Mr. Dunne Works on his Wikipedia Biography

Danny Kenneth Dunne (1842-1906) was born in a log cabin left over from William Henry Harrison's Presidential campaign. His family, however, abandoned the cabin in 1846 after the plumbing backed up.

Dunne's early education was skimpy, as was customary in the backwoods of Illinois. He borrowed Lincoln's shovel and practiced writing excused absence notes on it for his parents to sign. He later attended the Miss Edith Brooks School for Unlikely Lads and Budding Humorists. What he mainly learned from Our Miss Brooks was that all 19th century writers had three names.

When he came of age, or at least was wearing long pants, he looked--not very hard-- for work. He was a daydreamer, who was fond of making jokes. His family and friends liked to have died laughing at him.

Dunne decided to seek his fortune back East. Inspired by a local train wreck, he hopped a freight car on a circus train bound for New York City and had an overly close encounter with the MGM lion.

This adventure ended early when Dunne realized that the rails to New York hadn't been laid yet. This put a crimp in his plans, as he had hoped to get booked in one of the popular comedy clubs. He was in fact standing on the site of his town's future depot, which was then home to a family of squirrels.

But fate intervened in the form of the Civil War, which had to be fought to preserve the Union, free the slaves, and make it possible for Gone With the Wind to play to packed houses.

Dunne showed up for boot camp, but marched in the wrong direction for about thirty days. When he rejoined his regiment, he told how he had lived on tree bark and fought with tadpoles for a drink of branch water.

The regimental commander, General Buford Montgomery Logan, was so amused that he chose Dunne to be his aide and regimental clown. (Logan’s previous mascot, Buster the Bulldog, had crossed enemy lines in search of a French Poodle, a blonde last seen driving a T-Bird.)

After the war, despite entertaining the troops, Dunne's comedy career seemed stalled. He began submitting funny articles to local papers (he shoved them under the door of various editors' offices as his Internet connection was unreliable).

He was an overnight success at the Toledo Illinois Democrat (POP. 700 or 698 in winter as they had couple of snowbirds). At least a dozen people read his column--in time several other local papers picked it up.

Within two years, he was on the lecture circuit--he often opened for Ralph Waldo Emerson. His most famous oration was "How I carried the News from Bull Run to Washington". This was an account of how he got separated from his regiment and fell into the Potomac River.

In time, the public grew weary of funny stuff about the War. Dunne lost his column and found comedy bookings harder to come by. He had sunk so low he nearly signed up for his own reality show as a D list celebrity.

But by chance an army buddy bought the Greenup (IL) Press, and gave Dunne a job. He contributed one-liners and paragraphs about his hometown. The New York Times later picked up his column and he became an overnight sensation--again.

Several collections of his works were published in the closing days (Friday and Saturday) of the century. But public taste soon changed again, as new columnists from the cities became popular.

He spent his last years as an obscure newspaper editor; all his books were out of print by the time of his death.

His complete works are now available online, but a survey of the site's visitors indicated that they had landed on the address by mistake, as they were searching for Finley Peter Dunne, the Andy Rooney of his day.

Dunne did, however, have one last burst of notoriety in 1901 at President McKinley’s second inauguration. He tried to reproduce his famous Bull Run to Washington speech, but instead fell off the lectern and nose-dived into the Potomac River.

This caused quite a ruckus, as many onlookers thought Dunne was drunk. He was only awkward of course. But he told everybody how sorry he was and checked into rehab. It was the least he could do.

Dunne’s work may be forgotten, but he will live on thanks to Civil War buffs that look up the Battle of Bull Run. Google includes his dip in the Potomac as result number 1,720,000. A dedicated Civil War hobbyist will eventually reach that figure, although he might have to re-load his musket.

* * *

“Take that, Henry Wheeler ‘Josh Billings’ Shaw and all you three-named worthies!” said Mr. Dunne to himself as he closed down his study for the night.

Memoir Interrupted

Mr. Dunne was busy writing his memoirs. He was deep in his Vietnam War chapter when he had been a correspondent for CBS News. He had once met Agent Orange, but mistook him for a CIA operative.

He would have to be careful about the details of his personal life. What should he say of his romance with Greta, the A. P. photographer? Nothing. It never happened. At least, not to him. He could write about his friendships with Dan Rather and Morley Safer. Except that he never met them.

Mr. Dunne had actually spent the ‘60s back home in Illinois working at a bank. He had led a quiet life except for the splashy times when he was in rehab for his addictions (Folger's Regular Coffee and Salem Lights).

As a young man, on one of the few occasions he left home, he had attended banking school for two weeks at Southern Illinois University. For him this was a considerable journey, over one hundred miles.

Mr. Dunne was not a good traveler. He went places without knowing where he was going. When he somehow arrived at a destination, he didn't know how he had got there. When he returned home, he didn't know how he had got back, or where he had been in the first place.

His poor sense of direction led him to places not on the map; local residents would giggle at his ignorance and tell him to go east two miles until he reached "the slab", which was how the highway was described in their vernacular.

So exotic places and travel were not really on his agenda; he seldom left the cornfields of home.

Still there was his show business period when he worked as an extra at Universal Studios. His biggest role was the day he fell out of an upstairs window and landed on Audie Murphy's horse.

How had he got to California? Plane. A further check of his diary indicated that he had only taken the Universal Tour, but he liked the Audie Murphy story better.

Mr. Dunne suddenly had an epiphany (after a spell-check): he had given up on his memoirs, because he had gotten weary of making stuff up.

It would be hard, however, to skip the Civil Rights Movement. But he wasn't there—he had missed the bus. He had got home somehow, but was glad he didn’t have to explain the details-- although hopping a ride on a freight car would have made a good story. He could have explained how he met Woody Guthrie and rode the rails.

What was that song they used to sing together? "This Land is My Land"?