Brown baggers Win Delle regales his audience at the Fort Morgan Museum's Brown Bag series with tales of folklore Tuesday.
By JOHN LA PORTE
Times News Editor
"Folklore is nothing but a lie that's been dignified by age," Win Delle recalls being told.
Delle disagrees with that assessment, saying of folklore, "It's got an element of truth in it."
Delle, a former college history professor and an Oregon Trail historian for the National Park Service, discussed folklore and fakelore with a group of a couple of dozen at the Fort Morgan Museum's Brown Bag series Tuesday.
A story of Indians skinning a settler alive near Lusk, Wyo., has evolved into an annual show despite the protests of Native Americans, he said.
Much of folklore, Delle added, is more amusing.
For example, there was the tale of astronauts being told by Nikita Khruschev after Americans had landed on the moon that they were going to show the world that communism was better than capitalism by landing on the sun.
When one said they would burn up, the Soviet premier replied, "Don't worry. We're going to send you at night."
Another tale told of a Chinese man repeatedly going to see Premier Mao Tse-Tung and being told time after time that he was dead.
When asked why he kept coming back, he said, "I just like to hear that he's dead."
Delle also told tall tales of Colorado weather so cold that flames on candles froze.
When one man cut off the flame and put it in a drawer, it started a fire.
So next time, he put the flame outside -- and a chicken ate it and laid a hard-boiled egg the next day.
In hot weather, it was claimed that an eclipse was the sun hiding behind the moon to cool off.
Delle also touched on the rivalry between Kansas and Colorado in the years shortly before Colorado statehood -- and exaggerated claims of crop production in the home territory and bad climate conditions in the rival territory.
There was also the tall tale of a turtle drive from Colorado to Chicago and of farmers along the way putting up barbed wire because cattle would not graze where turtles had.
Folklore has its dangers, however, Delle warned -- in the days before World War II, Hitler took German folklore stories and gave all of the villains Jewish names.
Delle did two shows in Fort Morgan Tuesday, the brown bagger for the museum group and an evening presentation at the Fort Morgan Public Library on cemeteries.
Source: http://www.fortmorgantimes.com/Stories/ ... 32,00.html
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