Americans delight in having a designated specialist for each and every specialty, someone nationally recognized and often unusually accessible.
We have sisters Abby and Ann for personal problems in general, Judith Martin as Miss Manners, Judge Joseph Wapner for a little justice, Joyce Brothers for psychological peace of mind, Bob Vila for puttering around the house and, well, Dr. Ruth.And Jan Harold Brunvand is our favorite folklorist.
Brunvand, a University of Utah English professor, has parlayed a fascination (his and ours) for modern folklore - for urban legends, as he calls the stories - into quite a side-career.
In fact, "It's taken over my life," he admits.
Urban legends, of course, are those awful but wonderful stories that go around that are supposedly true, having happened to a friend of a friend (an FOF, in folklore terminology), or maybe the friend of a friend of a friend.
Besides penning a nationally syndicated urban legends column, which appears in the Deseret News, Brunvand is the author of a major textbook, "The Study of American Folklore," and has published three entertaining collections of legends: "The Vanishing Hitchhiker," "The Choking Doberman" and "The Mexican Pet."
His fourth set of stories, "Curses! Broiled Again!", is to be published soon. (Brunvand offers his thanks to Deseret News Today Section editor Ivan M. Lincoln who came up with the headline for one of his columns, inspiring his latest book's title. . . .)
Brunvand's books upped his visibility, but they were also springboards to a bit of fame from appearances with David Letterman, on the morning television network shows, in People magazine and in newspapers and on radio and TV locally and around the world.
His relatively high profile for a university academic, and his traceability thanks to addresses in his books and columns, mean constant telephone calls and lots of letters.
One recent long-distance call was from a woman trying to track down information about a certain tanning story. " `I don't know if you're the right person. . . ,' she asked. But I knew immediately what story she had in mind," Brunvand said.
The legend is featured in his newest book and is alluded to in the title.
A woman, so the story goes, is in a hurry to get a good tan. To circumvent tanning salon time limits she goes to several in one day. Later, her friends tell her she smells rather odd. Concerned, she visits a doctor and he informs her, "You've cooked your insides!"
"Some of the responses are angry," Brunvand said. One woman wrote a scathing letter because he presumed to doubt that someone could get a live bobcat in a suitcase.
The legend is that pranksters caught a bobcat then put it in an expensive suitcase and left it unattended on a highway. A car screeches to a halt, the occupants grab the suitcase and drive off . . . at least a short distance, until they open up the prize.
"On the other hand, I get letters from people who swear they knew someone who knew someone whose Volkswagen was sat upon by an elephant. . . ."
After reading his columns or books, correspondents send him similar stories, variations and paraphernalia. His ongoing work on alligators in the sewers brings in tips about pertinent cartoons, comic books, children's books, an original rock record album and even sweat shirts and T-shirts produced by the New York City Department of Environmental Protection and its Bureau of Sewers (check out the related Urban Legends column, right).
As part of his work, he tries to track down the origins of his stories. Sometimes they are true.
"One incident happened to a mathematician who's now famous. As a student, he went to a statistics class, copied two problems from the board and took them home, thinking they were homework," Brunvand said. The student brought them back with solutions, and his professor said, "Young man, you've solved two previously unsolved problems."
The story got around, went through some modifications, and the Rev. Robert Schuller picked it up as a fine example of "possibility thinking."
Another true urban legend took root at a small Midwestern college. During a wedding, the story went, a bridesmaid's high heel got caught in a floor grate during the procession. A helpful gent removed the grate to retrieve the shoe - and the bride, as she subsequently came along, fell into the gap.
Well, the real story happened in the 1940s, Brunvand said, at a school choir practice, a grate was shifted and a young man in his flowing choral robes fell through. Brunvand verified the tale through several witnesses. The gist of the story was even incorporated into Doris Day's 1966 movie, "The Glass-Bottom Boat," he learned from a friend.
Brunvand's road to folkloric fame has a few twists itself.
Born in Cadillac, Mich., and brought up in Lansing, he went to Michigan State University and there earned a bachelor's degree in, of all things, journalism. He also pursued a master's degree in English there.
While an undergraduate, he took some fascinating and popular classes from a charismatic history teacher, Richard Dorson, who was interested in folklore. Dorson sparked Brunvand's interest. Brunvand subsequently went to his parents' native land, Norway, on a Fulbright scholarship to study folklore.
Upon returning to the United States, Brunvand decided to seek a doctoral degree in English at Indiana University in Bloomington.
Much to his surprise, Dorson was at Indiana, too.
"It was purely coincidental," Brunvand said.
Four years later, he had his doctorate - in folklore. He subsequently taught in Idaho, then Illinois and, in 1966, was lured by the skiing, fishing and a strong tradition of folklore studies to Utah. He's been in Salt Lake City ever since.
"We just liked it here a lot with four kids, and they grew up here," Brunvand explained.
In the '70s he prepared a handout for his folklore classes at the U., collecting urban legends about hook-hand killers, sewer alligators and fancy cars reeking of death.
"The folder kept expanding," he said. "I started wondering: How many of these stories are there? Can we trace their histories, like fairy tales or old legends?"
That thought and further study resulted in an article for the magazine Psychology Today in 1980, and then the book "The Vanishing Hitchhiker."
With his newspaper columns, three published books, one in preparation and a fifth already in progress, Brunvand sometimes wonders where his side-career will lead.
"New stories are very rare," he said, "and if you have three or four very new stories, that's about par for a year." He still waiting for the 1989 crop.
But Brunvand isn't worried. The legends are always mutating, for one thing - most are actually variations on old tales. He can study groups of stories with themes, or those with morals, or concentrate on the ones that are really jokes. The computer explosion offers new avenues for research: legends are spreading via bulletin boards, computer networks, news groups and electronic mail. And he could always branch out into government and bureaucratic legends - or even into the dark world of espionage, researching the nasty trend of "disinformation."
Or he could make practical use of his first college degree.
"Mom doesn't think I've got a real job anyway," Brunvand said. "I could always go into journalism."
*****
(additional stories)
A hotbed of studies
Many people seem to think the study of folklore is a recent development. Not so, notes Jan Harold Brunvand, who is a former president of the American Folklore Society.
In fact, this is the American society's centennial year. The AFS was founded in 1889, and the English Folklore Society a decade before that, in 1878.
Utah is a virtual hotbed of folkloric studies, Brunvand said, with noted scholars in the field at the University of Utah, Brigham Young University and Utah State University.