Fact check
We live in a funny old world of fake news. So rather than ask you to take our word for it, here’s our working.
Every story we publish is true — but a good one isn’t only facts. There’s the occasional fair inference, and a little colour in the telling. Below, we’ve gone through The lawnmower in the shed line by line: what we know, where it came from, and the few places we’ve read between the lines.
Primary sources
Sourced facts
- In the summer of 1994, Alvin Straight, a 73-year-old from Laurens, Iowa, learned his 80-year-old brother Henry had suffered a stroke at his home in Blue River, Wisconsin, about 240 miles away.
- Alvin could no longer drive — his eyesight was too poor for the state of Iowa to renew his licence — and he also lived with diabetes, emphysema, and arthritis that kept him on two canes.
- He would not let anyone carry him: the documented reasons are that he did not trust anyone he knew to drive him, and that he was too proud to accept what he saw as a handout.
- He set off on 5 July 1994 on a riding lawn tractor pulling a homemade two-wheeled trailer; that first mower failed about 25 miles out and was towed home, so he bought a second-hand 1966 John Deere — top speed about 5 mph — and started again.
- The trip took six weeks. The mower broke down near West Bend, where he spent about $250 on parts and fitted them himself; he ran out of money in Charles City and waited there for his Social Security cheque.
- About two miles from Henry’s house the mower broke down a final time, and a farmer in a pickup helped push it the rest of the way; Alvin reached his brother on 15 August 1994.
- After the reunion Henry recovered from the stroke and moved to be near Alvin and the rest of the family.
- Alvin’s journey was later adapted into David Lynch’s 1999 film The Straight Story.
Reading between the lines
- “The lawnmower was not absurd. It was available.” — our reading of why he chose it: the record shows what he refused, so we frame the mower as the ordinary thing he reached for rather than a stunt.Framing
- “A tough old cob” who “would test you” but had “a smile in his voice” — these are the words of co-screenwriter John Roach, the one filmmaker who spoke with Alvin by phone; we lean on them for his temperament.Inference
- “The brothers had not spoken in about ten years. Nobody now living seems to know why.” — we hedge the figure as “about” and say plainly that the cause is undocumented.Our reading
Where sources differed
- On how long the brothers had after the reunion: counting from the August 1994 visit to Alvin’s death in November 1996 gives a little over two years, and we measured to that date rather than to Henry’s later passing, so the figure reflects the time they actually shared.
A note on quotes
Alvin’s line about not being put “in a plane or a box car” is drawn from period interviews, and the Roach quotes are verbatim from his 2020 Texas Public Radio interview.