Churkendoose.(The Churkendoose; Part Chicken, Turkey, Duck, and Goose )(Editorial)

 
It depends on how you look at things ... 
 
Ray Bolger (1947) 

Once upon a time, in a land of icicles and rabbits, not too far from the shores of Lake Superior, lived a few hardy people who scratched away in the mines and forests and on the railroads in a sometimes zero-sum attempt to make a living. The children of these scrappers and scramblers knew no other world except what Mrs. Kurth taught them about Baffin Island and the Belgian Congo. They attended little brick or wooden schools, sometimes with all twelve grades in the same building, and they welcomed and celebrated the seasons (fishing, hunting, trapping, berry, potato, baseball, basketball, spring, summer, partridge, deer, ski-jumping, winter, winter, and winter). In that setting my sister Sally and I (and maybe a few of our siblings, though we were separated in birth order by eons), spent a lot of those winter days building ice forts and then retreating to our grandmother's console record player when the first signs of purple-green frostbitten fingers began to appear. That's where we met the Churkendoose. This old Decca 78 rpm kiddy folk opera was played until it smoked, and we sang along with Ray Bolger (already a star from his classic role as the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz), and perhaps learned some of the lessons of empathy, inclusion, and tolerance articulated in classic Churkendoose fashion by classic philosophers such as Martin Buber.

The Churkendoose in text form was written in 1946 by Ben Ross Berenberg with pictures by Dellwyn Cunningham and published as a Wonder Book by a Division of Grosset & Dunlap in New York. Somehow it, and its Ray Bolger-interpreted recording, reached the hamlets of Upper Michigan and we loved it. The message was thinly veiled, important, and as relevant today as it was in the early 1950s. In fact it is echoed and reverberates in the recent political scene of the United States. In the original story as recorded in Bolger's wonderful Dorchester, Massachusetts, dialect (he was the son of Portuguese and Irish parents), the Churkendoose tale champions the cause of misfits and teaches that beauty, compassion, and tolerance are in the eyes of the beholder. The Churkendoose just didn't fit in. He was part chicken, turkey, duck, and goose--Churkendoose. The farm animals were dubious and skeptical and wanted to banish him. He was rejected and ridiculed. He talked in rhyme and danced instead of walked. And his message, as interpreted by Bolger, was classic:

 
It depends on how you look at things. 
It depends on how you look at things. 
Are the hippopotami, any handsomer than I? 
Well it depends upon, begins and ends upon, 
It all depends on how you look at things. 

The Churkendoose eventually saves the other farm animals from the dreaded fox (who took off so fast it took three days for his shadow to catch up to him). The cheers arose from the farmyard and the farm fowl gathered around their hero in gratitude. He would have nothing of their hero worship. ...