Author Archives: Larry F. Sommers

05.12.26
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Out of the Ether

As a 1960s teen in Kenosha, Wisconsin, I took refuge in voices from the night. 

The glow of vacuum tubes. Image by Christopher Schirner. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

The warm vacuum tubes in my small radio cast gleams through vents in the radio’s back, orangeing up the wall by my bed, as I harkened to heralds of tranquility, plucked from the ether, lulling me to sleep. 

Life was fraught: exacting teachers at school, crabby parents at home, classmates who always seemed to be cooler, more knowing, more confident—some actively hostile and others petty or dismissive. My days and evenings could be a mass of anxiety, hopped up by juke jive urging me to shake, rattle, and roll, consult my friend the witch doctor, and never dare step on anyone’s blue suede shoes. 

Then there was homework, a grind all its own. By ten o’clock, I was wrung out, ready for seductive sounds from the ether. 

“Ether?” I hear you cry. “What’s with all this ether, O New Favorite Writer? Are you telling us you were under anesthesia?”

Poster for 2014 scifi film The Came from the Ether. Fair use.

Not that kind of ether. Were I sedated, how could I be soothed any further by sounds coming from my radio? 

No, Gentle Reader. “Ether” is a long-discredited theory of physics that is still quite useful in talking about electromagnetic radiation. Radio, television, and radar travel through space as waves. But how can they travel if there is nothing to wave? In the ocean, waves are made of water. But in the wide reaches of the cosmos, there is only emptiness. So what is it, exactly, that waves? Simple: The ether, a nonsubstantial, non-existent substance that is everywhere but not anywhere. Radio waves ride it.

Our ether today is pierced by quadrigazillions of impulses careening around, each in its own tidy compartment, apt for reception if only one has the right equipment. It’s conceivable that all these invisible things lacing through our bodies at the speed of light might be unbalancing us.

But in those days of which I speak, every human on the planet did not have a pocketable telephone-cum-data center; there were only thirteen TV channels; and geosynchronous satellites blanketing the earth with their spoor existed only in the fevered imagination of Arthur C. Clarke. Most of what burdened the ether was just broadcast, amateur, and military radio signals, a bit of commercial TV, aviation-related radar, and telephone-related microwaves. Hardly anything at all.

Jay Andres. Photo from Speakingofradio.com. Fair use.

It was not too hard to pick out the dulcet tones of Jay Andres coming out of Chicago with “Music Till Dawn” on WBBM radio. Jay was urbane yet intimate. His voice conveyed friendliness with a kind of relaxed sophistication. He strung semi-classical, soft pop, and light jazz music together around loose verbal themes expounded with elegance. From time to time he spoke of the professional standards and sterling safety record of his sponsor, American Airlines. Before I ever took my first commercial flight, I was convinced down to my boot-tops that American was the plane to fly.

John Doremus. Behindthevoiceactors.com. Fair use.

The lilting, stringy, romance-tinged music, combined with the savoir-faire of our knowing host, helped me go into an untroubled, relaxing sleep.

Much the same could be said for John Doremus, with “Patterns in Music” on WMAQ. The same kind of thing, but a different voice—maybe a bit deeper and smoother than Jay’s, not quite as friendly and informal, but still a deep comfort. Worth listening to any night. 

These troubadors of the Midwestern ether played Tin Pan Alley standards, Broadway tunes, and a smattering of jazz—always in mellifluous instrumental renditions. They were high-grade professional announcers from radio’s heyday, whose plummy voices gave them large fan bases of their own. 

Franklyn MacCormack. From Discogs.com. Fair use.

You may think these late-night mood music programs were an odd attraction for a teenaged boy, but all I can say is, I liked them. They plucked chords in my soul. And if Jay Andres and John Doremus offered a trite or platitudinous form of radio entertainment—one could always tune to WGN and get the full treatment in the form of Franklyn MacCormack and “The All-Night Meister Brau Showcase.” 

MacCormack interspersed the usual tunes with romantic—nay, schmaltzy—poetry readings. His standard opening was: “Why do I love you? I love you not only for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you. . . ” intoned over Billy Vaughn’s weeping strings playing “Melody of Love.”  Franklyn purveyed reminiscences of old-time entertainers like Stoopnagle and Budd, as well as personal impressions of summer days at Wisconsin Dells as a guest of Tommy Bartlett. A perennial theme was the virtues of Meister Brau, a working-man’s beer from Chicago’s Peter Hand Brewing Company. “Meister Brau gives you more of what you drink beer for,” Franklyn would say. “It only tastes expensive.” 

An ad for Meister Brau. Public domain.

(Franklyn MacCormack was only his radio name, by the way. His real birth name was–get this–Franklin McCormick.)

While Jay Andres combined friendship with sophistication, and John Doremus delivered straight-from-the-shoulder baritone authority, Franklyn MacCormack sounded like a hale fellow well met. You could imagine him swilling a glass or two of his sponsor’s product while spinning records and looking up drippy poems to read. 

They were competitors, but all-night radio in Chicagoland was a small fraternity. A few months after MacCormack’s death in 1971, John Doremus took over his nocturnal duties at WGN, sponsored now by a savings bank, rather than a beer company. What listener would want to buy a round of suds for the buttoned-down Doremus?

I’m sure I was not the only teenaged boy listening to these soporific all-night deejays. Some of my college friends shared fond memories of them as well. In fact, at our college radio station, there was a kind of competition among several of us to see who could be the best Franklyn MacCormack. I did a program called “Music in the Night,” and—guess what?—I read poetry.

If you were not there, Dear Reader, you don’t know about it, but there was a sort of magic in the sounds and impressions that reached us late at night over the lightly-trod ether of the 1960s. Ethereal? Maybe. A lifeline? Definitely.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

05.05.26
by

De Equis

An event this weekend has got me thinking about horses. 

The moment before the surprise: Golden Tempo, far left, moves up from outside to join the pack in the home stretch. Courier Journal photo by Matt Stone. Fair use.

Golden Tempo, a 23-to-1 longshot colt, won the Kentucky Derby. He came from dead last at the far turn, outrunning seventeen other horses—including half a dozen who may have thought they were contending for the lead—to win by a neck. It was a breathtaking performance.

For some reason, the name Silky Sullivan came to mind. 

Silky Who?

Silky Sullivan (1955-1977) was a racehorse who became famous, in the days of my youth, for starting slow and then gobbling up incredible distances to win races. “Called the ‘California Comet’ and often ridden by Hall of Fame jockey Willie Shoemaker, Silky Sullivan once fell 41 lengths behind the field yet still won by three lengths, running the last quarter in 22 seconds,” according to Wikipedia. That was only one of many come-from-far-behind victories. “Of his 27 career starts, he was in the money 18 times with 12 wins, 1 place, and 5 shows.”

Silky Sullivan became a household word. So much so that if somebody was the last arrival at a party or meeting, somebody else might call, “Here comes Silky Sullivan!”

Silky Sullivan on his fourth birthday, with new owner Kjell Qvale. Public Domain.

As a three-year-old, in March 1958, Silky won the Santa Anita Derby by three-and-a-half lengths after being 26 lengths behind. He was favored to win the Kentucky Derby two months later, but on that occasion, he made “only a brief and ineffectual bid,” losing to co-favorite Tim Tam. When his racing days were over, he was purchased and cared for by horse lover Kjell Qvale.

“There was no horse like him,” said Qvale. “Silky was a person, a unique person, and I miss him.”

I am no expert on horses. Like most people these days, I did not grow up around them, never learned to ride, and have no idea how to care for a horse. Up close, I am timid of them, because they are so big. But there is something real and compelling about a horse, at once majestic and homely. 

A Horsey World

Only a few generations back, most folks knew quite a bit about horses—how to handle them, what they needed, what they could do. 

That was essential knowledge from the time horses were domesticated, about four thousand years ago, until the invention of the motor car when my grandparents were young. Nowadays, however, unless you’re an Amish farmer, you have to go considerably out of your way to own, ride, drive, or care for horses. 

Up through about the end of the nineteenth century, most people were farmers, and farmers used horses for all sorts of things. Not only were they ridden—they pulled wagons, sleighs, plows, and early-generation farming machines such as McCormick’s reapers. 

Young Clydesdales showing off their muscles. Photo by Bev Sykes, licensed under CC-BY-2.0. 

Regular plowing could be done by regular horses, but if you had heavy sod to break and did not have oxen to pull the breaking plow, you needed draft horses—outsize, heavily-built steeds whose muscles had muscles. The best-known breeds of draft horses were Belgians, Clydesdales, and Percherons. But it’s only in the past two to three hundred years that most modern horse types emerged through selective breeding. Before that, a horse was a horse (of course, of course!). 

Horses were also used for purposes other than farming. They pulled delivery wagons and streetcars. City dwellers might keep a horse or two to pull a buggy for running about town.

U.S. Army soldiers load horses into boxcar, World War I. U.S. Army Transporation Museum. Fair use.

The Army used horses—lots of them. A million and a half horses and mules are estimated to have died in the U.S. Civil War—two or three times the human death toll. They continued in use, for combat and for transporting men and supplies, through World War II. French boxcars in World War I were stenciled with the legend, “40/8,” to show they could hold forty men or eight horses. 

Many military leaders were horsemen—notably, General Ulysses S. Grant. Grant was not only a rider par excellence, he had a special affinity with equine ways from childhood on. Assigned as a quartermaster during the Mexican-American war, Grant decades later confided in his Memoirs, “I am not aware of ever having used a profane expletive in my life; but I would have the charity to excuse those who may have done so, if they were in charge of a train of Mexican pack mules at the time.” 

Speaking of Horses

I often think how the ubiquity of horses, before the twentieth century, has influenced our language. Old-timers like me grew up with expressions like, “Hold your horses,” because older people used those expressions. 

If you don’t know what “hold your horses” means, it’s an appeal to patience, a warning to wait. In other words, cool your jets.

To “saddle up” means you’re getting ready to go. 

Any political or other contest may be described as “a horse race.” 

To be “long in the tooth” means you’re old. It comes from the ancient practice of gauging a horse’s age by the apparent length of its teeth. Horses’ gums recede with age, making the teeth appear longer.

We talk about “harnessing” people’s talents and energies, in the hope of “spurring on” innovation. Unless, of course, we want to “rein it in.”

We rate automobiles and other engines and machines in terms of horsepower. It’s stunning to think how many horses a single car puts out of work. 

We talk of a person being “stubborn as a mule,” though most of us, unlike General Grant, have never needed to motivate a mule to productive effort.

An old term you don’t hear much but that still means something to some people is “come a cropper.” To say “he came a cropper” means he fell off a horse in the most spectacular way, catapulted over its head. But it’s used metaphorically to describe any spectacular failure in life’s endeavors. Why “came a cropper” means that, nobody seems to know exactly. But undeniably it’s a horsey term.

Will all these expressions, and others, be lost in another generation or two? That depends partly on how much longer we’ll have enough cash to fuel our cars.

So you see, Dear Reader—there’s a bright side to everything. That’s just horse sense. 

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

04.21.26
by

Numbers

I’ve been thinking about numbers. Not fancy numbers—just the ones we learned as toddlers.

Photo by Tanya Barrow on Unsplash.

“One” is a word for Unity. Wholeness. Perfection. Singularity. 

Once you say “Two,” you no longer have that perfection. You have traded in Singularity for Companionship. Fellowship. Relation. One is perfect and alone. But with Two, you can do the tango.

You have sacrificed insular perfection and gained a dyadic relationship. 

But note well: Embracing duality opens the door to plurality. 

It is inevitable: As soon as you have Two, Three comes marching in behind it, with a whole host of uninvited guests in its train. There is no end to the complexity you will encounter. You need a special symbol, ⚯, just to represent the embarrassing fact that there is no end. A through Ω no longer cover it. You need ⚯ as well.

I did not invent these ideas, Dear Reader. They have been expressed so often, for so long, that we may suspect they are hardwired into the human mind.

Lao Zi, the Daoist sage, may have had such things in mind when he opened his book, Dao De Jing, as follows: 

Lao Zi riding an ox. Painting by Zhang Lu (1464-1538). Public Domain.

The way which may be spoken of is not the Unchanging Way.

The name that can be named is not the Eternal Name. 

The Nameless is the beginning of Heaven and Earth. 

The named is the mother of the ten thousand things. . . . 

The Nameless is One; as soon as you name something, you have Two. And from these two, the Nameless and the named, come tumbling the myriad of other things.

Numbers are basic to Christianity as well. Long ago, formalizing a theological framework for the newly-acceptable religion, the bishops at the Council of Nicea asserted that God is one, “the Father Almighty, Maker of all things seen and unseen.” 

But also, Jesus Christ is included, being “begotten of the Father, the only-begotten; that is . . . consubstantial with the Father; by whom all things were made, both in heaven and on earth.” 

So that’s two. 

The unique twist of this god-talk, from the first chapter of John’s gospel, is that even though God is two—the Father and the Son—yet the two are still one. Some people might call that mystical.

And, as most folks know, two was not enough. They had to make it three by including the Holy Ghost or Holy Spirit—a being barely mentioned in the original version of the Nicene Creed but given more detail by the First Council of Constantinople a few decades later. So the One became the Three-in-One—a concept that has survived to this day, though never without challenge from dissenters.

Adoration of the Trinity, painting by Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528). Father and Son upper center, with the Holy Spirit as a dove flying above them, and myriad beings surrounding them in adoration.

I do not mention all this, Gentle Reader, to start a theology debate. I only mean to point out the power that these simple numbers—one, two, three—have, and have always had, on our thinking. 

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Soon, Your New Favorite Writer will be eighty-one years old. Now, there’s a number to conjure with. Eighty-one is nine nines. And nine is magical because it’s three threes. The Trinity trined. 

Lao Zi had eighty-one chapters in his little book. One legend says he remained in his mother’s womb for eighty-one years before emerging as a full-grown, wrinkly old philosopher. I do not say this is true. I do say the number “eighty-one” carries a potency in the human mind. 

When a person gets to be eighty-one, he will have learned a few things, if he has been paying attention. But all of them—all the myriad things—come out of those first three numbers. They come from unity, duality, and the further possibility of pluralism. 

These are depths we cannot plumb. We must be content to deal, in our various ways, with all the ten thousand details. But, doing so, we might be relieved to reflect upon occasion that all these things are just extrapolations of more basic themes. 

One, Two, Three . . .  

But may your blessings be myriad, Dear Friend.

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

04.14.26
by

Desiderata

Dear Reader: This is a reposting of a reflection originally posted June 20, 2020. It is as timely now as it was then. In fact, “timeless” would be a better word. Hope you enjoy it.

“Desiderata” is Latin for “things desired.” Often in difficult times, the thing we most desire is peace.

Max Ehrmann. Fair use.

The prolific, inspirational writer Max Ehrmann (1872-1945) of Terre Haute, Indiana, penned a prose poem that was published as “Desiderata” in 1948. It is the only one of his works to achieve enduring fame, and that only after his death. 

For its tone and diction, and because it once appeared in a church publication with the legend, “Old Saint Paul’s Church, Baltimore AD 1692,” it is often assumed to be ancient, maybe even Scriptural in origin. “1692,” however, meant the date of the church’s founding, not of the poem’s writing.

Inspiration

“Desiderata” is neither Biblical nor liturgical nor even very old. But, like Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, it stakes a claim to an authenticity of its own. It swept the nation in 1971, when a voice artist named Les Crane released it as a spoken word recording. That was at the height of our nation’s internal turmoil over Civil Rights and the Vietnam War. The serene, contemplative tone of the piece may have boosted its popularity.

Today we are again in a time of stress and conflict. Perhaps Mr. Ehrmann’s poem will be of some use to you. At least, it constitutes good advice.

Desiderata

Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons. Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story. Avoid loud and aggressive persons; they are vexatious to the spirit.

If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself. Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time. Exercise caution in your business affairs, for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals, and everywhere life is full of heroism.

Love . . . is as perennial as the grass. Photo by Мария Волк on Unsplash.
Do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Photo by Rendiansyah Nugroho on Unsplash.

Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is as perennial as the grass. Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth. Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.

Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

You are a child of the Universe. Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash.

Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be. And whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy. 

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Author

04.07.26
by

Today’s Word: Disintermediate

Do you ever get the feeling that it’s all going down the drain? That indignity piled on absurdity piled on ignominy will soon culminate in the End of Things? That there is simply no hope for humanity? No point in keeping on?

I sometimes feel that way, too. When I do, it’s a sure sign I need to turn away from TV, from social media, from all that clutter. 

I spend time with my grandchildren, who are real people. I take my dog, a living quadruped, for a walk. I feel the air and smell the earth. 

For, Gentle Reader, there are two kinds of things in this world: Real things, and things you witness on screens. 

Fire. Photo by Fir0002, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Real things include soil, water, air, fire.

Cottontail rabbit. Image by Harvey Henkelmann, Public Domain.

Rabbits, automobiles, baseballs, muffins.

A baseball. Image by Httackne, licensed under CC-BY-SA-4.0.

Fir trees, steel beams, clam chowder, toothache.

Real things are not all wonderful. But they are actual. They are authentic.

Screen things—media things—are stories, rumors, innuendoes, screeds. They are programs, livestreams, commercial announcements, candidate debates. They are strategies. They are  memes. They are panics. They are the news of the day. 

They may have some reality behind them, but not much of it. And what there is is curated, coiffed, filtered, teased, slanted. It is not the kind of reality that is in touch with your reality. It comes from a fabricated place. It comes via media.

If you’re losing hope, Dear Friend, I have one word for you.

Disintermediate. 

Go out in the real world, one on one. Just you and your experience; no third-party reporters, critics, summarists, AI bots, or commentators. Get rained on, get snowed on, get snowed in. Touch something made by God, not by an influencer. Steep yourself in actuality.

It will restore your confidence: not necessarily confidence in the future, but confidence at least in the solid present. 

“But, O New Favorite Writer,” you say, “even that may be a mirage, in the long run.” 

The long run?  I’m only here for the short run, and it’s getting shorter by the day. 

Stop. Smell the roses. 

This message brought to you by the Maker of Reality, through the medium of Your New Favorite Writer.

Blessings, 

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

03.31.26
by

Crashing Crockery

The life of a Literary Lion is like that of the Spinning Plate Man who used to captivate me from time to time on The Ed Sullivan Show or other TV venues. 

The magic of spinning plates. Photo by Henrikbothe, licensed under CC-BY-SA-4.0. 

Maybe you’ve seen this act, or some version of it: A guy sets dinner plates to spinning on willow rods mounted on a table. Just as he gets them all going, one of the plates loses momentum and starts to wobble, so he has to run over and rev it up again by wiggling the rod. By the time he does that, another plate is about to fall. He dashes hither and yon, frantic to keep all the plates a-spin.

The Payoff, the ultimate satisfaction of our intolerable suspense, is when a plate shatters on the stage floor. Even then, Our Hero is not licked. He takes out a fresh plate and gets it started just before zooming to the far end of the table to keep another from falling. He is the poster boy for dogged perseverance in the face of momentous odds.

And so is the serious writer. 

You must always be working on your new first draft. But you must also critique somebody else’s work; you must post your blog; you must polish a one-page synopsis to summarize your whole book for marketing purposes; you must go to a conference; you must get feedback on your first draft and make revisions; you must go to a craft fair and sell books. 

You dash here and dash there and keep everything going at once. 

But, sometimes, a plate crashes. That’s what happened at this address last week, Dear Reader. 

I failed to post a new blog, so you saw the same post two weeks in a row. 

Here is my mea culpa: I had a medical event the week before. 

On Thursday afternoon, March 19, while working on Major Important Literary Things, I was suddenly swamped by dizziness, lost consciousness, and fell from my chair to the floor. 

Aside from a goose egg on my forehead, I was unharmed. But Google told me to go to the Emergency Room, so I went. They did an EKG, a CAT scan, some stat blood work, and the usual neurological tests but found nothing amiss. 

That in itself was unsettling. Something must have caused this event. So they scheduled some followup tests.

As a result, my life these days is punctuated with trips to high-class medical facilities for different kinds of cardiac monitoring. Also, my wife or a friend must chauffeur me everywhere—because, what if the same thing happened again, while I was driving? 

The results trickle in, day by day, and pool around my feet. Yet so far, no doctor has put them together into a specific diagnosis. That kind of gnosis is hoped for in the near future.

MEANWHILE, Gentle Reader, life goes on. I heard from my highly-trusted advisor, the stellar Christine DeSmet, that she likes my new first draft (working title: Hard Feelings). It’s good that she agrees with me about that. I had hoped she would. It means there are only half a million small improvements that need to be made. You should see it in print in a year or two.

And here, somewhat late, is a new post—flogging this lame excuse, which is all I’ve got in my bag right now. I’ll try to have something better next week, Fair Reader. 

Meanwhile, prayers and all good wishes gratefully accepted.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

03.17.26
by

A Word from Our Sponsor

Dear Reader:

We feel compelled to point out, in the best interests of the Reading Public, that Your New Favorite Author’s complete works are still available at their original cover prices:

The Price of Passage—$26.95 hardcover/$18.95 paperback

Izzy Strikes Gold!—$19.95 hardcover/$14.95 paperback 

In accordance with their ever-increasing value as actual, non-AI books written by a Living American Author whom you know, we were going to raise the prices by at least five dollars per book. However, we ran into the cruel ironies of the Third Book Business.

If we were McGraw-Hill, or Grosset & Dunlap, or one of the other titans of the old book industry of the last century, raising the price would be a no-brainer. The next time we did a print run of, say, 50,000 more copies, we’d naturally print a higher price on the covers. But in today’s book industry, books are printed one by one. That means we can change the cover any time we want, only we have to pay a special set-up charge any time we alter the image stored in the printer’s computer. 

Forget it.

The only reason we mention this is because it means you can still buy these books at the same low price.

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1853: Scandinavian immigrants ANDERS and MARIA meet DANIEL, a young slave fleeing brutal captivity. Will they do their legal duty by turning him in, or defy the laws of their new homeland and risk everything to help him gain freedom? 

It’s an epic tale of America’s heartland, based on the author’s own Norwegian ancestors.

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Izzy Strikes Gold!

1957: Inquisitive 12-year-old IZZY squirms through a small-town childhood, helped and/or hindered by friends such as bombastic Andy Shore, bullying Lyle Haycock, bewitching Irma Ruger, and bewildering Mutt-mutt Corner. 

Rooted in the author’s own 1950s boyhood, it’s a warm-hearted coming-of-age tale, suitable for young readers and their grandparents.

Includes discussion questions and a glossary of 1950s terms.

Order from HenschelHAUS Books, here, or use QR Code:  

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That means, if you should happen to find any intelligence between the covers, you know who put it there.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

03.10.26
by

Liberation Day

It’s hard to describe the emotional punch packed by the simple act of writing “The End.”

It may be a stronger punch for writers of fiction than of nonfiction. When you’re writing nonfiction, there is at least a scheme—a plan, an outline—that you can follow to its inevitable conclusion at, well, you know, the end. 

As a fiction writer, you are somewhere between panic and desire, mired in a bog or lost in a fog, with little sense of how you’ll get to the end. You may not even recognize the end as you stumble past it. You could shoot right on by and write another twenty thousand words looking for a conclusion that is already embedded in the narrative. 

Some novelists breeze through first drafts with panache and confidence. I don’t know any of them, but I’ve heard of some. For me, the first draft is excruciating. Even when I know what I think the story is supposed to be, pulling it out of my strangely mixed conscious/unconscious brain is like the extraction of a whole mouthful of deeply impacted wisdom teeth. 

Once I have finished a first draft, I am liberated. No matter how bad it is, I can go to work and make it better. I love revision. 

All of which is my roundabout way of announcing—Ta-DA!!—I have just written “The End” on the first manuscript of my third novel, working title Hard Feelings. Don’t hold me to that title, Dear Reader. Titles are even harder to write than first drafts. 

But at last, I am delivered of this baby that has been years in its conception and now nearly three years gestating in the womb of my laptop. If it’s a little messy—and let’s face it, all babies are messy at birth—we can get to work cleaning it up. 

I’m shipping it off to the delightful Christine DeSmet for a first take on how much and what kind of work it needs. Her initial skim is like the APGAR score given to newborn babies—a quick check for signs of life. I hope there are some.

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What does all this mean to you, the reader? 

It means you may see—after a few months of author’s revisions and a few more months of publisher’s preparations—a wonderful book you can buy. It may or may not be called Hard Feelings.

It is a book about the soured relationship of two brothers growing up and coming of age in small-town America during the years before the Second World War. The two boy/men, Jag and Harold, have strikingly different journeys through life, and I hope you’ll find them interesting. 

What does it all mean to me, the author? 

It means I’m finally free to start work on my next project—as it happens, a nonfiction treatment of some fascinating bits of church history. I’m familiar with the turf, but additional research will be needed. And once I get that project off to a good start, I’ll circle back and do the fun part of the job on Hard Feelings—revising! As a certain rabbit of literary fame might say, “Don’t throw me in that briar patch, Br’er Fox!”

Br’er Fox throws Br’er Rabbit in the briar patch. Walt Disney Productions. Fair Use.

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You may have noticed that in all this palaver there is no hint that you will have a new book to read anytime soon. If this distresses you, and if you enjoy these weekly ruminations, feel free to order either or both of my previous novels, The Price of Passage and Izzy Strikes Gold!

You’ll find them a delight. 

Until next time, 

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

03.03.26
by

Aunt Bertha, Uncle Harry, and the Register-Mail

My mother’s uncle, Harry Young, was the circulation manager of the Register-Mail, the daily newspaper of Galesburg, Illinois. 

In those days, any city of 35,000, such as Galesburg, and many cities even smaller, had a daily paper—despite the cost and difficulty of printing the news every day.

There was no Internet. Computers were huge machines that took up whole rooms, and only rich corporations could afford one. 

Glen Beck and Betty Snyder program the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer) in 1947 at the Ballistic Research Laboratory in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. U.S. Army photo.

Almost everyone subscribed to the daily paper, giving it the ability to charge good rates for advertising space. 

People got spot news from the radio, had done so for decades. Television was a new thing; most of the channels had an announcer behind a desk, reading news, for 15 minutes at six p.m. But to really get the news, you needed a broadsheet paper like the Register-Mail.

Did I mention, Dear Reader? It was made of paper!

Can you believe, kids used to have to deliver these things by hand? A stack of newspapers, photographed by Daniel R. Blume. Licensed under CC-BY-SA-2.0.

They printed it fresh, with new contents, every day.

Reporters went out into the community, spoke with people, attended meetings, photographed events. Then they came back to the newspaper building—yes, newspapers had buildings—to a place called the newsroom, and pounded out their stories on manual typewriters, the kind with ink ribbons that were struck by metal bars with letters engraved on the end of them. Reporters and other typists had really strong fingers.

The stories rolled out as sheets of typewriter paper and were handed off to copy boys, who carried them to the copy desk, where an editor corrected errors with a blue pencil. Then it was off to the composition room, where skilled eyes and fingers, working from the edited copy, formed a body of type, one line at a time, out of molten lead. 

Sheep on a ranch in Tierra del Fuego, photographed no doubt from the south. Antonio Quintana (book author and copyright holder is Fernando Duran) – Sociedad Explotadora de Tierra del Fuego, 1893-1943.

Sometimes there was blank space left over at the bottom of a column. You couldn’t just press a button to adjust the spacing, so instead you inserted a filler—something like, “Patagonian sheep bear wool only on the southern side” or “Bituminous coal sales increased last year to 370,000 metric tons.”

Through a series of arcane steps, all of these story-bearing type elements came together on a printing press, which impressed the type lines in black ink on long rolls of paper. The newspaper’s large pages—six to eight columns wide—were cut, folded, assembled into a compact publication, and stacked in bundles of fifty or one hundred. 

At this point, Uncle Harry’s people—squads of paperboys and girls plus a few adult drivers for newsstands and rural deliveries—carried the newspapers to the reading public, in time to be read before supper. After supper, they were used to wrap the garbage.

Lots of other people were involved besides those already mentioned—clerks, librarians, stenographers, mechanics, pressmen, and part-time reporters called stringers. A typical small-city daily might give full-time work to dozens of people, and part-time earnings to many more.

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Uncle Harry and Aunt Bertha lived in a small, tidy brick bungalow on West Grove Street. It’s still there, decades later—or at least it was the last time Google drove by.

The Youngs’ house on Grove Street. Google Earth image.

Uncle Harry’s job was a day job, but it didn’t end when he left the Register-Mail building in the afternoon. Sometimes a subscribing household was skipped from the delivery. When they called the newspaper office around suppertime to complain, the call was forwarded to Uncle Harry’s home phone. He always had an extra copy or two in the car. Either before or after supper, he would drive out and make the delivery himself. This was a routine part of his otherwise managerial job. 

Uncle Harry wore a suit and tie to work and wing-tip shoes that he kept highly polished. He made good money and supported himself and Aunt Bertha well. They had no children but lavished attention on their nieces and nephews. 

They belonged to the Lake Bracken Country Club. Not for golf; they didn’t golf. But they loved to fish and spent many fine summer evenings fishing Lake Bracken, either from a boat or from the shore. They ate what they caught.

Uncle Harry broke his leg one time by stepping in a hole at Lake Bracken while carrying a load of fishing gear. Took him a long time to mend, since he was getting older. 

He worked at the Register-Mail until he was too sick to work anymore. He died in his sixties from complications of emphysema, having been a lifelong smoker. Aunt Bertha—a happy, sweet woman who was a favorite of all the nieces and nephews—was devastated. She died soon after, of a broken heart.

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Uncle Harry and Aunt Bertha.

In balmier days, we enjoyed their company. My sister and I were great-niece and great-nephew to them. Uncle Harry had a wry sense of humor and always delivered a laugh line at family gatherings. Aunt Bertha did not work outside the home, and her household chores were not onerous, so she often piled us into her Ford Victoria and took us swimming at Lake Bracken.

There was a large clubhouse that overlooked the swimming beach. The lower story was given over to locker rooms and showers for swimmers. The upper story had a dining room for evening events and a daytime snack bar just off the dining room. It was a swell place, but it burned down years ago and was never replaced. Lake Bracken these days is mostly a golf course and a suburban community. I think there is a small clubhouse there, away from the lakeshore—a nineteeth-hole kind of place.

Times change.

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These days, journals of paper still exist, but they are less relied on. The Register-Mail still delivers a print version six days a week “for a retro feel when consuming the news.” (For example, if you’re a very old person.) But don’t worry—the print subscription includes the eNewspaper as well.

King Harald Bluetooth, right, is baptized by Poppo the monk, around 960 AD, in a relief dated around 1200. Photograph by Anagoria, licensed under CC BY 3.0.

Today we have something called a news cycle, and it is 24/7/365. People pick up information on the fly—through their TV, their laptop, their tablet, their phone. By something called Bluetooth. 

Bluetooth used to be an embarrassing dental condition. After that, it was the name of Norway’s king. Now, it’s a window to the world. 

There’s no longer any need to touch a smeary piece of paper. You can have your content beamed straight into your head. Nobody needs linotype operators anymore. Nobody needs pressmen.

And, frankly, why bother to pay an editor? Fact-checkers? Reporters? Nah. 

Even mere rewrite men are being replaced by Artificial Intelligence. 

More and more, our window to the world is filtered by something people trust precisely because they mistrust their own intelligence.

Uncle Harry might not have a job in today’s world. Aunt Bertha might have to go to work, perhaps as a barrista, and would certainly not have time to take anybody swimming. But that’s okay, because the swimming beach is closed anyhow.

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Look at all we’ve gained. 

Until next time, Dear Reader, blessings be upon you. 

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

02.24.26
by

Archie, what hast thou wrought?

Archibald MacLeish. Public Domain.

Archibald MacLeish was a poet, a playwright, a great figure in American letters. He served as Librarian of Congress during the Second World War and apparently did a bang-up job of it. He won three Pulitzer Prizes—in 1933 and 1953 for books of poetry and in 1959 for a play, J.B.

In 1962, when I was a freshman at Knox College, Mr. MacLeish came to our school to give a speech. At the given hour—11 o’clock on a Tuesday morning, as I recall—I came to Alumni Hall, our massive, neo-romanesque theater, clutching my softback copy of the published script of J.B., which the college bookstore had stocked by the gross to prepare for the playwright’s visit. 

Climbing the front stairs and entering the small second-story lobby, I spied the literary lion in a tweed coat and dark vest, chatting with my English composition professor, Michael Crowell. 

“Mister Sommers!” Crowell boomed. “Come and meet Archibald MacLeish.” 

I stepped up and shook hands with the great man. He was trim and natty, with close-cropped gray hair, a hawklike nose, and dark, intense eyes. 

He looked five times more awake than I. 

I burbled a word or two and held out my book to him. He smiled, uncapped a huge silver fountain pen, and signed the title page in black ink. I thanked him and made a quick escape. I found a seat in the theater, and in due course he made his speech. I don’t remember what he said. Probably something about literature.

That I can no longer locate my autographed copy of J.B. may give you a reasonable estimate of the durability of literary fame.

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I actually did read that play, J.B. It was supposed to be a modern American version of the biblical Book of Job. Not to throw shade on an undeniably fine poet and library leader, nor to quibble with the judgment of a bona fide Pulitzer Prize jury, nonetheless I recall feeling underwhelmed. It seemed to me the best parts of the play were long passages quoted directly from the Bible; the parts that had been rendered into a contemporary American setting were rather mundane by comparison with the scripture from which they sprang. 

These recollections bring us, in a deplorably roundabout manner, to the Book of Job, one of the great works of world literature. Have you read it? It’s easy to find in any standard Bible, tucked right between Esther and Psalms. 

It is a stark fable, a story of undeserved suffering and a seemingly callous God. It holds believers accountable for their faith in a way that no conventional tale could.

Job, the central character, is subjected to immense suffering and loss for no reason he can discern. Instead of giving him an explanation, God re-asserts his Almightiness and draws attention to Job’s creaturehood.

Three Friends Visit Job by Wanda Korzeniowska (Polish, 1874-1939). Public Domain.

In what screenwriting guru Robert McKee would label “an education plot,” Job’s inner landscape is changed—not by anything resembling justice in ordinary human terms but by the simple knowledge that God offers no rational choice except humility.

It’s a thoroughly Jewish answer to the problem of evil. If you feel the resolution of the story unsatisfying, you can hear the unseen narrator’s voice whispering: “Vell, vot did you expect?”

In today’s world, we see evil and injustice seemingly everywhere. The good are punished while the evil prosper. It seems, at times, unbearable.

One almost hates to mention in this regard: It was ever thus. 

There is nothing new about evil. It still stinks. 

We can fight it, but we won’t always win.

As in the days of the Old Testament, we can either cast aspersions at God or admit that the universe God has made is one altogether beyond our imaginations, where justice may have to be measured by divine standards rather than human. 

Archibald MacLeish, wherever you are—I invite you to put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Until next time,

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer