Long Lane Picnic

   For many years, the Ozarks region was the butt of jokes from national media because of the supposed ignorance and lack of sophistication of the hillbillies who lived here. (This is still true, I think, but to a lesser extent than it used to be.) But the ridicule didn't always come from outsiders. Sometimes the people of a larger city in the Ozarks, such as Springfield, would joke about or make light of the country bumpkins who lived out in the isolated areas of the countryside. Understandably, people usually didn't like it when someone disparaged them for being ignorant and unsophisticated, but on the other side of the coin, methinks the offended party, to paraphrase Shakespeare, sometimes protested too much. Sometimes even the smallest of slights offered in jest could arouse indignant rebuttal. This phenomenon was apparently at work after the Springfield Leader published a letter in July 1927 about the town picnic at the Dallas County community of Long Lane that was coming up later in the month.
   I recently wrote about the small community of Charity, also in Dallas County, but I didn't mention that one of the main things Charity was known for was the annual Hogeye Picnic, so named because Hogeye is/was a nickname for Charity. The Hogeye Picnic was held for about 85 consecutive years from the late 1800s to the late 1900s. Such town picnics or reunions were common throughout the early and mid-1900s. Long Lane, located about 15 miles to the northeast, also held an annual picnic that was quite popular, although maybe not quite as much so as the one at Hogeye.
   In early July 1927, the Springfield Leader published several ads publicizing and promoting the upcoming Long Lane Picnic, but then on the 14th, the newspaper published an anonymous letter from someone who painted a sardonic picture of the annual picnic. That particular issue of the Leader apparently does not survive, but we know from later sources that the letter writer described Long Lane as "a little country village, usually quiet and dead" and that he also called it "a wide place in the road" and referred to its residents as "natives." The writer mentioned the rocky fields around Long Lane and said that the annual picnic was "an event even for the dogs." He said the picnic for many represented "the one bright spot in each year's humdrum routine of eventless existence." Describing the end of the picnic, when families began to congregate for the trip home, the letter writer said, "Torn and ragged children, with dirty faces and grimy hands, bruised bare feet and perhaps a black eye suffered in a miniature gang fight greet each mother as she rounds up her flock of tow-haired children."
   Apparently many residents of Long Lane and the surrounding territory took umbrage at the way the people in general and the picnic in particular were characterized in the Leader, and the Buffalo Reflex gave voice to their complaints. Writing to the Leader a week later, the Reflex editor called the letter published on the 14th a "vicious article" which maliciously slurred the Long Lane Picnic and the people of the Long Lane vicinity. Apparently under the impression that the letter had been written by a member of the Leader staff or some other non-Dallas Countian, the Reflex said the article had grossly misrepresented the picnic and the people
   In early August, Leo Nyberg stepped forward to claim authorship of the infamous letter. He said he himself was a longtime resident of Long Lane and that he had attended and enjoyed the Long Lane Picnic almost every year of his life. He had not meant his letter as an insult but rather as a fond but playful depiction of the event, and he thought that if readers would go back and reread his letter, knowing the writer's identity, they would see that it was not a disparaging account of the picnic. If anybody still found it distasteful, however, he sincerely apologized.