The Online Photographer

I got started writing about my youth this morning—one way I've been lucky since then, and one way I've been unlucky. But I got distracted by thinking again of a former coach and his wonderfully thick regional accent.

He was the athletic—or, as he would say it, attah-letic—director at my prep school, an aging three-sport athlete and former college football standout named Howie Boese (pronounced BAY-zee). I didn't know him well at all, nor he me, because gym and "intramurals," never mind inter-school varsity and junior varsity sports, were not my thing. As a student I made the assumption that Mr. Boese was just a local guy, the very soul of a blue-collar everyman, but that was wrong. He only talked like one. In reality he was quite an accomplished guy. He retired in 1980 and died only a few years ago at the age of 99.

Howie, as we called him, was one of those guys who are the opposite of mimics. He could only talk the way he talked. (Comedian Nat Bargatze says he's the same way. Can't change his "Tinnissee" accent.) It used to be that if you watched the local news anywhere in the country, most of the presenters would have standard accents, but the sportscaster would be the one person who had the accent of that region. I haven't had a television for years now so I don't know if that's still true. I suspect every region of the US has a few people who speak the local accent more strongly than everyone else—I knew a North Carolinian once who consciously cultivated his traditional accent. A guy I met from Evansville, Indiana, must have done much the same thing—if you mentioned to him that you liked his accent, he would say, in a velvety mild drawl, "Oh, we don't speak with an accent in Evansville...but them folks across the river t' Kentucky do speak with a little bit of a twang, now that you mention it." I asked his wife is that was the first time he ever said that, and she rolled her eyes and said, "oh God no." If you go watch a video of Shelby Foote, the Civil War historian, you'll hear a Mississippi accent. Howie had a wonderful and very strong Sowt Mwaukee (South Milwaukee) accent. It was delightful. It was about as hardcore Sowt Mwaukee as it got, and he was not being deliberate about it. Not at all. Not that kind of guy. I learned to mimic it very well, although not to make fun of him; I was just fascinated by it and by his inability to modify it. He sometimes referred to us kids in the third person as "da yoot," which always seemed funny to me, and I don't believe he could have said "youth" in standard pronunciation for a twenty-dollar bill. Boese-isms still pop to mind from time to time all these years later. But I especially like "da yoot."

But now on to my own yoot and what I started out to write.

Mike

CORRECTION: The first version of this post said Shelby Foote had a Virginia accent. But I was going from memory. When I checked it I found that he was born and raised in Mississippi, around the Delta region and culture. Sorry for the error.

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Featured Comments from:

Nick: "My parents are from Minnesota, but neither of them has lived there for the last 48 years. They both have (well, had, in the case of my deceased father) fairly 'neutral' accents most of the time, but both could drop entirely into the accents of their youth: My dad was from 'up der on de iron range, near Hibbing' (he remembers seeing signs for Zimmerman Motors, owned by the family of Bobby Zimmerman, who has gone by a different name for a while now...), while my mom was from working-class South St. Paul. I still have relatives in South St. Paul, and most of them have some variant of the local accent (which I can imitate pretty well myself). When I went off to grad school in Madison, the local accent was instantly familiar, a slight-to-moderate variation of the Minnesota accents of my family. I once asked a student in one of my classes what part of Wisconsin she was from, and she responded, 'How did you know?' I said, 'From your accent.' She said (in her usual heavy Sconnie drawl), 'I don't have an accent!...Do I?'"

Mike replies: Other readers might know the Minnesota accent from the movie Fargo—which perhaps hits it a little hard, although I'm never sure if the Coens meant that to be affectionate or mocking.

Funny, when I'm tired and under stress (like when I got pulled over once), I sometimes revert to the accent of the region where I spent only the first six years of my life. It surprises me that it's still "in there." I recall that Dan Rather said he spoke with a standard broadcast accent but that signifiers of the Texas accent of his youth would sneak in when he was very tired.