Missoula News

New West Book Review

What’s A ‘Honyocker Dream’? David Mogen Explains in New Memoir

By Jenny Shank, 5-30-11

Colorado State University English professor David Mogen recounts his peripatetic 1950’s Montana childhood with good humor and insight in Honyocker Dreams: Montana Memories (University of Nebraska Press, 231 pages, $21.95). His father worked as a teacher and superintendent for school districts throughout Montana. Every few years, Mogen’s parents would move with their six children to a new town for a different job—the towns the family lived in included Missoula, Ennis, Box Elder, Billings, Whitewater, and Froid, where Mogen graduated from high school. (When he went to college at Columbia in New York, one of his new classmates informed him that he pronounced the name of his hometown incorrectly.)

Although there were many differences between these places—such as the contrast between lively Missoula, where Mogen’s dad completed his studies through the G.I. Bill, and the “time warp” they encountered in Whitewater, population 75, where electricity had only recently been introduced—Mogen sees all of these towns as places where the prior generations enacted their “honyocker dreams.”

What’s a honyocker? Variations of this word are derived from German, Czech, and Hungarian. Mogen writes his favorite definition is “a backward, old-fashioned type of rural person.” (My Nebraska Czech grandpa used to call the kids “honyacks,” which we always took to mean “wild boys.") Mogen remembers his father bellowing, “Come on, you honyockers,” to call the kids to breakfast.

Mogen writes, “We inherited honyocker dreams. The dreams of people who came from the far ends of the earth to encounter ample space but too little sustenance, who discovered that 640 acres and get-up-and-go could only sustain them from drought and locusts if they learned to hunker in and survive, to appreciate good luck when it came and hope for better when things went bad.”

Mogen returns to this theme frequently as he evokes the different homes of his childhood. He also reflects on the myth of the West, which loomed so large to him when he was a kid that he didn’t think that the term “the West” could actually apply to the ordinary places he lived in. “‘Geez, Dad. I wish we could live in the West,’” he remembers telling his dad. “I looked up from my Roy Rogers comic book as he entered the room. ‘You goofy kid,’ he snorted, surprised and amused. ‘Where the hell do you think we are?’”

Although the honyocker dreams of homesteaders have disappeared, Mogen is intrigued to find Montana is still the focus of fantasies: “Through some mysterious process, especially in the thirty years since I had moved away, my home state had become identified as the ultimate West, ‘the last best place,’ a cherished refuge of writers and movie stars and celebrities and the Unabomber and the Freemen—all acting out their romantic frontier fantasies of escape and new beginnings.”

While he mulls these underlying themes over the course of the book, Mogen tells vivid tales about growing up. He’s never ashamed to let the reader in on a past embarrassment for purposes of comedy, such as the time he’d just moved to Froid and was about to start his freshman year in high school. He went to the barber and while there, asked the barber to shave the peach fuzz off his upper lip, a service witnessed by another boy, who spread the word. Teasing on the part of upper classmen, of course, ensued.

The funniest episode might be Mogen’s preparations to leave for college in New York. His high school hired a guidance counselor, who suggested he apply to Columbia, even though the largest city Mogen had visited up to that point was Billings. When he was accepted with a scholarship, the university sent him a list of wardrobe items to pack, which he and his mother dutifully tried to fulfill at the largest department store in Williston, North Dakota. When Mogen showed up on campus with the recommended three-piece tweed suit and resplendent white bathrobe, he discovered he was the only student so equipped.

“I have never had an occasion to wear a tuxedo, while at Columbia or since,” he writes, “and more than once that first year I reflected on my good fortune. Thank God that Williston department store didn’t stock tuxedos, I would think, contemplating the space next to my three-piece suit, where it would have hung as a taunting testimonial to my wasted summer wages.”

Another funny fish-out-of-water episode in Manhattan has to do with Mogen’s name. “I knew that my name was also the name of a wine,” he writes, “As a matter of fact, it was the only wine I was familiar with back in Montana…But that didn’t seem to explain the level of response my name sometimes elicited in New York…I suddenly had the feeling that introducing myself as David Mogen in Manhattan was like a non-Christian in Montana introducing himself as Jesus Christ, without any idea why people found his name remarkable.” When his name was listed in the Manhattan phone book, people would call to offer product complaints, saying, “Is this Mogen David?” He’d reply, “No, this is David Mogen.”

Honyocker Dreams is David Mogen’s first foray out of academic writing into writing for a general audience. He’s a natural at it—Honyocker Dreams is full of humor, sharp details, clear prose, and reflections on what it means to be a Westerner, past and present.

David Mogen will discuss his book at Matter Bookstore in Ft. Collins on August 25 at 7:30 p.m.

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