I Remember Everything—and Nothing

 

Erie Lackawanna tower, Hoboken.

I can’t believe it’s been 25 years. I can remember how it felt, sure, but at this remove I need a historic timeline to assemble the pieces correctly. So I have used that to help me remember.

I worked from home in those days, freelancing for a string of magazines. I don’t remember my morning routine, but I know that my browser home page was set to the front page of The New York Times.

That morning, when I woke my desktop, above the NYT headline was a tiny sentence in red or black announcing the breaking news: a plane had hit one of the towers of the World Trade Center. The plane had struck at 8:46 AM.

I immediately assumed the aircraft was something small, like a Piper Cub. I imagined a young, inexperienced pilot making the most egregious of errors. But I couldn’t confirm that because one sentence was all the newspaper knew at that point.

I wasted time poking around other sites, hoping to glean more than that single sentence. I came up empty at the Associated Press and a few other news sites before I turned on the television. I did so just in time to watch the second jet hit the second tower. That happened at 9:03 AM.

By then, everyone knew what was going on.

I don’t know when I called Suzanne. She was an old college friend who had recently moved to Hoboken, our little river town across the Hudson River from Manhattan. She was the only other freelance journalist I knew in town.

I don’t remember when she came over my place. Before, or after 9:37 AM, when the third jet crashed into the Pentagon? I know we were in my apartment watching TV, worrying about friends we knew who worked in the vicinity of the towers, when one of the broadcasters announced that the south tower had fallen.

Such a thing seemed unfathomable.

I had grown up watching those towers being built. For what seemed like forever, my family had passed the construction site every time my father drove us to Brooklyn to visit our grandmother. As an adult I’d spent a long winter night at the rooftop restaurant, Windows on the World, during a lavish Christmas party thrown by my then-employers at the children’s publishing house, Scholastic, a firm enriched by franchises such as Harry Potter, Goosebumps, and The Babysitters Club. Hell, I had been in one of those towers as recently as last Friday, taking the escalator down to the PATH station for my ride home after meeting with some editors.

But now, watching that morning, Suzanne and I could not believe that a building could be toppled so quickly. Were they absolutely sure? After all, there was all that smoke…

Only one way to find out.

I lived in an old five-story tenement building several blocks west of the river. We stepped out the back doors of my apartment, and scampered up to the roof.

It was was a Tuesday. A beautiful clear day. I do recall that.

I saw the river. I saw the smoke. I heard sirens emanating from the city below me.

But for the life of me, I cannot remember the color of the smoke. Black? Gray? White? Today I need the photos as badly as the timelines to fix those images securely in my mind.

While we were on the roof, the north tower collapsed. And yes, even with the smoke, it was obvious. There one second, gone the next.

Only minutes ago on TV, we had heard the voices of family members telling the on-air broadcasters just where in those towers they believed their loved ones were trapped. In elevators. On stairwells. On the roofs.

Had those people gotten out?

Suzanne and I hugged briefly, then went back to scanning the scene across the river.

Then, honestly, I don’t remember the next few hours.

I know that phone and mobile phone service were disrupted regionally. When I couldn’t connect with my parents, who lived about 20 miles north of me, I made the foolish decision to drive home to check on them. Foolish, because the traffic was insane, and my drive took forever.

They were fine, but of course they were. I spent a few nights sleeping in my old bedroom. I heard that my young cousin—who had a heart condition and worked in the Wall Street area—had joined the long line of dust-spackled commuters who trudged back to their homes over the Brooklyn Bridge. Her husband, then a school teacher at one of the public schools, had done the same.

By Friday, a group of us Scholastic alums carpooled to south Jersey to attend the wake of the brother of one of our colleagues. The drive down, on the New Jersey Turnpike and the Garden State Parkway, to a funeral home at the Jersey Shore, is associated in my memory with the sight and sounds of vehicles flying American flags and honking in soldarity to each other.

On the car radio, actor Henry Winkler was telling a DJ that going forward, our mourning nation would have to learn to take better care of each other and better care of ourselves. Why he stressed those words, I don’t know.

I don’t remember much of the wake. In, hugs, out, then dinner somewhere before the somber ride back north. Our colleague’s family were lucky only in the sense that their loved one had escaped to the presumed safety of one of the tower roofs. When that building pancaked on itself, his remains were among the first to be discovered and identified. Or so we were told. And thus one family was permitted the closure denied to so many others.

One of my other cousins, who then worked as a U.S. attorney, requested, nay, demanded, my presence over the weekend. Over the years, she had gotten chummy with the firefighters who worked at the firehouse near her office in downtown Brooklyn. They had invited her to a wake and pot luck gathering in honor of their fallen members.

“You gotta come with me,” she said. “It’s going to be too painful.”

Did she bring food for the pot luck? Did I? She was (and still is) the type who can be counted on to make a giant crockpot of meatballs, but I just don’t remember.

I do remember us standing outside that firehouse, pouring ourselves plastic cups of beer from kegs literally positioned on the sidewalk.

I remember how congenial the firefighters were. How dry-eyed they were as they told us of the friends they had lost.

One man stands out in my memory for his wordplay. He talked about how, once they were allowed to search the rubble for bodies, they found so few.

“You know why?” he said “They were gone. Poof.”

Then he launched into a litany of words which all rhymed, and which all have roughly the same meaning: Decimated! Obliterated! Annihilated!

Over the years, I have tried to recall many of the other things people said and did doing those first few days, and I take myself to task for not taking the time to write much of it down.

You were a reporter, I tell myself. You should have known to capture what you were witnessing. Where was your pen? Where was your notebook?

I do remember walking to the water’s edge in Hoboken over the next week to watch smoke rising from Ground Zero. I remember the flowers and photos and tokens people left by the railing on the southernmost corner of that riverside park. And in the weeks that followed, I remember seeing posters of missing people fluttering on every surface throughout the city. Families holding out hope that their loved ones made it out alive.

At the time, I was researching a medical story for a science magazine about a family of physicians located in Massachusetts. On one of those phone interviews, the eldest sibling told me how Mass General in Boston had leapt into action, preparing their emergency room to receive potentially hundreds of patients who might be airlifted from New York City to Boston for care.

“But no one came,” he said. “They didn’t need us.”

Eventually, yes, I did write a short story based in part on what I saw that day and what came after. It’s the story of a former tough guy from Hoboken who has escaped his previous life until 9/11 forces him back into the fold.

“Back to the Boke” was written about ten years after the fact. By then, I was married and had left Hoboken for good. I based the piece mostly on the old-timers I remembered populating the city. Guys who played endless rounds of cards at the social club across the street from my apartment building. The guy on our block who earned money hauling scrap metal in his rusted-out pickup. The Italian American grocers, butchers (aka “meat-cutters”), bakers, and cheesesteak vendors who lamented the loss of families in a town made famous by Sinatra and Brando, and who ceaselessly excoriated the inevitable ascendance of Wall Street yuppies.

The story found a home at Beat to a Pulp, which kept it available until the site closed. It holds the distinction of being my first “long” story to be published at a mystery venue.

I still beat myself to a pulp wishing I had kept a better record of those days. A solid paper trail in my own hand would be far more valuable to me now than my recollections.

Once, at a book festival, I met an author who wrote a couple of books on the fragility of human memory. How what we think happened often turns out to be untrue when meticulously fact-checked. I recall being so impressed by the reporting in The New Yorker after Hurricane Katrina slammed into New Orleans. Those writers had fanned out into the city looking for stories, they had carefully recorded them, and then they had rushed back to file their pieces. Maybe I would have done better if I myself had been on deadline. Who knows.

But hey—if there’s any lesson to be learned after 25 years, it’s to keep a notebook and pen handy, to know when to use them, when to tuck them away, and when to look, listen, and feel instead.

Hoboken days:
Visiting Sinatra’s birthplace.

* * *

See you in three weeks!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

joedenise.com

[REPOST] When Character Development Meets "The Real World"

Flat characters are two-dimensional in that they are relatively uncomplicated and do not change throughout the course of a work. By contrast, round characters are complex and undergo development, sometimes sufficiently to surprise the reader.

Stock character, a character in a drama or fiction that represents a type and that is recognizable as belonging to a certain genre. Most of the characters in the commedia dell'arte, such as Columbine and Harlequin, are stock characters.

– Both quotations courtesy of The Encyclopedia Britannica

I have written at length in this space about the importance of character development in your writing. (If you're interested in reading some of my previous work on character, feel free to click here, here, here, and here.) And lately, I've returned to the well, and begun to consider the importance of the delicate balance of character development versus character continuity.

Take John Updike's Rabbit series of four novels, all featuring the same central character, Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom. The series takes place over a span of thirty years, taking Rabbit from his mid-twenties to his death in retirement. Updike released the various novels an average of ten years apart (1960, 1971, 1981 and 1990). The final two novels (Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest) won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Over the course of the series Updike kept his character restless and angsty, while also showing both physical and mental changes in the character as he grew older. He did this against an evolving social backdrop (the early '60s, '70s, '80s and '90s, respectively) that dovetailed pretty seamlessly with the character's arc (see my post on the effective use of setting as another character in your work). And, obviously, "Rabbit" Angstrom would be an example of the "round character" defined above. Taken as a whole, the books are well worth your time.

Where Updike's series presents a collective masterwork of balancing development and continuity, it has in many ways presented an outlier bucking the last few decades of writing marketplace trends. This seems especially true in crime fiction.

Don't get me wrong. There are lots of great writers currently out there developing their characters, working their collective tails off, and producing really unforgettable stuff.

However.

The last few decades have seen the rise of the so-called "airport thriller." And where early practitioners of the art of thriller writing (then, as now, a sub-genre of crime fiction), such as Robert Ludlum and the immortal Elmore Leonard were masters equal to Updike in writing characters who showed growth, they have proven the exception rather than the rule. The emphasis in thrillers is on fast-paced plotting, and with the market growing more and more lucrative, publishers have shown a preference for thrillers as part of a series of books, rather than the stand-alones most favored by so many masters of the sub-genre.

I'm not giving examples because I'm not looking to call anyone out. Plus, were my agent to tell me tomorrow that a top five publisher was offering me a multi-book contract adorned with a whole lot of zeroes to write thrillers that adhered to these standards, I would not hesitate to dive into this end of the writing pool. Character development tends not to be a hallmark of thriller writing. It's delightful to see when you find it, but truth be told, thriller fans (my brother among them) tend to read thrillers for the action, first and foremost.

What I'm saying is that I have begun to see this "light" character development crop up more and more in other types of crime fiction, especially in any number of series. The character has a benchmark, and even in a series that runs for years, tends to vary little from said benchmark. In so doing, series lead characters which ought to be "round" tend to take on the aspects of so-called "stock characters."

Rather than give examples of this, let me go in the opposite direction, using a real world example.

There's this guy I used to know. We grew up on the same block. Neighbors and friends for years and years. We eventually lost touch (as people often do), and a few years ago, I happened across his social media presence. Here's a thumbnail of the "character" I found there:

My old friend worked in radio, eventually helming his own talk radio show. From here he took a quick detour into StartUpLand at one of the pioneer startups where he made a pile, then eventually found his way back into talk radio. Now in his fifties, his political and social positions seem to rely heavily on the foundation of his deep spiritual faith, and the importance of his family in his life.

And I say good for him. He was a great guy back then, and I have little doubt he still is.

What makes this thumbnail so interesting is the set of fundamental differences I see between the guy I knew back in early-to-mid '80s and his current self. When we were teenagers growing up together, my old friend was practically a socialist. And for all intents and purposes heavily agnostic (not irreligious so much as indifferent to religion). Something that hasn't changed at all is that he was a brilliant, and opinionated conversationalist then, as he still seems to be. One huge difference was that he loathed Ronald Reagan more than I did (I still do. If anything I loathe Reagan more in retrospect). Not sure what's changed there, but needless to say, my friend isn't exactly "anti-Reagan" (or anti-his memory, I guess) these days.

Some other things: he went on a family vacation with myself and my extended family, and developed his first real crush on a girl who came on the trip with one of my cousins. It was amusing to watch this most opinionated of guys basically abandon several of his previous opinions based on what his new love interest thought. 

And yet I never saw him in love again during the time I knew him. If anything I saw him protecting his heart, flirting with girls, never dating, plenty of "hanging out," but never making himself "available."

Here's the funniest part, though. I had another friend back in my teens. Conservative, grew up with a strong church background, also opinionated. Loved Reagan.

I've stayed in touch with this friend. He's got grown kids, a thriving career in a union construction job, climbs mountains and he frequently uses his free time helping build schools in Sub-Saharan Africa. I have no idea how feels about politics these days. We don't talk politics when we talk. We talk music. And it's always great.

That funny thing? My first friend back in the day heartily disliked this second friend. And nowadays my second friend reminds me of my first friend in his youth and that first friend reminds me much more of my second friend in his youth.

Heyyyyy I think I might have the germ of a story idea here....

See you in two weeks!

The Tell-Tale Heart

We went down to Albuquerque last week for an Edgar Allan Poe theatrical, which was entertaining in itself, and got you thinking about Poe beyond the confines and conventions of theater.  It was billed as a “speakeasy,” and they did indeed serve themed drinks in the intervals.  Carole had seen a previous production, up in Farmington, and loved it, the event put on in different venues by different casts.

You open on a set that could be a garret, or a study, and Poe enters to introduce himself, and talk a little about his work, his themes and obsessions - death of course a big one – and then slips into the shadows as another actor comes on to dramatize the story, first up, “The Fall of the House of Usher.”  Curiously, they were musical interludes, sung-spoken, so it helped if you were already familiar with the plotlines, because they were really riffs or attitudes toward the stories, not staged readings.  “Usher” was efficiently creepy, followed by “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Premature Burial,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” “The Gold Bug,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” the two of the more famous poems, “Annabelle Lee” and “The Raven.”  So it was a highlight reel, with drink breaks.  I liked the actor who played Poe a lot, but I thought the rest of the cast was less successful.  Mostly, I think, because of the material they were given.  The trouble with condensing Poe, or any writer, isn’t just that you lose the words themselves, but the sense of the words - the rhythm, and the pace.  Poe creates dread through a very calculated use of echoes and repetition, foreshadowing and false narratives.  What he’s struggling to write, in effect, is psychological horror.  Even though that term, or even the concept, didn’t exist at the time.

David Morrell has suggested that Thomas De Quincey, in his series of essays, On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts, is actually engaging in psychological analysis – Morrell has now written three period thrillers about it - although that concept was unknown to the Victorians.  Freud and the Vienna school were sixty years away.  Poe is, for one thing, influenced by De Quincey, but it seems pretty clear to a modern reader that Poe is trying to describe a phenomenon he doesn’t have the vocabulary for.  Roderick Usher is deeply weird and wicked, his sexual mania left to the reader’s imagination, but the house cracking at its foundations and collapsing into the dark lake is vivid and literal.  Sure, it’s metaphorical, but it’s illustrative of psychological collapse.  Roderick is coming apart at the seams, because he can’t stand the idea that his dying sister’s body might be stolen, to be dissected by medical students in an anatomy class, so he buries her alive to prevent it.  The whole thing reeks of what was diagnosed in the 19^th century as hysteria, a peculiarly female malady.

Poe is readily characterized as Gothic, and I think there’s more going on here than that.  Not that there has to be more, for Poe to be taken seriously, but that he’s actually even odder than we imagined.  My main takeaway from our recent evening with Poe, down in Albuquerque, is that it’s past time I revisited his writing.  His influence is widely recognized, and he certainly deserves to be read.

Verbal Cues

 

I’m currently editing a story that needs some help. The tale lacks energy. It could use a verbal kick in the pants.

Cullen 328 Creative Commons

I culled out some of the crutch words—just, really, a lot, very, slightly—I’ve got a slew of them. They fill up the story without doing anything to advance it. They sneakily leaked in while I composed. When I pulled them out, the story became more efficient. The reader arrived at the point more quickly. But the piece still lacked vibrancy.

I blame the verbs. I’ve got some bland ones tucked into the tale. And I compensated by jacking up the adverbs. “But it’s not my fault,” he said defensively. “I think it’s in my biology,” he added genetically.

Stephen King, in his craft memoir, On Writing, should have taught me this. He reminds me of the elementary lesson that verbs come in two types—active and passive. With an active verb, the subject is doing something. With a passive verb, the subject is just letting it happen. Even when my subject is active, she sometimes moves into a room instead of gliding or stomping. Stronger verbs, like specific nouns, help the readers form a better picture.

As I mentioned in the previous paragraph, I’m not sure the blandness is entirely my fault. As a species, I believe that we have more trouble with verbs. Humans want to name things. We like to slap labels on stuff we see. If we name it, we’re on our way to understanding it. We give ourselves control. Linguist Jess Zafarris says that English has three times as many nouns as verbs. We’re skilled at naming things.

Down the road, Zafarris says, we back-form and create verbs from the pre-existing nouns. “Evaluation,” and “regurgitation,” for instance, both existed long before the verbs “evaluate,” or “regurgitate” came into existence. Our English verbs are always playing catch up.

William Shakespeare gets credit for inventing a host of new English words. Many of those were verbs that emerged from pre-existing nouns. Among the back-formed verbs he created are “negotiate” from “negotiation,” and “metamorphose” from “metamorphosis.”

We’re hardwired for the naming of things. The more analytical process of describing action, however, proves harder for humans. Motion is less tangible. Across languages, processing verbs in sentences is more neurologically demanding than processing nouns. From an evolutionary biology standpoint, our species wants to preserve that brain power. We may need those little gray cells suddenly to scheme our way out of becoming prey. Self-preserving authors, like me, tend to rely on forms of “to be,” and other simple, unimaginative verbs. Then when we need a little zest, we succumb to the temptation of adding adverbs.

That’s my story for the rough draft. I’m blaming Darwin and evolutionary biology.

Having identified the problem, the solution emerges—edit. I’ll live with getting the wrong words down initially. I can’t edit a blank screen, to paraphrase Jodi Picoult. Once something tumbles onto the page, I’ll test the verbs, asking if this is the best choice for the situation being described. Would it reinforce character if he “lumbered” rather than merely “walked”? Almost certainly.

The “be” verbs are easy fixes. They can reliably be traded for more interesting options.

“The body was in the den” becomes “The body lay in the den.” At least with “lay,” I’m describing the body doing something, as much as a dead body can reasonably be expected to do. Perhaps it morphs into “Sluggo carried the body into the den.” The focus gets changed off the body and onto the actor.

I’ll work through the short story and send it off. Someday, I hope, readers will see it. I don’t know where or when. All I know is that the version that eventually surfaces won’t look anything like the version I’m working through now. The nouns you might recognize, but the verbs will look very different.

I'll be traveling when this posts, on the hunt for good nouns and better verbs. 

Until next time.

School Daze

As far as I can tell, I was admitted to Dickinson College, a small, scholastically rigorous institution in Pennsylvania, on the strength of my swimming prowess. Certainly not my academic record, which should have prompted an admissions scandal. I was tipped off when I found the college swim team in my dorm room soon after I arrived. There were no athletic scholarships offered at Dickinson, but the coaches had a cozy enough relationship with the gatekeepers that the occasional standout was snuck through (someone with better high school preparation would have written “was sneaked”).

It helped that my father was prepared to pay full boat, so I opted for a different college path, one mostly involving beer, cigarettes, procrastination and rock ‘n’ roll, none of which were on the curriculum, though individual excellence in these areas was rewarded by allowing you to return every year, provided the maintenance of a shaky C average.

      My basic impediment was the theory of school itself. I could never grasp the concept of sitting together with people my age at little desks all day while someone at the front of the room told us things. That alone would have tried my patience, but they required you to

regurgitate their words at some later time, with rather harsh penalties for imprecise recollection. Worse still, once liberated at the ring of a bell, we had to use precious TV-watching and horsing around time to recapitulate much of the day’s proceedings, and even add to the burden with supplemental labor. The whole thing seemed entirely medieval.

They hadn’t yet identified ADHD in the 50s and 60, but I had such a ferocious case that my parents had to resort to drugs to keep me still in kindergarten. Thus afflicted throughout my school career, I thought “isn’t realizing his potential” was my middle name. Though I did have an ace in the hole. As with many things in my young life, it was provided by my big brother, who was an excellent student, but also an omnivorous, indefatigable reader. He caught the habit from my mother, so our house was crammed stem to stern with books.

Since I did everything my brother did, I read every book I fell over, and then some. As compulsions go, this was a lucky one to succumb to. Unsupervised as it was, my pool of knowledge was quite deep in some areas, and barely a puddle in others. My subsequent test performances had lots of hills and valleys, which evened out to around, well, a shaky C average.

The psychological lesson for me was that information I read tended to stick, whereas anything delivered from the metaphorical pulpit sounded like Charlie Brown’s TV parents. This led more than one teacher to ask my mother why a student who aced the test on Ancient Greece (didn’t every kid devour Edith Hamilton?) could barely add and subtract (still largely true.)

Although my math SATs never rose above the statistical probability of correctly guessing at least some of the answers, I did okay on the English side of the house, maybe just well enough for Dickinson to retain its accreditation. I’m not sure how much I learned in public school, but there’s an awful lot of information available when you have access to your mother’s Book of the Month subscription.

Most relevant to this platform, my bibliophilia soon blossomed into full blown hypergraphia. This not only saved my scholastic bacon, it provided the template for my entire life. When things were looking dire, I could always write myself out of trouble. In college, there was nothing more exhilarating than the option of a term paper versus a final exam. Somewhere within those ivy walls, I’d heard some critics regarded form as important as content. This theory was sorely tested across a variety of disciplines, but I made it through.

My roommate not only shared my general strategy, he honed it to perfection. A professor wrote at the bottom of one of his papers: “You write well, which is good, since you have very little command of the material.” He clinched a B in Russian Literature by using the liner notes of the Dr. Zhivago movie soundtrack as his sole reference. This is the stuff of greatness.

Since so little time was committed to slaving over The Brothers Karamazov, or door-stop biology texts, we had ample in reserve for 8 ball, making midnight grinder runs or destroying our hearing with electric guitars. Whatever was left on the schedule for actually writing those papers was usually reserved for about ten hours before the deadline. This was also, for me, an invaluable life lesson.

      It wasn’t until my Creative Writing MFA program, when the focus was entirely on matters of interest to me, that I discovered the pleasing embrace of a classroom, stimulating professors and the novelty of academic achievement. Since I had to pay for it all out of my own pocket, that might have enhanced my focus. But I came to regret being such a lousy student and all the stuff I could have learned had I been paying attention. Among my screwball college friends there are a few lawyers and corporate executives, along with a stockbroker, CEO and Dean of the Boston Cathedral. There’s no evidence that a decent grade point average distracted from their attention to the extra-curricular.

Trinity College once asked a cross-section of professionals to come speak to their students about proper career preparation. I was the designated advertising copywriter.

“First,” I told them, “don’t even buy the textbooks until about halfway through the semester. Take a passing glance when you get a chance, in case your parents come to visit and ask what you’re studying. On the night before your paper is due, get some pizza and sample the keg in the dorm basement, play a lot of pool, or basketball, if that’s your preference, until everyone’s gone to bed, then slip page one into the typewriter. Think desperately of something to write that will sound even remotely persuasive. Then you have to actually write something down, if you can stay awake.

“If you pass, they won’t kick you out, and you’re able to preserve your lifestyle (and in my case, stay out of the draft.) This is the life of a copywriter. Working with scant information, often exhausted, forced to produce a compelling argument under extreme pressure in a very short amount of time. Oh, and the stakes are pretty high. Just ask your kids, if you’re lucky enough to have them.”

They never asked me back. Don’t know why.

Dumb Kids

 SleuthSayers relies on Google’s Blogger platform. Over a couple of decades, we’ve discovered a thousand thorns amid its bed of roses, bugs, errors, and omissions. This past week has been particularly harrowing with lockouts and outages affecting and infecting our outbound news feed and comments. It particularly affected Anna on Friday, so for writers especially, I recommend taking in her promotional suggestions.

But also… her article inspired today’s article.

In reading Anna Scotti’s guide, it dawned on me when I was 15-16, I came up with smart and more innovative ideas than what I use now. It began with a statewide scholarship competition sponsored by foods companies, e.g, American Dairy Association, Wonder Bakeries, Kraft, producers and canning companies– the food chain of farm to family table. They selected 200 of us, put us up in hotels, arranged lectures, arranged tours, fed us well, and even sponsored a night of music and dancing.

Participants were expected to chat up their local community about nutrition and sponsored interests in the middle of food-growing rural Indiana. The program was divided into boy and girl programs, one boy and one girl per county, one hundred girls, one hundred boys, vying for scholarships and monetary prizes. I came from a tiny rural school without a county library, so this was new to me. I appreciated being a part of it, even if I didn’t stand a snowball’s chance at a prize.

City students might wonder how dumb kids from the middle of nowhere farm country could compete with Indianapolis, population a million, or Chicago surrounds, another quarter million or more, Cincinnati bedroom communities, or university brain silos in Terre Haute, Bloomington, and Lafayette.

Easy: I had no idea what I was doing.

I started small and I owe that initial toehold to women. Gentleladies of that area and era belonged to numerous clubs– book clubs, cooking clubs, craft clubs, knitting clubs, lodges, and social clubs. Mom connected me with a couple of her societies, where I gave brief talks and the ladies politely listened.

I branched out, 4-H, Scouts, and local church groups where I spoke about matzo and manna. The mad scientist in me built a robot, not unlike R2-D2, which accompanied me to some presentations. By then, I’d acquired Albert the Alligator, who stole the show at other events and garnered more girl attention that I did.

In the meantime, I discovered local newspapers were hungry for articles. I listened and complied. Our county had no library, but the neighboring county’s library didn’t mind my taking up space where the sun warmed from a particular window. I researched, scribbled, I even dared send an essay to the Indianapolis Star which, to my surprise, printed it. (Much later I learned public cable channels thirsted for content.)

Media investors planted a radio station literally in the middle of county cornfields. Early one morning, I threaded back roads to the three towers of WSVL. They gave me a short tour before sitting down for an interview. I returned a second time for my own broadcast.

Susan, our county’s female entry, and I didn’t really interact. She was smart and pretty, and to this day, I picture Nancy Drew looking exactly like her. She was a full year older than me, an insurmountably huge age gap. She was sufficiently elderly to qualify for a driving permit; Mom drove me in her pink Rambler. Susan attended a large city school, I underwent a one-hour bus ride to a small rural 1-12. Her father ran a well regarded hardware, mine farmed and sold insurance to make ends meet. In retrospect, we could have– perhaps should have– collaborated, but the thought never occurred to either.

Meanwhile, I documented, documented, documented, every article, every talk, every presentation. At the end of summer, I packaged everything, submitted it to the committee, and gave Albert time off. I’d worked my tail off for a 1% chance at the prize. The promoters had gotten their money’s worth.

And then a letter arrived and a package. The letter announced Susan had won the girls’ division. Well done.

And winner of the boys’ division and overall winner… me! Seriously! Program directors noted both winners came from the same county. All that work had paid off.

Today, outlets have changed. The internet gutted newspapers and perhaps journalism. Gen Alpha has little use for radio and television. Substack and Reddit and Tim Tok make money in entirely different ways. We have to learn and adapt and perhaps adopt.

In a broader sense, Poe’s pendulum swings both ways. People were patient with me who might not have been as lenient with an adult, whereas a different station or magazine might have no time for dumb kids. Never know until we try.

Lesson

Thanks to Anna’s article that not only inspired today’s essay, it reminded me of what one can accomplish with few resources. Without knowing what he was doing, a dumb kid validated a couple of Anna’s ideas as achieveable and well grounded. That should serve as a lesson for me.

The Old Man and the Sand and Sea

Ever met anybody famous?

I suspect you have. Most of us, I think, have experienced--or know folks who have experienced--unique contacts with "well-known" people. Examples: When one of my writer friends was a child, his babysitter was Sharon Tate. (Seriously.) Another writer friend once did a major-movie love scene with Clint Eastwood. My former literary agent talked Robert Bloch into writing Psycho. My father's best friend flew missions with pilot Gene Autry in World War II. And so on and so on. I myself have sat next to several of my favorite movie actors on commercial flights during my IBM years, and pestered a few of them all the way to baggage claim.

Another memory is of a night when my vacationing family and I were eating dinner in my dad's brother's seaside restaurant in Pensacola, Florida. I was twelve years old, and because it was my sister's fifth birthday, my uncle (who had no children) secretly arranged for all the cooks and waiters to march out with a cake and sing "Happy Birthday" to her. As it turned out, two of the cast of the then-hit TV show Gunsmoke--Amanda Blake and Milburn Stone--were among the diners that night, and afterward the two of them came over to our table, wished my sister a happy birthday, and sat and visited with us for half an hour. This was long, long ago, but such a thing was unusual even then, and I still remember being thrilled.

My favorite story, though, of a chance meeting with a famous person came from one of the students in my writing classes.

Here's the background . . .

The student in question, the late Nick Adams, lived in Mendenhall, Mississippi, about half an hour south of Millsaps College in Jackson, where for many years I taught two night courses on writing and selling short stories. Nick was a good writer and an all-around good guy, and I grew to know him well. We worked together on a number of his stories, and he honestly enjoyed the process of writing--he wrote both fiction and poetry. 

The funny thing is, he never said anything, during all our weeks of classes, about the story I'm about to tell you. He revealed it to me only afterward, at a dinner held to celebrate the end of our two courses. (Celebrate is the correct word; my students were probably glad to be rid of me.)

. . . and here's the story:

In the early spring of 1959 Nick Adams was a freshman at Del Mar Junior College in Corpus Christi, Texas. He was a student reporter for the school newspaper, The Foghorn, and his family owned a restaurant in a Corpus hotel called The Sand and Sea Resort, on the Gulf of Mexico. After classes Nick waited tables, washed dishes, made room-service deliveries, mopped the floors, and did whatever needed doing at both the restaurant and the hotel.

One day that year he looked up from his duties and saw, standing there in the hotel lobby . . . Ernest Hemingway. The author was there with his wife Mary and his old friend and fellow author A.E. Hotchner. An avid reader, Nick recognized Hemingway immediately. Since Nick was in the vicinity, the desk clerk asked him to take the three guests's luggage up to their rooms, and Nick--in a quick whisper--asked the clerk if she realized who these people were. She said no--she'd never heard of them.

Nick took the bags up, they tipped him well, and he rushed back to the restaurant to tell his mother what had happened. She listened as Nick blurted out his story, then said, "Go call him. Now."

"What?"

"You're studying journalism, right? You write for the school paper. Call him on the phone and ask him if you can do an interview."

Nick realized that made sense. He beat feet back to the hotel lobby, phoned Hemingway's room from the front desk, and--trying to keep his voice from shaking--made the request. He did not, however, reveal his name. He was afraid that if he mentioned his name they would think he was pulling some kind of hoax, or making a joke. (As a longtime fan, he was familiar with all the Nick Adams short stories Hemingway had published, mostly in the 1920s and '30s.) To his amazement, he was told by the wife, "Sure. Come on up."

Mary Hemingway welcomed Nick into the room just as her husband was stepping out of the shower. He smiled and shook Nick's hand as he stood there naked and dripping, and in fact continued to stand there chatting until his wife fetched him a bathrobe. Then they sat together at a table, and for the next twenty minutes Nick asked questions and scribbled the replies in a notebook he'd brought along. Hemingway was gracious and helpful throughout the interview. When it was over, he asked Nick not to let anyone from the local media know he was there until after he'd left the next day, and Nick agreed to keep the secret.

The following morning the three travelers had breakfast at the family restaurant before leaving. Nick was away and in class, but his mother introduced herself to Hemingway, and he asked her what her son's name was so he could leave a card. When she told him Nick Adams, Hemingway was both surprised and pleased. The note he left said, "To Nick Adams, who will make a good reporter."

Some years later, Hotchner wrote a book called Papa Hemingway, and the Sand and Sea incident is recorded there. He got some of it wrong--I've read the book and found the account--but the essentials are there, right down to Hemingway's reaction to finding out the boy's name. 

Again, Nick never mentioned this during our many references to Hemingway's writings during the classes--he told me about it only at the final dinner, when all of us were sitting around talking about old times. And maybe the funniest thing of all is that Nick Adams (the real one, not the character) never became a reporter. He became a successful businessman instead. 

And a part-time writer. I still have a signed book of his poetry. Is that wild, or what?

NOTE: Last week I googled the hotel for the first time, and found this, among other info: In March 1959, renowned author Ernest Hemingway was interviewed at the Sand and Sea Resort Hotel by a college journalism student. 

My question for today is, have you ever met, either accidentally or intentionally, a famous writer--or, for that matter, a famous politician, actor, musician, etc? Was it a normal meeting, or unusual in some way? If it was an author, did that at all inspire or influence your writing? Did the meeting result in any fictional versions of it?

Before closing, I'll share one more story of my own. I once ran into the American pop singer Billy Joe Royal, just before one of his college concerts in the late 1960s. (Yes, I know--you younger folks won't remember him.) Anyhow, he and his group were turning a corner going one way and I was walking the other way, and I ran into him, literally--Royal was a short guy and I'm not--and knocked him flat on his back right there in the hallway outside the ballroom of the Student Union. His entourage went nuts, but I apologized and helped him to his feet and all was well. I still think about that every time I hear an old recording of "Down in the Boondocks."

Hopefully your celebrity encounters went better than that one.

Whatever it is or was that inspires you, find or remember it and keep writing! See you in two weeks.