Posted by Sharon Schendel on Nov 12, 2017
Nat Read (top) recited poems by Robert Service (lower right) and discussed how Service's verse influenced his own work, "Poet Cop"
 
Nat Read is a frequent speaker at Rotary Club of Del Mar, and he never fails to entertain.  The poet Robert Service was the focus of his presentation at our November 9, 2017 meeting.  Nat began by reciting from memory Service’s poem “The Cremation of Sam McGee”, the story of the continuously cold prospector Sam McGee who finally found warmth on the shores of Lake Lebarge.
 
Nat told how, at the age of 20, Service left Scotland to sail to western Canada to become a cowboy in the Yukon wilderness.  His ambition as a young man was never to take a “respectable” job, and he fulfilled that ambition by taking on a variety of menial labor jobs. 
 
The charm of disrespectability soon wore off and Service migrated south, first to San Francisco, followed by Los Angeles, and he eventually responded to a job posting for what he thought was for a tutor for two young girls in San Diego, but was in fact a job as a replacement handyman at a brothel. As a parting gift, Service received a guitar from one of the brothel’s “residents”.
 
After drifting throughout the West, Service eventually secured employment with the Canadian Bank of Commerce and was transferred back to the Yukon.  While there, Service wrote “The Shooting of Dan McGrew”, which Nat also recited from memory (together, the two poems total nearly 2,000 words). 
 
Following more wanderings and a stint as a war correspondent and ambulance drive in World War I, Service lived more comfortably on the earnings from his 14 books of poetry and 6 novels.  He even landed in Hollywood for a brief period as movies were being made of his stories.  His turn as an actor was not as successful as his writing- he was deemed “ill-suited” to play himself in a movie. 
 
Nat noted that American poetry eventually moved away from poets like Service, in favor or less traditional poems such as “Makeshift”, which Nat read as a representative poem that appears in The New YorkerNat said that he’d talked with one of the former Poet Laureates of California, who said that his colleagues didn’t like Service, but the fact that his poems have never been out of print reflects their popularity. 
 
Nat is a poet himself, and Service was one of his inspirations.  His book of poetry, “Poet Cop” details his feelings about his work as a Reserve Officer for the Los Angeles Police Department.  His assignments for the LAPD included vice in Hollywood and gang suppression in the South Bureau.