Mega-book-reviewer Jake Chism and a couple of friends have launched FictionAddict.com, to "help you find your next fiction fix." There's a big introductory book giveaway to help publicize the site. I saw the first reference on Twitter a few days ago, and then checked it out this morning.
In addition to Chism, the main writers include novelist Frank Redman and Ted Dekker co-author Kaci Hill. The site includes review, book and author news, interviews, links to booksellers and contests. The author featured in the spotlight is Robert Liparulo, the author of Comes a Horseman, Deadlock and a young adult series, the latest of which is Timescape.
FictionAddict.com features thrillers, suspense and mystery, all in a one-stop shop. Cool.
Monday, June 29, 2009
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Bonnie Grove's "Talking to the Dead"
Talking to the Dead by Bonnie Grove is one of the best novels I've read -- not only this year but in recent memory. I've posted a review at Amazon, in which I praise the book, and I'm still thinking through what I finished reading this morning.
Wow. Grove is one talented writer.
It's a story about grief -- the unexpected loss of a young husband -- but it's also a story of how the mind and emotions deal with grief, which can include blocking out reality. In the case of Kate Davis, the young heroine, the loss of her husband Kevin is stunning and ravaging -- but ultimately not for the reasons she and the reader think. It becomes even more complicated when she begins to hear his voice talking to her, and he tells her she's forgotten too much. And he's right.
Slowly, as Kate descends into a kind of madness, she begins to grasp the monumental betrayal by her husband, his friends and business associates, and even her own family. She comes to understand that this betrayal includes her own memory, a memory gutted by grief.
As the healing comes with love and faith, Kate's pain gets worse. And the moment is approaching when she will have to surrender what has become a grief-driven anger.
For a long time, I didn't know how big a role anger could play in someone's grief. And then I saw a loved one engulfed by it, and how the anger could manifest itself in different ways. The grief of loss, accompanied by anger, profoundly changed the person, the relationships and the family.
That's the story Bonnie Groves masters in Talking to the Dead.
Wow. Grove is one talented writer.
It's a story about grief -- the unexpected loss of a young husband -- but it's also a story of how the mind and emotions deal with grief, which can include blocking out reality. In the case of Kate Davis, the young heroine, the loss of her husband Kevin is stunning and ravaging -- but ultimately not for the reasons she and the reader think. It becomes even more complicated when she begins to hear his voice talking to her, and he tells her she's forgotten too much. And he's right.
Slowly, as Kate descends into a kind of madness, she begins to grasp the monumental betrayal by her husband, his friends and business associates, and even her own family. She comes to understand that this betrayal includes her own memory, a memory gutted by grief.
As the healing comes with love and faith, Kate's pain gets worse. And the moment is approaching when she will have to surrender what has become a grief-driven anger.
For a long time, I didn't know how big a role anger could play in someone's grief. And then I saw a loved one engulfed by it, and how the anger could manifest itself in different ways. The grief of loss, accompanied by anger, profoundly changed the person, the relationships and the family.
That's the story Bonnie Groves masters in Talking to the Dead.
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Leif Enger's "So Brave, Young and Handsome"
Leif Enger’s first novel, Peace Like a River, puzzled me. I couldn’t decide what it was – a western, a contemporary version of Huckleberry Finn, or an exploration of good and evil and how sometimes “good people do evil things,” Or maybe all of these things and something else, too, something out there just beyond my grasp.
I wish I had read Enger’s second novel, So Brave, Young and Handsome, first. I understood the first one better after reading the second, and I liked the second one better, in fact, which surprised me for some reason. The first novel even has a cameo role in the second novel, and that was my tip-off.
Both are novels about the nature of story and storytelling. They’re all of those other things, too, but they are essentially about story and storytelling.
Long ago and in a galaxy far, far away, I took a course called “The Nature of Story” for a masters program. We read Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, which most of the class found rather odd if not bizarre but which for me seemed like growing up in New Orleans. We read Twain’s Roughing It, Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It, Nabokov’s Pale Fire and a lot of works that are, consciously or unconsciously, about story and storytelling. Enger’s two novels, although published considerably later, would have fit perfectly into the syllabus.
So Brave, Young and Handsome is a story told by Monte Beckham, who’s had a spectacular success with his first novel, a western, but fails to write anything that might work as a second novel. Glendon Hale comes rowing down the river by Monte’s house, and life will change forever for Monte and his family. Monte accompanies Glendon on a trip to Mexico to find Blue, Glendon’s first and possibly only love. Early into the trip, Monte learns that Glendon is an outlaw, and the authorities are still looking for him. It’s 1915, far enough away from the Wild West but still close enough for outlaws to be hanging around.
So Enger takes us on a road trip, and gives us a western, a novel about the odd interchange of good and evil (and heroes and villains), a love story, a history lesson or two, and considerable, if subtle, discussion about stories. Because that’s what the characters are actually talking about. Stories.
While So Brave, Young and Handsome is not a sequel, seeing Enger’s first novel through the prism of his second helps explain both.
And the man is a storyteller.
I wish I had read Enger’s second novel, So Brave, Young and Handsome, first. I understood the first one better after reading the second, and I liked the second one better, in fact, which surprised me for some reason. The first novel even has a cameo role in the second novel, and that was my tip-off.
Both are novels about the nature of story and storytelling. They’re all of those other things, too, but they are essentially about story and storytelling.
Long ago and in a galaxy far, far away, I took a course called “The Nature of Story” for a masters program. We read Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, which most of the class found rather odd if not bizarre but which for me seemed like growing up in New Orleans. We read Twain’s Roughing It, Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It, Nabokov’s Pale Fire and a lot of works that are, consciously or unconsciously, about story and storytelling. Enger’s two novels, although published considerably later, would have fit perfectly into the syllabus.
So Brave, Young and Handsome is a story told by Monte Beckham, who’s had a spectacular success with his first novel, a western, but fails to write anything that might work as a second novel. Glendon Hale comes rowing down the river by Monte’s house, and life will change forever for Monte and his family. Monte accompanies Glendon on a trip to Mexico to find Blue, Glendon’s first and possibly only love. Early into the trip, Monte learns that Glendon is an outlaw, and the authorities are still looking for him. It’s 1915, far enough away from the Wild West but still close enough for outlaws to be hanging around.
So Enger takes us on a road trip, and gives us a western, a novel about the odd interchange of good and evil (and heroes and villains), a love story, a history lesson or two, and considerable, if subtle, discussion about stories. Because that’s what the characters are actually talking about. Stories.
While So Brave, Young and Handsome is not a sequel, seeing Enger’s first novel through the prism of his second helps explain both.
And the man is a storyteller.
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
What I'm Working On
I’ve occasionally referred to writing projects I’m working on. I’m writing novels. (Yes, that’s plural.) I’ve actually written two, each about 90,000 words, and one being a sequel to the other. I’ve done some half-hearted marketing with agents but I don’t think I’m ready for that yet, at least with these manuscripts. Not yet.
I’ve been collecting lots of information on agents, publishers, advice, etc., and I’ve been mapping out who I want to target. I know who my intended readership is. I’ve developed drafts of pitch letters and even tried out a few on various agents. Polite turn-downs, generally. But rejection is 99.9 percent of this business. And it is a business. Don’t ever think that book publishing is anything but a business.
So I read, study, ponder and write. I developed a whole series of ideas based on the first two manuscripts, and could continue the saga through several books. I’ve written extended treatments of all of them.
Lately, I’ve been working on a completely different manuscript from the earlier ones. It’s a contemporary novel about a family that’s torn apart and then gradually brought back together, at least partially, in spite of awful circumstances. The catalyst is a child. The characters have names like Sam, Danny, Rafe and Joanna.
Joanna didn’t start out as a main character. In fact, she wasn’t even supposed to be a character. But she showed up at a Christmas tree lot, and I had to do something with her, because she wouldn’t go away. She’s now become a major character in the story, and a major part of the story. I had to go back and rewrite stuff to accommodate her, but not much, as it turned out. It was if the story had been waiting for her.
Sam, on the other hand, was the main character from the time the idea of the novel first entered my head. And he still is. But he’s gotten deeper and more complex than he started out. He’s picked up a kind of clipped accent. He became a carpenter. Through no fault of his own, he has a history that’s horrible and unjust, one that is never explicit and only imagined, but more real for the imagining.
There was another character who played a major role, and represented a whole section of the story. But then it made more sense to remove her and let the reader imagine what happened. She’s real, but she exists only in the reader’s (and writer’s) imagination now.
Interesting how the writing process works.
I’m about two thirds of the way to completion. I define completion of the novel the way the agents and publishers do – word count between 80,000 and 100,000. I’ve got about 62,000 words done. I know how it ends; I know what I have left to write.
This is the one I’m going to get aggressive with marketing to agents and publishers.
I’ve been collecting lots of information on agents, publishers, advice, etc., and I’ve been mapping out who I want to target. I know who my intended readership is. I’ve developed drafts of pitch letters and even tried out a few on various agents. Polite turn-downs, generally. But rejection is 99.9 percent of this business. And it is a business. Don’t ever think that book publishing is anything but a business.
So I read, study, ponder and write. I developed a whole series of ideas based on the first two manuscripts, and could continue the saga through several books. I’ve written extended treatments of all of them.
Lately, I’ve been working on a completely different manuscript from the earlier ones. It’s a contemporary novel about a family that’s torn apart and then gradually brought back together, at least partially, in spite of awful circumstances. The catalyst is a child. The characters have names like Sam, Danny, Rafe and Joanna.
Joanna didn’t start out as a main character. In fact, she wasn’t even supposed to be a character. But she showed up at a Christmas tree lot, and I had to do something with her, because she wouldn’t go away. She’s now become a major character in the story, and a major part of the story. I had to go back and rewrite stuff to accommodate her, but not much, as it turned out. It was if the story had been waiting for her.
Sam, on the other hand, was the main character from the time the idea of the novel first entered my head. And he still is. But he’s gotten deeper and more complex than he started out. He’s picked up a kind of clipped accent. He became a carpenter. Through no fault of his own, he has a history that’s horrible and unjust, one that is never explicit and only imagined, but more real for the imagining.
There was another character who played a major role, and represented a whole section of the story. But then it made more sense to remove her and let the reader imagine what happened. She’s real, but she exists only in the reader’s (and writer’s) imagination now.
Interesting how the writing process works.
I’m about two thirds of the way to completion. I define completion of the novel the way the agents and publishers do – word count between 80,000 and 100,000. I’ve got about 62,000 words done. I know how it ends; I know what I have left to write.
This is the one I’m going to get aggressive with marketing to agents and publishers.
Sunday, June 21, 2009
The Hush Puppies Box - Part 3
The remaining memories my father placed in the Hush Puppies box date from the late 1940s to the mid-1950s. Of note is a photo of a scene from the play “Bus Stop” by William Inge – a production at a little theater company in New Orleans, probably about 1957. Look closely at the actors, and you see the bus driver standing by the counter at the café.
The bus driver is my father. My father was an actor in a play. And this wasn’t the only one.
When I was young, I can remember my parents taking me to see plays at little theater companies. The last one was “The Music Man,” staged when I was 8. I remember it because I was in third grade and had accidentally taken home a textbook that was supposed to stay in the classroom. And I was horrified, certain I was to meet my doom when I arrived at school the next day. It hung over me all through the play.
That was the last play my parents attended. My younger brother was born two years later; my father was caught up in his printing business (we wouldn’t see him for days, sometimes; he’d be gone in the morning before I got up for school and home after I’d gone to bed at night). But there was a period in which my parents enjoyed theater.
The Hush Puppies box also contained a March 1955 copy of The Fisherman magazine. Before he started his printing business, my father worked as a ciculation manager for a publishing company in New Orleans that printed magazines like Work Boat and Shrimp Boat and Southern Bottler – trade publications for various industries and associations. He traveled (by train) to conventions and trade shows all over the country. There are a couple of photographs of my father at trade shows, and he looks so much like my younger brother that it’s startling.
A feature story in The Fisherman is about fishing for croakers. One of the four fishermen is my father. Another is a long-time friend of my father who died some years after he did; they worked together at the publishing company. A third is the man who with his wife founded the Bon Ton Restaurant, still on Magazine Street in downtown New Orleans (and still a where the locals like to eat; tourists rarely hear about it, like other well kept secrets in the city).
The interesting thing (to me) about this story is that my father hated to fish. Absolutely hated it. He was drawing upon some of his acting ability to get through that story, and probably had to do it because of the company he worked for.
But he liked going to trade shows. Once, and this is likely my earliest memory of my father, he came home from a trip to New York City with a jack-in-the-box for me. You turned the handle, and the box played Pop Goes the Weasel, a clown’s head popping out when the music reached the “Pop.” I remember sitting on the living room floor as he came in the front door. He was wearing an overcoat (so it must have been wintertime; he had worn it in New York and was still wearing it when he came home). If I have the time right, I would have been about 3 ½ years old, possibly a bit younger.
The shoebox contained little else. It’s as if the memories stopped sometime in the 1950s. Perhaps he got too busy. But he never placed anything else in the Hush Puppies shoebox.
I added a few things to the shoebox, things connected to my father, like a photo of me and my mother. I was about 2; she would have been 30. With her 1953 hair-do, she looks elegant. She always looked elegant in her photos, especially those from the 1950s. I also added my father’s business card for his printing business – Direct Mail Enterprises, Inc. My mother never called it Direct Mail or the office or even the business; she always, always referred to it by its current address – 424 Gravier, or 501 Baronne – streets in downtown New Orleans. “Where’s Dad?” I’d ask. “424 Gravier,” she’d reply. There was a lot packed into that short response, far more than a child, even a teenager, could understand.
And I added his driver’s license. His last one. The one he had in his wallet when he died of a massive stroke in 1987. Driver license photos are notoriously bad, but he doesn’t look well in the photo.
We weren’t close, my father and I. My childhood coincided with “424 Gravier” and a lot of time was lost, or never made. I remember spending part of a Saturday with him in New Orleans’ French Quarter and having my picture drawn in pastel. It’s dated February 1960; the artist’s name is Lee Stallings. It would have been near the time of "The Music Man" production. I remember it because time spent with my father was rare, and my parents had had a fight about it that morning – he needed to go to the office, yet he had promised to take me to the French Quarter. My mother won the argument. But we all lost.
I don’t doubt that he loved me, my brothers and my half-sister. It was difficult for him to show it, but it was something common across my parents’ generation. Surviving a depression, even if it killed your dreams; surviving a war; surviving two divorces before he met my mother – experiences like that can keep a lot of emotions permanently submerged.
Last year, I bought an archive-quality box with acid-free wrapping paper, and emptied the Hush Puppies box. There was a lot of sentimental value in the shoebox itself, but the contents needed better storage. The Young family Bible, dating from the 1840s, went into another archival box.
I’ve only added one thing since then. A Caravelle wrist watch, circa 1964. My first watch, a present from my parents. The band has a slight break, but the watch still works.
Like the memories.
The bus driver is my father. My father was an actor in a play. And this wasn’t the only one.
When I was young, I can remember my parents taking me to see plays at little theater companies. The last one was “The Music Man,” staged when I was 8. I remember it because I was in third grade and had accidentally taken home a textbook that was supposed to stay in the classroom. And I was horrified, certain I was to meet my doom when I arrived at school the next day. It hung over me all through the play.
That was the last play my parents attended. My younger brother was born two years later; my father was caught up in his printing business (we wouldn’t see him for days, sometimes; he’d be gone in the morning before I got up for school and home after I’d gone to bed at night). But there was a period in which my parents enjoyed theater.
The Hush Puppies box also contained a March 1955 copy of The Fisherman magazine. Before he started his printing business, my father worked as a ciculation manager for a publishing company in New Orleans that printed magazines like Work Boat and Shrimp Boat and Southern Bottler – trade publications for various industries and associations. He traveled (by train) to conventions and trade shows all over the country. There are a couple of photographs of my father at trade shows, and he looks so much like my younger brother that it’s startling.
A feature story in The Fisherman is about fishing for croakers. One of the four fishermen is my father. Another is a long-time friend of my father who died some years after he did; they worked together at the publishing company. A third is the man who with his wife founded the Bon Ton Restaurant, still on Magazine Street in downtown New Orleans (and still a where the locals like to eat; tourists rarely hear about it, like other well kept secrets in the city).
The interesting thing (to me) about this story is that my father hated to fish. Absolutely hated it. He was drawing upon some of his acting ability to get through that story, and probably had to do it because of the company he worked for.
But he liked going to trade shows. Once, and this is likely my earliest memory of my father, he came home from a trip to New York City with a jack-in-the-box for me. You turned the handle, and the box played Pop Goes the Weasel, a clown’s head popping out when the music reached the “Pop.” I remember sitting on the living room floor as he came in the front door. He was wearing an overcoat (so it must have been wintertime; he had worn it in New York and was still wearing it when he came home). If I have the time right, I would have been about 3 ½ years old, possibly a bit younger.
The shoebox contained little else. It’s as if the memories stopped sometime in the 1950s. Perhaps he got too busy. But he never placed anything else in the Hush Puppies shoebox.
I added a few things to the shoebox, things connected to my father, like a photo of me and my mother. I was about 2; she would have been 30. With her 1953 hair-do, she looks elegant. She always looked elegant in her photos, especially those from the 1950s. I also added my father’s business card for his printing business – Direct Mail Enterprises, Inc. My mother never called it Direct Mail or the office or even the business; she always, always referred to it by its current address – 424 Gravier, or 501 Baronne – streets in downtown New Orleans. “Where’s Dad?” I’d ask. “424 Gravier,” she’d reply. There was a lot packed into that short response, far more than a child, even a teenager, could understand.
And I added his driver’s license. His last one. The one he had in his wallet when he died of a massive stroke in 1987. Driver license photos are notoriously bad, but he doesn’t look well in the photo.
We weren’t close, my father and I. My childhood coincided with “424 Gravier” and a lot of time was lost, or never made. I remember spending part of a Saturday with him in New Orleans’ French Quarter and having my picture drawn in pastel. It’s dated February 1960; the artist’s name is Lee Stallings. It would have been near the time of "The Music Man" production. I remember it because time spent with my father was rare, and my parents had had a fight about it that morning – he needed to go to the office, yet he had promised to take me to the French Quarter. My mother won the argument. But we all lost.
I don’t doubt that he loved me, my brothers and my half-sister. It was difficult for him to show it, but it was something common across my parents’ generation. Surviving a depression, even if it killed your dreams; surviving a war; surviving two divorces before he met my mother – experiences like that can keep a lot of emotions permanently submerged.
Last year, I bought an archive-quality box with acid-free wrapping paper, and emptied the Hush Puppies box. There was a lot of sentimental value in the shoebox itself, but the contents needed better storage. The Young family Bible, dating from the 1840s, went into another archival box.
I’ve only added one thing since then. A Caravelle wrist watch, circa 1964. My first watch, a present from my parents. The band has a slight break, but the watch still works.
Like the memories.
Saturday, June 20, 2009
The Hush Puppies Box -- Part 2
By far, the greatest number of items in my father’s Hush Puppies box came from World War II. He joined the Navy fairly late in the war – early 1944. He once explained the reason – his parents didn’t want him to go. They convinced him to use the “only son” deferral until he couldn’t stand it any longer. He enlisted and then told them.
He was eventually assigned to the USS Pondera as part of the original crew. The shoebox contained a “Plank Owner’s Certificate” identifying him as one of the originals. Seeing this as a child, I was more impressed by the topless mermaids framing the certificate and the drawing in the center of a city being bombed as ships stream toward it. The caption reads “Destination Tokyo!”
What I missed was the rank designation after his name – “S2c(RdM).” Radar Man, Second Class. He completed radar operating training at the Naval Training School in Point Loma (San Diego) on July 4, 1944. That certificate was in the shoebox, too, signed by Captain (Ret.) E.L. Vanderloot, along with the small New Testament of the Bible given to all servicemen. My father received his on April 30, 1944, from the chaplain at the Naval Training Center, M. DeWitt Safford.
Shortly after becoming a radar man, he was assigned to the Pondera and shipped out. There is a photo album entitled Shipmates. It contains several pictures of the first stop out from California – Hawaii. The photos are small, black and white shots that appear to be ones he bought and wrote captions for on the back. But there's also one of my father in his Navy uniform, standing against a backdrop of trees and bushes. He's smiling, and he's skinny. I never knew him to be skinny, yet there's the evidence.
The album also contains the names of five shipmates, written in my father’s fine handwriting: Michael Pania of Chicago, Ill.; Virgil Coon of Pennyton, Texas; James Orand of Marfa, Texas; Richard Weir of Fremont, Nebraska; and Harlan Haas of Victoria, Texas. These were the five he was closest to, the ones whose names and hometowns he wrote down, yet he never talked about them. The Greatest Generation was also the Silent Generation.
There is a one-page, typed “Radar Security Watch List” covering the dates from Nov. 26 to 29, 1944. It’s a schedule of who is on watch duty, typed by the radar officer, Ensign B.J. Chartier. The watches were to be secured when the ship left the dock, and they “are to be stood with loaded pistol.” My father’s name is listed for 0700-1200 on Nov. 27 and 2400 to 0700 on Nov. 29.
There were a gaggle of loose photos as well, showing other places the Pondera docked – Manila, Hong Kong and Shanghai. These photos as well look like commercial or tourist photos that one might buy.
Judging by number of photos and artifacts, the Philippines seemed to have made the greatest impression on him. Or it may have been the first international stop for the young man from Shreveport. There is a bracelet made of Philippine coins, a knife in its leather sheaf, a dried seahorse, and one item too large for the shoebox – a small carved chest, with a lock and key. The lock fell off at some point – I never saw it attached to the chest but always inside of it. The box now sits on my bookshelf, close to one other artifact my father bought in Shanghai – a three-legged, brass Chinese wedding cup.
There are other items: a membership card for the Order of the Golden Dragon, given for crossing the equator; an official discharge letter from Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, dated February 1946; and the Durham Duplex straight razor that he used to shave (portable and compact, with a folding handle).
For me, the most intriguing memory from the shoebox is a printed newsletter, The Attack. It’s the ship’s newsletter, Vol. 1, No. 1 (and possibly the only edition published; who would have time to do a newsletter once the ship moved into the war theater?). It announces the official commissioning of the Pondera and includes profiles of the captain, Lawrence J. Hasse, and the executive officer, L.M. Fabian. The back page lists the crew, and my father’s name is at the very end (the curse of alphabetical order). He’s listed on the masthead as the circulation manager – a nod to the job he left behind at the Shreveport Journal. But he also wrote one of the stories – about the ship being named for Pondera County, Montana, which was being honored for all the work done in war bond drives.
My father was a writer.
He was eventually assigned to the USS Pondera as part of the original crew. The shoebox contained a “Plank Owner’s Certificate” identifying him as one of the originals. Seeing this as a child, I was more impressed by the topless mermaids framing the certificate and the drawing in the center of a city being bombed as ships stream toward it. The caption reads “Destination Tokyo!”
What I missed was the rank designation after his name – “S2c(RdM).” Radar Man, Second Class. He completed radar operating training at the Naval Training School in Point Loma (San Diego) on July 4, 1944. That certificate was in the shoebox, too, signed by Captain (Ret.) E.L. Vanderloot, along with the small New Testament of the Bible given to all servicemen. My father received his on April 30, 1944, from the chaplain at the Naval Training Center, M. DeWitt Safford.
Shortly after becoming a radar man, he was assigned to the Pondera and shipped out. There is a photo album entitled Shipmates. It contains several pictures of the first stop out from California – Hawaii. The photos are small, black and white shots that appear to be ones he bought and wrote captions for on the back. But there's also one of my father in his Navy uniform, standing against a backdrop of trees and bushes. He's smiling, and he's skinny. I never knew him to be skinny, yet there's the evidence.
The album also contains the names of five shipmates, written in my father’s fine handwriting: Michael Pania of Chicago, Ill.; Virgil Coon of Pennyton, Texas; James Orand of Marfa, Texas; Richard Weir of Fremont, Nebraska; and Harlan Haas of Victoria, Texas. These were the five he was closest to, the ones whose names and hometowns he wrote down, yet he never talked about them. The Greatest Generation was also the Silent Generation.
There is a one-page, typed “Radar Security Watch List” covering the dates from Nov. 26 to 29, 1944. It’s a schedule of who is on watch duty, typed by the radar officer, Ensign B.J. Chartier. The watches were to be secured when the ship left the dock, and they “are to be stood with loaded pistol.” My father’s name is listed for 0700-1200 on Nov. 27 and 2400 to 0700 on Nov. 29.
There were a gaggle of loose photos as well, showing other places the Pondera docked – Manila, Hong Kong and Shanghai. These photos as well look like commercial or tourist photos that one might buy.
Judging by number of photos and artifacts, the Philippines seemed to have made the greatest impression on him. Or it may have been the first international stop for the young man from Shreveport. There is a bracelet made of Philippine coins, a knife in its leather sheaf, a dried seahorse, and one item too large for the shoebox – a small carved chest, with a lock and key. The lock fell off at some point – I never saw it attached to the chest but always inside of it. The box now sits on my bookshelf, close to one other artifact my father bought in Shanghai – a three-legged, brass Chinese wedding cup.
There are other items: a membership card for the Order of the Golden Dragon, given for crossing the equator; an official discharge letter from Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, dated February 1946; and the Durham Duplex straight razor that he used to shave (portable and compact, with a folding handle).
For me, the most intriguing memory from the shoebox is a printed newsletter, The Attack. It’s the ship’s newsletter, Vol. 1, No. 1 (and possibly the only edition published; who would have time to do a newsletter once the ship moved into the war theater?). It announces the official commissioning of the Pondera and includes profiles of the captain, Lawrence J. Hasse, and the executive officer, L.M. Fabian. The back page lists the crew, and my father’s name is at the very end (the curse of alphabetical order). He’s listed on the masthead as the circulation manager – a nod to the job he left behind at the Shreveport Journal. But he also wrote one of the stories – about the ship being named for Pondera County, Montana, which was being honored for all the work done in war bond drives.
My father was a writer.
Friday, June 19, 2009
The Hush Puppies Box - Part 1
I always called it "The Hush Puppies Box," because that's what it was -- a shoebox with a photo of the iconic bassett hound on the top. But what was inside wasn't shoes. Instead, the box contained artifacts of a life, as if everything about a person could be contained in something the size of a shoebox. Artifacts of a life. My father's life. He kept treasures in this shoebox.
The Hush Puppies Box disappeared by design a year ago or so, replaced by a proper, archives-quality storage box. The jumble of articles has been replaced by each item being carefully wrapped in acid-free paper or, in one case (a knife in a sheath from the Philippines), a silversmith's cloth.
He was born in 1916 in Jena, Louisiana. He had three sisters, all also born in Jena. A fourth sister died in childhood -- a vastly more common occurrence then than it is now. His father had been a land surveyor, at a time when you didn't need much training to do that. He had landed in Jena with his surveying crew, and stayed at a boardinghouse owned by my tobacco-chewing great-grandmother. Her 16-year-old daughter worked there, too. My grandfather was 26 at the time. They would be married for almost 46 years.
My father had been nameless for three months after his birth, because my grandparents couldn't agree on a name. My grandmother finally came up with "Glynn," reflecting either some Welsh heritage or the name of the county in Georgia rumored to be where the family landed from England. "Landed" might be too gentrified a word. "Dumped with the rest of the inmates from the debtors prisons" might be more accurate, if less romantic.
After a few years in Jena, the family moved to Shreveport, where my grandfather operated a small grocery store. Shreveport in the 1920s and 1930s (and well beyond) was a highly structured class society. My father's family fell into the part of the structure that might be called "lower middle class," a group that nearly fell out of the structure with the Great Depression. My father started Byrd High School in Shreveport in 1929 and graduated in 1933, likely the darkest year of the Depression. That he stayed in high school was nothing short of a miracle. And a dream.
He clung to this dream in high school, even as economic conditions worsened. The dream was this: he wanted to be a doctor. And he took Latin, which was something aspiring doctors did back then. But at Byrd High School, Latin was a class for the wealthy kids -- and here was this boy from the wrong side of the tracks memorizing amo, amat, amare with the rest of his class.
For Thanksgiving one year, the Latin classes organized a food basket drive for poor families. The baskets were delivered to every house on the block where my father lived.
Including his.
I can't even imagine what he must have felt. But the memory remained with him for the rest of his life.
The Depression ended the dream of college and medical school. After high school, my father went to work in the only business hiring at the time -- the oil business in East Texas. It was a dirty and often dangerous business. And there was this wannabe doctor becoming a real-life roughneck.
From the oilfields, he got a slightly better but still potentially dangerous job with the Shreveport Fire Department, helped, no doubt, by one of his brothers-in-law who worked for the department and would eventually become Shreveport's assistant fire chief. He left the Fire Department and joined the circulation department of the Shreveport Journal. This was a time when radical career changes seemed to be the norm, at least for my father. He stayed with the Journal for several years, even through the early period of World War II. And then he joined the Navy.
From this early period of my father's life, the Hush Puppies box contained only three items.
One is a 1941 copy of his birth certificate from 1916. His parents' names were James Lafayette Young and Martha Ann Valentine.
The second item was a big metal souvenir penny from Galveston Beach, a remembrance of a family vacation from 1921 when my father was five. The self-described "Lucky Penny" is dark gray, with an Indian head on one side and the inscription "Souvenir Penny of Galveston, Tex." on the other. My grandfather bought this for my father, and he treasured it, as much for the souvenir value as for the fact his father had bought it for him. More than 40 years later, his own family would take the same vacation, a pilgrimage of sorts to one of the happiest memories he had as a child. Galveston Beach was a lot dirtier and in no way resembled the memory of that vacation in 1921, but my father loved it anyway. Nothing could take away the magic of the Lucky Penny.
The third item was my grandfather's pocket watch. The crystal is cracked; the watch stopped at 5:25. On the back is a flowered engraving surrounding a small shield. Inside the shield is a "Y" for Young. The one time I can remember my father showing me the watch, he said it was one of his earliest memories of his father -- pulling the watch out of his pants pocket to check the time.
It's hard for me to think of my father as a child. Except when I hold the Lucky Penny and look at the pocket watch.
The Hush Puppies Box disappeared by design a year ago or so, replaced by a proper, archives-quality storage box. The jumble of articles has been replaced by each item being carefully wrapped in acid-free paper or, in one case (a knife in a sheath from the Philippines), a silversmith's cloth.
He was born in 1916 in Jena, Louisiana. He had three sisters, all also born in Jena. A fourth sister died in childhood -- a vastly more common occurrence then than it is now. His father had been a land surveyor, at a time when you didn't need much training to do that. He had landed in Jena with his surveying crew, and stayed at a boardinghouse owned by my tobacco-chewing great-grandmother. Her 16-year-old daughter worked there, too. My grandfather was 26 at the time. They would be married for almost 46 years.
My father had been nameless for three months after his birth, because my grandparents couldn't agree on a name. My grandmother finally came up with "Glynn," reflecting either some Welsh heritage or the name of the county in Georgia rumored to be where the family landed from England. "Landed" might be too gentrified a word. "Dumped with the rest of the inmates from the debtors prisons" might be more accurate, if less romantic.
After a few years in Jena, the family moved to Shreveport, where my grandfather operated a small grocery store. Shreveport in the 1920s and 1930s (and well beyond) was a highly structured class society. My father's family fell into the part of the structure that might be called "lower middle class," a group that nearly fell out of the structure with the Great Depression. My father started Byrd High School in Shreveport in 1929 and graduated in 1933, likely the darkest year of the Depression. That he stayed in high school was nothing short of a miracle. And a dream.
He clung to this dream in high school, even as economic conditions worsened. The dream was this: he wanted to be a doctor. And he took Latin, which was something aspiring doctors did back then. But at Byrd High School, Latin was a class for the wealthy kids -- and here was this boy from the wrong side of the tracks memorizing amo, amat, amare with the rest of his class.
For Thanksgiving one year, the Latin classes organized a food basket drive for poor families. The baskets were delivered to every house on the block where my father lived.
Including his.
I can't even imagine what he must have felt. But the memory remained with him for the rest of his life.
The Depression ended the dream of college and medical school. After high school, my father went to work in the only business hiring at the time -- the oil business in East Texas. It was a dirty and often dangerous business. And there was this wannabe doctor becoming a real-life roughneck.
From the oilfields, he got a slightly better but still potentially dangerous job with the Shreveport Fire Department, helped, no doubt, by one of his brothers-in-law who worked for the department and would eventually become Shreveport's assistant fire chief. He left the Fire Department and joined the circulation department of the Shreveport Journal. This was a time when radical career changes seemed to be the norm, at least for my father. He stayed with the Journal for several years, even through the early period of World War II. And then he joined the Navy.
From this early period of my father's life, the Hush Puppies box contained only three items.
One is a 1941 copy of his birth certificate from 1916. His parents' names were James Lafayette Young and Martha Ann Valentine.
The second item was a big metal souvenir penny from Galveston Beach, a remembrance of a family vacation from 1921 when my father was five. The self-described "Lucky Penny" is dark gray, with an Indian head on one side and the inscription "Souvenir Penny of Galveston, Tex." on the other. My grandfather bought this for my father, and he treasured it, as much for the souvenir value as for the fact his father had bought it for him. More than 40 years later, his own family would take the same vacation, a pilgrimage of sorts to one of the happiest memories he had as a child. Galveston Beach was a lot dirtier and in no way resembled the memory of that vacation in 1921, but my father loved it anyway. Nothing could take away the magic of the Lucky Penny.
The third item was my grandfather's pocket watch. The crystal is cracked; the watch stopped at 5:25. On the back is a flowered engraving surrounding a small shield. Inside the shield is a "Y" for Young. The one time I can remember my father showing me the watch, he said it was one of his earliest memories of his father -- pulling the watch out of his pants pocket to check the time.
It's hard for me to think of my father as a child. Except when I hold the Lucky Penny and look at the pocket watch.
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