"Ours to Give": Not long enough
“Ours to Give: The Long Legacy of an American Family,” a new 26-minute documentary about the overlooked Long family of Kansas City, is too short -- and that is unfortunately not a compliment.
Written locally by Peter Hansen and narrated by “Family Ties” actor Michael Gross, “Ours To Give” tells a remarkable story about R.A. Long, without whom we wouldn't have Longview Farm (seen above) nor possibly the Liberty Memorial either. Owner of the world's biggest lumber company in the early 1900s, Long spent down his estate on philanthropy, both here and in the company town he created near Kelso, Wash., until his death in 1934.
“Ours To Give” bears all the marks of a solid, professionally done documentary … or at least half of one. The whole story is there: Born to a humble Kentucky family in 1850, Long is filled with ambition. Seeking his fortune, he starts in hay and quickly shifts to the budding timber industry. With millions of Midwesterners putting up homes of wood, he buys 250,000 acres of pine in Louisiana, picks it clean, converts it into 61 lumberyards, erects a Beaux-Arts skyscraper in downtown Kansas City and occupies the area's first million-dollar home (the 70-room Corinthian Hall, now home to the Kansas City Museum).
He builds Longview Farm, raises a family on simple Christian virtues, buys horses for his daughter Loula, moves to Washington State, buys 270,000 acres of Douglas fir, becomes a pioneer in reforestation, builds his model town, suffers economic and personal setback, but perseveres to the end, leaving behind countless beneficiaries and admirers of his goodwill.
The film's narrative moves along kind of like that: skimpy on details and short of breath. The result is not a confusion -- director Richard Luckin has done a fine job keeping the film's narrative simple and linear, and Hansen's script is straight ahead -- but something like a Saturday-night liturgy, a speed-read through what is surely one of the more underrated lives in the annals of Gilded Age moguldom.
I would be the first to argue that documentaries like this need to be made because many of us are not willing to plunge into the deep end of history. We'd rather get our toes wet, then wade in slowly. The R.A. Long Historical Society was formed in 2006 by people who felt Long's legacy of giving back to the places where he lived and forested must not pass away. “Ours To Give,” done at the group's behest, is a good first step. But even the film's most generous funders might agree that had its running time been doubled to 54 minutes -- standard length for PBS documentaries -- the public could have learned so much more.
Like how it was that Long learned to build a multi-million-dollar business empire without, apparently, crushing his rivals, strangling labor or raping the land. (Actually, the film does show he left Louisiana's woods a barren wasteland, but he got a do-over in Washington and according to the town's mayor, who's interviewed here, redeemed himself.)
What, exactly, was his role in funding the Liberty Memorial, and entertaining the leaders of the allied nations who assembled in Kansas City for its dedication? How did he divide his time between Kansas City and Longview, Wash., in his later years? What was it like for Ella Long to pack up and move, at midlife, from the Midwest to the Northwest? And why were Kansas Citians so enthralled by Loula, the youngest child of R.A. and Ella, who was prominent in local society because of her equestrian fame?
One of the few generous allotments of time in “Ours to Give” is the nearly four minutes given to the show horse career of Loula Long Combs, who (according to a magazine article I found online) was still winning ribbons from the National Horse Show at age 70, her 53rd year of equestrian competition.
Combs is referred to here, and on the box of the DVD that will be for sale, as the “Jackie Robinson of the show horse world.” It's hard to think of a more inappropriate analogy, since Jackie Robinson broke a color barrier that disenfranchised women and men alike in all phases of their lives, including voting rights and economic opportunity. (The only black person I saw in this film was a laborer working on Corinthian Hall.) Loula Long Combs, by contrast, came of age in the suffrage era and broke a gender taboo with talent, pluck, and the 70 horses her father bought her. The film never suggests that anyone so much as disinvited her from a party. If anything, she was the Babe Didrikson Zaharias of the show horse world -- but I guess nobody remembers who she was, either.
KCPT will air "Ours to Give" at 7 p.m. Thursday, followed by encores of "Bad Blood" (reviewed here) and "This Place Called Home" (reviewed here).
