know we needed,

which was a connection, the friendship, the camaraderie, the belonging. And so the guy who wrote the best book on this was Robert Putnam Bowling Alone. That came out right as you and I were finishing up, you know, our college years there. 2000, I think, was the pub date on that. And he used bowling because he said, he found out that people weren't bowling less in 2000 than they had in 1960, but they were bowling leagues had crumbled everywhere. So people were more likely to bowl alone or bowl just with their best friend or they were there, wife or whatever. And that was that was just almost a little analogy for what was happening more broadly. Membership,

you know, PTA membership had collapsed and all of this stuff. What we belonged to had gone down across the board. And so I went and I looked to update the numbers when I wrote Alienated America that came out 2019. So almost 20 years later. And it had just continued. The people just again, more likely to sort of strike out on them their own. When I was on the board of a small organization here in D.C., we did this study, and it came back, millennials didn't want to join anything. We said, be a member. They're like, I don't want to be a member. We're like, will you chip in 20 bucks to help us out? They're like, oh, yeah, I'll do that, but I'm not joining, okay? I don't want to belong to it. And so you and I are at the sort of tail end of Gen X, and I think that that was

already in motion. Studies show that America's civic engagement peaked in the 1960s and has been declining ever since. By the time I graduated high school in the late 1990s, it had plummeted. I remember my dad, the believer, being involved in everything he possibly could his whole life. He was in a fraternity in college, he never drank, by the way, a member of the Kiwanis Club, the Lions Club, the Archery Club, he was a deacon at the church. And for decades, he was heavily involved in a group that helped families with critical construction projects, like if the roof was leaking and they couldn't afford to get it fixed, or if some family needed a wheelchair ramp built.

He was very civically involved, but he grew up in the time of America's peak civic engagement. He always wanted me to do more stuff, but I just wasn't that interested. Now, as an adult, I have maintained high levels of involvement in my church, my whole life, but I have not been nearly as involved in other stuff. I didn't know until I talked with Tim that I was just a pawn in the common trend of my generation. I didn't choose this all on my own like I thought. It's kind of spooky when you realize that you have less control over your life than you think. Hmm, that is interesting. But who is most affected by this lack of civic engagement? Is it the rich or the poor who are less civically engaged?

I bet it's those rich folks. There are nuances to this. It's worse. The collapse of belonging, civic engagement, bowling leagues, et cetera. All that stuff is worse in the working class in America than it is in the middle class or the upper middle class. There's a stereotype that, you know, wealthier Americans, you know, you live behind a gate or you're, you're, you're, you're, you. you know, with your money, you're just buying your isolation. But if you go to like these rich suburbs where houses are really expensive and the property taxes are high,

they have enough literally coaches for every team. They have people leaving their, the kids lead their bikes out on the front yard because neighbors sort of know neighbors. The collapse in community and civic engagement is greater for a dozen reasons I go through in the book in the working class. And so that's particularly harmful because these are people who rely more on social capital. If you're rich and don't have friends, you could sort of, you could buy stuff. But the irony is the richer people in America, not the super rich celebrities who have to live in a gated mansion, but the upper middle class, they are more likely to know their neighbors, more likely to volunteer, more likely to belong to things. and it's because this sort of thing isn't just an individual choice. It's a community thing.

The community has to give you those opportunities. And in some parts of America, those opportunities for belonging and volunteering aren't there. That's very interesting and not what I was expecting. But that's just why the community of Gillette is so unique. I spent some time describing the Gillette Coon Supper to Tim Carney. I wanted to see what he thought. Here's what he said. When you described that, I want to go to Gillette and see this and eat the food and watch the people.

This is the stuff that makes America great, really. And I've seen it in other towns. My favorite town in Iowa is this town called Imogene, Iowa, which is down to 30 people. How does a town survive with 30 people? Well, it has an Irish pub, a beautiful Catholic church, and a softball field where they have a big, tournament as part of what they call shamrock days because you know irish uh population traditionally and it brings in people who used to live there and people from the other towns and these sort of things even if they're only occasional things they really keep a town alive tradition

customs these things are social capital that gets passed down from generation to generation it's almost like you're time traveling right you're you're talking about these kids in jolette and They don't even have a high school, but they still, they almost get to travel back to when they do because suddenly there's a senior class, the high school Gillette senior class, even though there's no Gillette high school. And so that is what customs do. They provide, I often talk about social capital as providing sort of a, I mean, we use the word network, but just imagine an infrastructure, something that's a scaffolding, a scaffolding that holds you up. Traditions are a sort of scaffolding that spans across time. And so that's one of the key things that strong communities do is they have traditions, they have customs, they have these things,

and it just injects a little bit of meaning into everybody's life. And so these big annual things, they can sort of keep a town on the map, give a town an identity even if other things are crumbling. I think it's pretty unique that we can learn so much about ourselves and our community by looking at a wild tradition like the Coon Supper. I love it. And I'd say there's a high likelihood Brent and I will be back at the Coon Supper next year. That is, if we can get some tickets.

I can't thank you enough for listening to Bear Grease. Please leave us a review on iTunes and tell your friends, family, and coworkers about the amazing stories you're hearing here and on Brent's podcast, this country life. Be sure to check out our friend Tim P. Carney's new book called Family Unfriendly,

how our culture made raising kids much harder than it needs to be. I hope you have a great week. First Lights Field Ware collection is made for the work that happens long before opening day and continues when the season ends. Products built

for early mornings, full days, and real use, hardwearing where they need to be versatile where it matters. No shortcuts. Just gear designed for the work that earns the season. Built to perform, built to last. Check out. First Light's new fieldwear gear at firstlight.com. This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed human.