A Labor Day Man On The Street Profile – by Travis Mateer

The survivor in this AI-rendered image wasn’t receiving a medal in the real version of this picture because, even if I had a survivor medal to give him, I doubt Dale would accept it.

But he deserves one.

While I knew Dale was a tough bastard who spent time on the streets of Missoula after coming to Big Sky country from Orlando, what I did not know about Dale was how he refused direct orders in 1975 amidst the chaos of American troops exiting Vietnam.

“We were ordered to leave the kids behind,” Dale told me, referring to young orphans at an Vietnamese orphanage. “But we knew what would happen to them if we did–the kids would be raped, murdered, decapitated, and their heads would be put on wood spikes, so we pooled our money and paid some helicopter pilots to evacuate them.”

For saving children from a horrific fate, Dale and the other soldiers who refused direct orders were demoted a rank. Now Dale deeply despises the US military, which is why he never sought out the VA benefits he’s owed.

Dale’s father had a VERY short career playing baseball for the Phillies before the war. “Look him up,” Dale said, so I did.

Dale Eldon “Nubs” Jones (December 17, 1918 – November 8, 1980) was an American Major League Baseball (MLB) pitcher. Jones played in two games for the Philadelphia Phillies in 1941. His only decision occurred in an 8–6 loss to the New York Giants on September 23, 1941.

During World War II, Jones served in the United States Navy in the Pacific. He died on November 8, 1980, and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

Dale also wanted me to look up an old actor with the same name, since Dale Robertson was a family friend and threw one hell of a wake for his Dad.

Dayle Lymoine Robertson (July 14, 1923 – February 26, 2013) was an American actor best known for his starring roles on television. He played the roving investigator Jim Hardie in the television series Tales of Wells Fargo and railroad owner Ben Calhoun in Iron Horse. He often was presented as a deceptively thoughtful and modest Western hero. From 1968 to 1970, Robertson was the fourth and final host of the anthology series Death Valley Days. Described by Time magazine in 1959 as “probably the best horseman on television”, for most of his career, Robertson played in Western films and television shows—well over 60 titles in all.

The more recent data point I learned about Dale, though, is interesting when you consider our cultural moment with the Lindsey Clancy mistrial.

Dale was a juror for the Beau Donaldson rape case, which, for those who don’t know, was a pretty big deal for this little college mountain town, though an outsider who read the book ten years later asked on Reddit recently…where’s the impact?

If/when my book comes out, I put Kirsten Pabst’s post-Krakauer career into the context it deserves, using her own words and national efforts to re-cast prosecutors into victims of vicarious trauma to show how the lessons learned locally were all about CONTROLLING NARRATIVES in order to prevent local authority from ever experiencing the terror of actual exposure, especially the Missoula County Sheriff’s Office–an entity never closely scrutinized by the Federal investigation that ensued.

The cultural influence of the University, and the unintended consequence of killing the humanities program on campus, is something I will be writing about soon from a very interesting angle because I want to document some of my most recent research for an interview I have scheduled later this week. More on that later.

Returning to Reddit, according to an anonymous commenter on the above Reddit thread, it was someone working at the University who blew the whistle on UM’s rape culture. Here’s the comment:

Another anonymous commenter framed the impacts like this:

Four months ago, when this Reddit thread was first posted, we had yet to see the modern American woman’s ability to identify with a mother who methodically murders her own three children, but here we are. No wonder a hero like Dale goes unrecognized in the community he’s chosen to live out the remaining years of his life.

As timing would have it, I’ll be recording a conversation later today about the career of Denis Villeneuve and how his early movies, like Prisoners, is part of a larger cultural agenda to re-cast the mythic narrative of “the west” by, in part, redefining what masculinity means, like showing how a prepper father ready to protect his family for any natural disaster finds himself (spoiler) in a race against time to save his kidnapped daughter from a woman who kills children as a means of waging a war against God.

If you appreciate the unprofitable LABOR involved in bringing local stories to a local audience (which the online Reddit crowd appears to be hungry for) please consider donating to my new GoFundMe page. Any little bit helps.

Thanks for reading!