Sitting around deep in reverie is how a lot of my thinking begins (and gets me in trouble).

This morning the thoughts of the old days somehow led me to thinking about which books I enjoyed when young, how they influenced me, and how they differ from today's stuff we "feed" our kids' minds with...

When I was relatively young, my heroes were people like Sasha Seimal. If you never heard of him, he wrote the book "Tigrero" which was published in 1953. At that time,
Sasha was widely considered the only living white man who REGULARLY hunted the 250-lb.+ Tigre of the Motto Grosso ALONE,WITH ONLY A SPEAR as armament.

When asked why he did it that way, he said " because it is safer than relying on a gun".

The reason none other than the a very, very, very few native Indians of the area did it that way was this: The man must get close to the Tigre, then anger it enough or otherwise provoke its instincts enough that it charges and makes it's final leap directly at him. The big Moto Grosso Tigre (Jaguar) is at least 1/3 larger than the biggest of those in Central and North America, and can disembowel even a Brahma Bull with just one swipe of its powerful claws.

To kill it with a spear requires a long enough spear (usually about 8' overall, including a 2' razor sharp pointed blade) that the butt of the spear can be moved down 'til it touches the ground at the last instant of El Tigre's leap, and the Tigre impales himself on it. To keep the impaled, flailing and enraged cat from sliding down the spear, the spear has a sturdy dross member just below the blade. Most of all it requires a man who is able to concentrate in fast moving moments of mortal danger, and not quail at his task.

So that was one of my heroes.

Also in those days, the publishing industry was a much different animal from the entertainment industry of today.

Prominent publishers were big on true adventures by true, living adventurers.

One firm (George Allen & Unwin Ltd for instance maintained offices in London, Auckland, Bombay, Buenos Aires, Calcutta, Cape Town, Hong Kong, Karachi, Madras, Piso (Mexico), New Delhi, Sao Paulo, Singapore, Sydney, and Toronto. One of the functions of each of those offices was to become aware of the predominate local heroes in every field of endeavor (particularly skilled physical endeavor) and to inspire, fund, edit, vette and publish the true stories of their lives and adventures.

In other words, in those days heroes were real people, not the creations of fiction. And their accomplishments were the things they did, not how much money they could attract or amass.

They gave all their readers examples of what work, an inquiring mind, skill development, courage, risk taking, and steadfastness could do. Those attributes created the successes of Columbus, Galileo, Madame Curie, Horatio Nelson, and all the others of their stature.

In other words, something worth while to admire and aspire to being like.

Our true heroes still do, but where are their stories and why is almost all our entertainment shallow, money-grubbing patched-together pieces of social drivel?

No wonder kids are not all we might have once expected. We give them few heroes to emulate.