Henry Van Dyke wrote, “London is a man’s town, there’s power in the air. . . .”
Maybe that’s why 177,000 people troop down to Buckingham Palace every morning to see the Changing of the Guard.
Panoply of power: Buckingham Palace. Photo by Chiugoran, licensed under CC-BY-SA-3.0.
What happens, over a period of forty-five minutes: Some guys in red coats and tall black hats perform various ministry-approved silly walks while a couple of bands play brassy songs, some other guys troop through on horseback, and dark-suited policemen in lime yellow day-glow vests yell at the hoi polloi to get down off the fences.
Changing of the Guard, a worm’s-eye view. Photo by Jo Sommers, used by permission.
That’s power.
All these people would be doing other—more sensible—things, were it not for the heady aroma of power emanating from Buckingham Palace. That’s because the king lives there.
The main part of London is chockablock with gargantuan buildings in marble and other heavy stones. The Houses of Parliament stand for tradition and the vox populi. Westminster Abbey weds sanctimony with magisterial authority. The Tower of London has nine hundred years of experience as the enforcement branch. Endless corridors of bureaucratic power stack up along Whitehall.
And it’s all watched over by the unsleeping London Eye.
The London Eye never sleeps. Photo by Diego Delso, delso.photo, License CC-BY-SA.
Even a strong man might get vertigo.
A Chequered Past
Londinium was established about 47 A.D. by the Romans, who knew a thing or two about power. After a brief destruction by the Iceni under Queen Boudica, the city was rebuilt and grew rapidly in subsequent decades.
Under the Romans, “Londinium was an ethnically diverse city with inhabitants from across the Roman Empire, including natives of Britannia, continental Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa,” according to Wikipedia.
This cosmopolitan city was infiltrated and overrun by the Saxons over several centuries’ time, captured by Vikings for a few years, and eventually incorporated into Alfred the Great’s Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia in 886.
The year 1066 saw the introduction of Norman law, customs, and language. The next nine hundred years or so crystallized the existence of a distinct Englishness that spawned a world-wide empire with leaders like Nelson, Wellington, and Churchill.
In the process, “being English”—or even “being British,” a broader label—was distilled into an essentially white and Anglo-Saxon identity.
Then, the World Changed
By the middle of the twentieth century, the British Empire (“Im-paahh,” in Etonian/Oxonian) was impoverished and exhausted. It was hard enough to hold the British Isles together, let alone India, Kenya, and the bloody Irish. The Empire was reduced to a “Commonwealth” of nations sharing a nostalgic attachment.
Natives of Commonwealth and other nations increasingly migrated to London for economic opportunity, and the same thing that has happened to other major cities happened to London as well. It became jumbled up, ethnographically.
When Joelle and I visited in the early 1970s, the typical Londoner was pretty much the man or woman we had seen on our television tubes—a blend of Stanley Holloway, Robert Donat, and Mrs. Miniver. A few Indian restaurants were the only visible outposts of brownness.
Today, fifty years later, London is alive with Britishers of all races, colors, and national origins. Stand on a street corner near Victoria Station, and in ten minutes you will see everybody in the world walk by. London has again become “an ethnically diverse city with inhabitants from” . . . just about everywhere.
This week, I shelved a long-held plan—a bucket list item—because I did not feel confident I could pull it off.
I planned to travel across Ireland, from Dublin to little Foynes on the southwest coast, to visit the Foynes Flying Boat Museum. Uncle Ed was a rookie airline pilot, employed by Pan American Airways, in the golden age of flying boats—the late 1930s and early 1940s.
In those days, airlines like Pan Am were pioneering the concept of transoceanic passenger service, in competition with the big steamship lines. It could take a couple of weeks to cross the Pacific on the proverbial “slow boat to China,” but in one of Pan Am’s magnificent Clippers you could make the trip in three or four days. You had to be willing and able to pay a couple of thousand dollars—an astronomical sum in those days—but you would travel in unrivalled luxury and comfort on a big seaplane called a “flying boat.”
These planes—large, boat-shaped hulls with wings and engines attached—were invented to fly from one seaport to another, over water all the way. In a flying boat you could take off and land on any fair-sized body of water—ocean, bay, lake, or wide river. Further, the ability to land on water gave an extra margin of safety in case of engine trouble.
The Anzac Clipper, a boat my Uncle Ed flew. Public Domain.
Uncle Ed flew, in quick succession, the Sikorsky S-40 and S-42, the Martin 130, and the mighty Boeing 314—the ultimate flying boat, only twelve copies ever made.
After the Second World War, when civil aviation resumed its march of progress, flying boats had become obsolete. Land aircraft were now more reliable, most cities now had decent airfields, and boat/plane hybrids were no longer required.
Because I am a sucker for the romance of the flying boats, because a flying boat pilot figures in the novel I am writing, and most of all because Uncle Ed used to fly the beasts, I really craved to visit the flying boat museum in Foynes, Ireland.
Because of that local history, people in Foynes built a museum dedicated to the great flying boats of yesteryear. All twelve Boeing 314s had been reduced to scrap metal before the 1950s were out. So they built a full-sized replica of the great plane. The flying boat in Foynes can’t fly—doesn’t even have complete wings—but a full-sized fuselage sits in Foynes harbor, rigged in detail with seats, a deluxe dining lounge, and the plane’s elaborate flight deck.
Stepping into that mockup, I thought, would give a real sense of what it was like to fly in a B-314. But I had to go on my own. My wife and granddaughter would be off exploring Blarney Castle, while my daughter and grandson biked all over Dublin’s Phoenix Park.
All I had to do was catch a train to Limerick, change to another train across Limerick to the bus station, and make a seven-minute connection with a bus that wanders through the countryside and eventually reaches Foynes. And then, after visiting the museum, retrace my steps and get back to Dublin in time for a late dinner.
In planning, this had seemed feasible. My wife, Jo—the travel planner among us—had given me a printed itinerary for my excursion a week or so before our departure. Somehow, I forgot where I had placed the printout for safekeeping and also forgot, while packing, to hunt it up and include it in my luggage. So there I was in Dublin without the paperwork to guide me on my complicated trip.
That was not my only lapse. I had also left behind all the standard European plug adapters we needed for our stopover in Iceland. I had set them aside in my suitcase, but when adding the British Isles plug adapters, I removed the ones for Iceland. “What do we need these for?” I asked myself. So we struggled through Iceland with minimal recharging capability.
Do you see a pattern here, Dear Reader?
In the first days of our big trip, I discovered several embarrassing memory lapses or confused thought-sequences. Discovering this pile-up of mental aberrations smacked me right in the face.
The night before my trip to Foynes, I chickened out. I would skip the trip to Foynes and stay back in Dublin while everybody else had their own kinds of fun. By the light of day, things didn’t look so bad, and I went with Katie and Tristan to Phoenix Park, which is very nice.
But the Foynes decision took the wind out of my sails. I was unnerved.
“What a revoltin’ development!” William Bendix as Chester A. Riley. NBC Radio. Public Domain
What a revoltin’ development!
I don’t have Alzheimer’s disease, Fair Reader. I probably don’t have any form of specific, diagnosable dementia. But there are times my brain seems to crumble before my eyes.
This concerns me. Life has been treating me so well that I look forward to reaching age 100, active and creative all the way. Going vegetative could interfere with that.
So this post is written in a haze of postmature anxiety.
I can’t resist thinking my discomfiture is a passing thing. I have been so narrowly focused on marketing plans for my forthcoming book—Izzy Strikes Gold!—that other regions of my brain have become temporarily disconnected. That’s all.
So I’m not panicking. I may still go on to a glorious future as Madison’s Old Man of Letters.
But do not fear, Gentle Reader. If I become seriously incoherent, you’ll be the first to know.
Flight of Honor participants in Raleigh, NC are welcomed back by crowds. Photo by Rtphokie, licensed under CC-BY-SA-3.0.
You know what I’m talking about? Maybe not, since honor flights are a recent invention.
Military veterans from a locality are flown, free of charge, to Washington, D.C., on a given day, ostensibly to view the nation’s war memorials. At the originating airport, on board the plane, and at the destination airport—Reagan, Dulles, or Thurgood Marshall—they are drenched with applause and special treatment. Veterans thus honored are often moved to tears.
The original notion was to honor men and women who fought World War II—the “Greatest Generation.” The National World War II Memorial had been completed in 2004, yet few WWII vets had gone to Washington to pay a visit. Soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines of that vintage were growing old and infirm. How many would live long enough to visit the memorial expressing the nation’s gratitude to them and their fallen comrades?
The Honor Flight Network, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, was founded by Earl Morse and Jeff Miller, two younger-generation veterans. Wikipedia says it “grew to a veritable forest of volunteerism, fundraising and goodwill toward the Greatest Generation veterans, who had been too busy building their communities to demand recognition for wartime service.”
Why Me? Why Now?
Since its founding, the progam has naturally progressed to recognizing veterans of the Korean and Vietnam conflicts as well as World War II.
Although I was involved with the Vietnam War, I never thought of going on an honor flight.
Those junkets are laid on for doddering old men, I thought. Which certainly does not describe yours truly.
Moreover, I was hardly a gung-ho troop in the first place. In the years when I wore a uniform, bellyaching was the more fashionable posture. I was only too glad to gain separation from the U.S. Air Force 55 years ago. Since then, I have been mostly absent from veterans’ events, organizations, and affairs.
So why am I listed on the manifest to ride the Badger Honor Flight this coming November?
One good thing about living so long—I’ll be 79 tomorrow—is that one gains perspective. One mellows.
Being a Veteran
Though never vocal about claiming respect as a veteran, I have come to realize that there is a point to it. Those who donned the uniform when called upon, whether we endured horrendous combat or performed other tasks, rightly earned our nation’s gratitude.
The historian Steven Ambrose described a particular outfit in World War II using words lifted from William Shakespeare: “band of brothers.” The phrase evokes an intense, unbreakable bond among those who have borne the battle, be they Britons at Agincourt in 1415 or Screaming Eagles at Normandy in 1944.
King Henry V and his band of brothers at the Battle of Agincourt, 1415. Painting by John Gilbert (1817–97). Public Domain.
The whole corps of us who served, doing any job at all, in the armed forces, may not rate such a heady epithet. The totality of U.S. military veterans, I think of as a “gang of guys with a certain sameness.”
A Vietnam War-era P-38 can opener, with a U.S. penny shown for size comparison. Photo by Jrash. Public Domain.
We have all been yelled at by noncommissioned officers in boot camp. We learned how to stand up straight and how to salute. Even decades later in civilian life, we align the plackets of our shirts to our belt buckles and trouser flies to achieve a straight “gig line.” Every one of us can still work the official P-38 can opener that was issued with tinned field rations in the days before the introduction of plastic-pouched “Meals, Ready-to-Eat” (MREs).
These tokens held in common must not be taken lightly.
But, What’s the Point?
Even so, when my late friend Jerry Paulson, a fellow Vietnam-era veteran, came back from his honor flight a couple of years ago and insisted I should sign up, my reaction was skeptical. I am no doddering old man. But then, neither was Jerry, and he’s no longer among the living.
When I learned a bit more about the process, I changed my mind. You see, a veteran doesn’t just go on this trip. A veteran is accompanied every step of the way by a volunteer “guardian.”
If you need help walking or boarding the airplane, even if you need a pusher for your wheelchair—your guardian is there for that. But what if you happen to be in tip-top shape? You get a guardian anyway!
It’s right there on the website: “BHF uses a 1:1 Veteran to guardian ratio. We do this to for the safety and accountability of our Veterans. The most important reason is to ensure each Veteran can enjoy their ‘Trip of a Lifetime’ to its fullest.” I suspect they simply don’t want to pick and choose which vets need help and which ones don’t.
The program has volunteers ready to act as guardians. But—this is what snagged me, Dear Reader—you can nominate your own guardian. It can be a member of your family. It can’t your spouse, which would amount to an expense-paid holiday for two. But it can be your son, daughter, niece, nephew, or friend.
I thought of our only child, Katie. Suddenly the project became compelling.
My Guardian
Katie was almost fourteen when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. The First Gulf War, which soon followed, happened when she was a teenager, far removed from any concern with world affairs. By September 11, 2001, she was 25—old enough to fight for her country in the Global War on Terror which followed. But military service, whether compulsory or voluntary, has always been a predominantly male thing. She did not enlist, nor did anyone expect her to.
Though women today serve in all branches, they do not generally grow up with a sense of their own eligibility, vulnerability, or destiny of military service. But young men do.
Historically, our country has provided about one war per generation, and the young men are expected to fight it. Not all of them, but some of them will surely go. The rules of the game—the degree of compulsion or free choice—vary by national policy and historical circumstance. Some are born too late for one war and too early for the next. But all young men live in the shadow of the next war.
War for men is like motherhood for women. We don’t all experience it, but its very possibility shapes our lives. Those who go through it are formed by it. Those who escape it may feel they have missed out on something, even if it is something better avoided.
I have no memories of real combat, thank God, to haunt my days and disturb my dreams. In those days when battle was a live possibility for my generation, I could have burned my draft card and fled to Canada. A lot of men did. The reason I didn’t was not that I was a super patriot or convinced of the need to fight the Communists in Southeast Asia, but only that I wished to continue being an American, subject to our nation’s laws.
(If you want the full rationale, look up Socrates’s conversation with his friend Crito. It’s filed under Plato’s Dialogues.)
Crito Closing the Eyes of Socrates, bas-relief by Antonio Canova (1757–1822). Public Domain. Image file by Fondazione Cariplo, licensed under CC-BY-SA-3.0.
Katie is still a young woman. She’s had no opportunity to understand the nature of the experience her father went through more than fifty years ago, or the resulting bond among a gang of guys with a certain sameness.
But come November, she’ll accompany me as my volunteer guardian on what amounts to a road trip with a random sampling of that gang of guys. I don’t know who my fellow Badger Honor Flight veterans will be, but I reckon we’ll have a few things in common. Maybe Katie and the other guardians will catch a whiff of what our sameness means to us and therefore to them.
Kindly old Mrs. Winders kept me after class one Friday afternoon in October. She sat me down by the dusty chalk rail and said next Monday morning I must report to the room across the hall.
Dazed by this announcement, I walked home. Skipping a grade was nothing I had heard of before. I didn’t know it could be done.
I told the news to Mom. She knew all about it. She, Dad, the teachers, the principal, and the school psychologist had already talked at length about this plan to make me a fourth-grader.
The only one left out of the conversation was me.
So What Else Is New?
It would have been extraordinary to include a kid in a decision that affected him.
We were to be seen rather than heard. Why would anyone consult us on a matter of importance? We were defective; that is, not yet adult.
“But Mom, I like my friends in third grade. Those fourth-graders are older than me. I don’t know them.”
“You’ll just have to make new friends.”
That was that.
The next Monday, I walked into a classroom where all the kids towered over me.
Where everybody already knew their multiplication tables.
Students practicing penmanship. Fair use.
Where the cursive characters—which I had barely begun to learn—were posted above the blackboards all around the room, from which vantage point they leered, taunted, and dared me to write using them all the time. And to practice “good penmanship,” whatever that was.
Fourth grade was a place where my new teacher, a mean old lady with beady eyes, saw me as an untutored savage, a burden thrust upon her.
Oh, the Humanity
Van Gogh suffering from an earache. Public Domain.
People say artists must suffer. If they never suffered, it’s not art.
Writers are held to be artists. Therefore we must have suffered too.
In this business of suffering I am also defective. I haven’t suffered much. At age seventy-nine, I look back on a life of tranquillity, prosperity, and more than my share of joy.
But in those days when I was an impostor posing as a fourth-grader—both smaller and younger than my classmates, resented by my harsh teacher, expected to know all sorts of things I had sped past in this oddball promotion—at that time, Dear Reader, if at no other, I thought I was suffering.
Making friends was the least of it. My classmates treated me as a novelty—a mid-season interloper with an overgrown brain and an undergrown body. At least they were nice. They showed a kind of mascot-worthy toleration. One or two offered real friendship.
Some other kid, with a different personality, might have used the sudden promotion to take fourth grade by storm. Some folks are outgoing, potentially meteoric, by nature. I am not one of them.
Years and decades have taught me versatility; the skills required to make new friends quickly; the ability to assert my own interests in a pleasant, no-nonsense way so I won’t be huddled in a dark corner when goodies are distributed. But way down deep, I’m still an introvert.
Timidity ruled me in third and fourth grades. I seemed born to be bullied.
“Stand up for yourself,” my parents said.
Now, I know what they meant. Then, I had no clue.
My path to a full social life may have been gradual, but I got here. Gone are my days of quailing and quaking. Life is now good to me.
Yet the wounds of childhood, even many years later, can still sting.
An Altered Ego
So there was a hidden agenda when I set out, a few years ago, to write fiction.
We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. --T. S. Eliot
I thought through historical fiction—stories set in the past—I could fix the past.
I created a character, Izzy Mahler—a six-year-old boy, beleaguered by schoolyard bullies who shook him down for money, a dime he did not have. “You’d better get it,” said big bully Barton Bigelow.
Izzy’s first, forlorn appearance, from the Saturday Evening Post’s Depression-era art files. Fair use.
The ingenious means by which Izzy got the dime, warded off Barton Bigelow, scored a candy prize for himself, and learned a lesson in finance, became a fount of quaint humor. The Saturday Evening Post website liked the story well enough to publish it as “Nickel and Dime.”
By combining a couple of real incidents from early childhood—changing a few names, facts, and relationships—I had given Izzy a success that had eluded the actual me. How’s that for exploration, T. S. Eliot?
Two more Izzy stories, again bought by The Saturday Evening Post, showcased my flair for creative reconstruction of the past.
Then I caught the bug to write The Great American Novel. My great American novel, Price of Passage, took about five years to complete. All along, I had it in mind to write a book about Izzy’s grade-school experiences back in the 1950s.
And I did it. The result, Izzy Strikes Gold!, is a middle-grade novel that grandparents will also enjoy reading—as a dip into the roseate past, if nothing more.
It’s 1957. Twelve-year-old IZZY, long on hope and short on cash, claws golden nuggets from the waters of a secret spring. His co-discoverer COLLUM swears him to secrecy.
Izzy hopes to be a regular kid, not just the class shrimp. Half his brain teems with schemes to fit in with his peers, while the other half struggles to keep his family from falling apart.
MOM and DAD are at odds, Izzy helpless to save their marriage. THE RUSSIANS launch the first artificial satellite, blighting Izzy’s hopes of space-age glory. Bullying LYLE dashes Izzy’s self-image; breathtaking IRMA seems oblivious to his wistful ardor; and GRANDPA, who taught him to be brave, wastes away in a hospital room.
Money could ease these woes—but Izzy has pledged silence about the gold in the hidden spring.
DEEP IN DILEMMAS, HOW CAN IZZY HOLD ON TO HOPE?
Because it features a child protagonist with a child’s problems, this book is classified by booksellers as a middle-grade novel—one meant for readers eight to twelve years old.
But, Dear Reader, I wrote it for EVERYBODY. I hope there’s enough universality in Izzy’s story that people of any age can enjoy it as a snapshot of a magical time in a child’s life. People my age, who can remember the very different world of the 1950s, will resonate with the events contained in its pages.
I hope they will give this book to their grandchildren—read it along with their grandchildren, perhaps. It may spark wonderful conversations.
Themes
Authors must talk with people about their work. It’s easy to talk about characters and events in a story you have written. It’s harder to talk about themes.
You may not know the themes until the dust has settled.
Long before starting on the Izzy novel, I shared with my friend Christine DeSmet the fact that I wanted to write a “coming-of-age” book which would be mainly about “acceptance.” That desire sprang from the many times I suffered anxiety, hoping my classmates would accept me as a true peer even though I was younger and smaller, and knew bigger words.
But when the book was finished, I found its main themes are hope, friendship, and love.
All these transcend mere acceptance. In fact, taken together, they make acceptance unnecessary.
I thought I wrote about a child’s struggle to be tolerated in juvenile society. What came out was a saga of hope tenaciously held, friendship slowly gained, and love made manifest.
I went in for a penny but came out with a pound.
Having arrived where I started, I knew the place for the first time.
Blessings,
Larry F. Sommers
Your New Favorite Writer
P.S.—If you’re in or near Madison, Wisconsin, on July 24, come to the FABULOUS LAUNCH PARTY. You can buy the book on site and get a genuine author’s signature on the title page. Details here.
What can I say? Nothing that has not been said before.
It gives me a sinking feeling in my stomach. People died for me. Rightly or wrongly, wisely or foolishly, for good cause or in vain—they gave their lives.
This morning we will attend the Memorial Day Parade in Monona. Given just a little wedge of dry weather, we’ll cheer as our granddaughter marches down the street, playing her trombone in the high school band. We’ll applaud, full of pride and happiness—as we ought.
Our happiness came with a price tag. Later in the day, we’ll make time to remember the fallen.
My great-great-grandfather, Anders Gunstensen, who died of dysentery contracted at Vicksburg in 1863, as surely a victim of the war as if a bullet had found his heart.
My uncles, Stanley and Franklin Sommers, shot from the sky at opposite ends of the earth—one over the Solomon Islands, the other over France. They were uncles I never knew, taken before I entered the world.
My friends Billy Harff and Bruce Hulting, among the many lost when America stumbled into a little-understood war in Southeast Asia.
Ryan Jopek, a Wisconsin Guardmember who died in Iraq, before his twenty-first birthday. I photographed him with his father before he left Madison.
It’s personal.
War comes for each new generation, with the regularity of a clock striking twelve.
The aggressor fails to resist the lure of power. The defender can hardly be blamed for choosing survival.
The cost is obscene, but young men and women must pay it just the same.
Let us weep for our lost brothers and sisters and honor their sacrifice.
It wasn’t her fault. She had no way to get there, except with me. Katie had never visited this time, which vanished lon before her birth.
Contemporaphobia
Yes, I know: My bill of indictment already lists numberless counts of living in the past.
How do I plead, Your Honor? Guilty—but I can explain.
It’s about the stickiness of life. Some of us shoot through like lightning, slick as greased pigs. Others get caught up in the net of circumstance. Our skin adheres to dates, places, and events. We fall farther and farther behind our peers.
Like Emily Webb in Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town, I want people to stop and notice what they’re living through.
We don’t do that much. The remaining option is to go back and re-examine the past once it’s over; fondle it, breathe in its scent. Get a whiff of the roots.
The Conundrum of Childhood
So Katie and I plunged into LaSalle County, Illinois, to the city of Streator, where the ghosts of my boyhood are laid.
I wanted to expose her to the real-life setting of my forthcoming middle-grade novel, Izzy Strikes Gold! Izzy’s fictional town of Plumb resembles Streator, where I lived for six years.
Katie has already read the book. I showed her the places where this scene happened, where that action unfolded, where the plot took some peculiar turn. She got to feel the ambience of this small place that is in her family’s rear-view mirror.
What did I get out of it? I got to spend time with my much-loved daughter, to talk with her, to give her some sense of the experiences that made her old man who he is.
Thank you, Thomas Wolfe
It’s true: You really can’t go home again. The best I could offer Katie was a string of reminiscences, illustrated by physical ruins.
The first house we occupied in Streator, on First Street in the shadow of the glass factory, is no longer specifically identifiable. It was a tiny place and may lie hidden in one wing of the larger house that stands there now. Or maybe it was razed and replaced.
The Owens-Illinois glass factory still stands but employs a tenth of its former workforce, due to increased automation.
Onized jacket. Fair use.
Formerly, thousands of people worked there. The company sponsored a club, the “Onized Club,” for its employees and their families. They had picnics and bowling leagues. By taking a job with Owens-Illinois, you became “onized.” Folks went to Piggly Wiggly, the corner tavern, or the gas station wearing their “Onized” jackets—just as people today wear Packers gear. It was a badge of belonging.
Each of the three neighborhoods I lived in had its own mom-and-pop store. Those buildings are still there, but they are no longer stores.
In the old days, your neighborhood store was a short walk from your house. Today, the gas stations have become convenience stores sprinkled along streets at the edge of town. I guess that’s okay, because people no longer walk much. They drive instead.
Katie, who became a full-grown adult almost instantly, before my astonished eyes, holds a graduate degree in urban planning. I wonder how she views vanishing neighborhood stores, from a professional standpoint.
“Do we lose something,” I want to ask her, “when traffic patterns change?” But I hold my tongue. This trip is not for interrogation or philosophy. It’s just to put her on the ground here in the 1950s.
Merriner Field, beside the old Illinois National Guard armory, is no longer suitable for playing baseball. Its infield is now bisected by an earthen levee designed to keep the Vermilion River in proper bounds.
In my day, they just allowed it to flood and cleaned up afterwards.
Did I mention my daughter is also a certified flood plan manager? Here eyes lit up with humor when she saw the green wall where kids once played ball. “Now people downstream can enjoy bigger floods,” she said.
Is it wrong of me to want Katie to see and know these things? Is it vain?
If she doesn’t experience them, how can she pass the knowledge on to my grandchildren?
Maybe they need their own trip through the time tunnel.
Carnegie and Endres
One place that has endured fairly well is the Streator Public Library, on Park Street.
Streator Public Library. Fair use.
It’s a handsome building, donated by Andrew Carnegie at the dawn of the twentieth century, its lighted entryway flanked by Ionic columns. A wing was added at the back some years ago, freeing up space in the entire library, giving it an airier and more open floor plan. That’s an improvement, I think.
The big circulation desk still stands front and center when you come in. I approached the folks at the desk—youngsters all—to tell them about my forthcoming book and leave them a pre-publication copy.
I couldn’t help noticing the desk itself is new, gifted to the city by the son of Oral and Dorothy Endres, who are described in the accompanying plaque as “Long Time Patrons & Fans of the Library.”
I had Katie take my picture by the plaque.
Your New Favorite Writer and the Oral Endres plaque. Photo by Katie Sommers.
“I knew Oral Endres when I was a kid,” I explained. “He was an old man—maybe forty or so—with receding hair and dark-rimmed glasses. He came around from time to time and sat down at the kitchen table with Mom and Dad to make sure we were covered by Metropolitan Life.”
Now here is Oral Endres, memorialized in a library desk.
“What goes around comes around.” I’ve never known just what that saying means. Maybe it refers to the Wheel of Life, picking up loose bits of roadway which may cling for two or three revolutions before falling aside as time rolls on.
It was nice to encounter Mr. Endres on the back side.
Moving On
From Streator we drove to Ottawa, stopping at Prairie Fox Bookstore to introduce ourselves—and Izzy Strikes Gold!—to the good folks there. I’m hoping we’ll be able to do “author events”—talks and signings—there and at the Streator Library.
Katie’s reward for slogging through this old-time history and contemporary book-schmoozing was nature hikes.
At Matthiesen State Park, which we called Deer Park back in that era when any deer sighting (especially in Illinois!) was a phenomenon, we hiked a sunken trail amid rocky dells, following a babbling stream as far as we could go before the walls closed in.
My daughter found several interesting plants, including an uncommon lady’s-slipper orchid. Did I mention she is a tracker of wild botanicals?
Starved Rock. Photo by Katie Sommers.
But the pièce de resistance was Starved Rock State Park, where sandstone bluffs tower above the broad Illinois River. From the top of the largest bluff, the one where misty legend whispers that a whole tribe of Indians perished in a long siege, one can see a monumental dam across the river and squadrons of white pelicans fishing in its outflow.
The park was established in 1911. In the 1930s, members of the Civilian Conservation Corps constructed the Starved Rock Lodge, a wood structure of elegant rusticity, like similar lodges at Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks. Since paying a brief visit to Starved Rock when I was eight, my bucket list has included an overnight stay at the Starved Rock Lodge. On this trip, we checked it off.
The rooms are cozy. The food, beverages, and service are excellent. After dinner, Katie and I sat on the lodge veranda, which overlooks a broad expanse of the Illinois Valley. We sipped our chosen beverages and talked. It was a great time for catching up.
A yellow violet. Photo by Katie Sommers.
The next morning, we set out on the park’s hiking trails, which parallel the river and traverse several dramatic tributary canyons. Katie found more plants. We saw squirrels and birds, and plenty of other hikers.
We covered about five miles of trail, including a few stretches over rough, broken ground. We did not exhaust all the park’s trails, but we did exhaust this old man before climbing back in the car and heading back to 2024.
Starved Rock State Park and its iconic lodge rate my sincere recommendation. Spring, fall, and midweek days in summer would be the best times to visit. On summer weekends you might encounter quite a crowd.
Fifty-six years ago, in the streets of Taipei, Taiwan, I purchased a work of art from its creator, the Chinese painter Peco Yeh.
The sordid details of that transaction are mentioned here.
Since then, several people have contacted me to declare themselves owners of other original Peco Yeh canvases.
The latest is Jane Upchurch, who emailed me: “In the early 1970s my (ex) husband was in the military and was stationed in Taipei. He had been to Chinese language school to learn Mandarin. We bought a Peco Yeh painting on the street which I still have in it’s original frame. It’s approximately 16” x 18”. (It’s hard to see in the attached picture but the little girl is catching a bubble.)”
Jane attached a good photo of the canvas she owns.
Bubble Girl, by Peco Yeh. Courtesy of Jane Upchurch.
Once again, we have a picture which hints at the multiplicity of styles and subject matter painted by Peco Yeh, the enigmatic twentieth-century artist. The girl is a rather standard renering of a Chinese child. The bubble she embraces is rendered with grace and finesse. We could call it a slice of life.
Compare this not only with my canvas—a mystical expression of a boatman on a misty morning—but also with pictures provided by Earline Dirks and Joshua Lowe.
Once again, we have a picture which hints at the multiplicity of styles and subject matter painted by Peco Yeh, the enigmatic twentieth-century artist. The girl is a rather standard renering of a Chinese child. The bubble she embraces is rendered with grace and finesse. We could call it a slice of life.
Compare this not only with my canvas—a mystical expression of a boatman on a misty morning—but also with pictures provided by Earline Dirks and Joshua Lowe.
Others who have contacted me and provided images of their Peco Yeh paintings include Earline Dirks and Joshua Lowe.
Chinese boy with lantern. Courtesy of Earline Dirks.
Street scene. Courtesy of Joshua Lowe.
If this keeps happening, this lowly blog may become the world’s leading collection of information about Peco Yeh.
Kudos to my friend Jerry Apps for reminding me that this week—April 7-13, 2024—is National Library Week. The theme this year, according to the American Library Association, is “Ready, Set, Library!”
Apart from the brutish verbing of an ancient and honorable noun, I endorse the sentiment.
Libraries, expecially local public libraries, are wonderful things.
“Libraries connect our communities and enrich our lives in ways we may not realize,” says National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature and Newbery and Pura Belpré-award winning author Meg Medina, who serves as 2024 Honorary Chair.
Birth of a Bookworm
The first library where Your New Favorite Writer ever had borrowing privileges was the public library on Park Street in Streator, Illinois. I was astonished and proud to learn that, shucks, even kids in grade school could have library cards. I signed up and started reading books, one after another.
Streator’s Carnegie-built public library in 1903, still in daily use.
In those days, between the ages of six and twelve, I read what today we call kid lit. Adventures like Treasure Island and Swiss Family Robinson. Cowboy books like The Coming of Hopalong Cassidy. Horse books by Marguerite Henry, dog books by Albert Payson Terhune, Lassie Come-Home by Eric Knight.
I read biographies especially written for children—thumbnail sketches of American heroes like Andrew Jackson, John C. Frémont, Lou Gehrig, and George Washington Carver. Casting my mind back to remember a children’s biography of a notable woman, I draw a blank. Sorry, dear—we just didn’t have them.
We had plenty of sports books, though, most of them written by Jackson Scholz or John R. Tunis. None of those books won the Newbery Medal or the Pura Belpré Award, but they were exciting and taught sportsmanship, persistence, self-respect, and consideration for others.
And then there was science fiction.
A great place to loiter. Photo from Streator Public Library website. Fair Use.
Dear Reader, when I was a boy, no actual human being had ever flown into space. But the feat had already been achieved many times over in the works of Robert Heinlein, Lester Del Rey, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke.
My habit, when loitering—there is no better word for it—in the Streator Public Library, was to find a book that looked interesting, pull it off the shelf, and start reading. There in the cool stacks, I sat or squatted on the marble floor and read, sometimes as much as half a book before my stomach told me it was lunch time, or supper time. Then I would trot to the front desk, flash my library card, check out the book, and take it home to finish.
Carnegie Libraries
The library was a swell place to spend time, a temple of learning in its own right. It was one of 2,509 libraries built between 1883 and 1929 with money donated by Scottish-born steel magnate Andrew Carnegie—1,689 of them in the United States.
According to its website, “The Streator Public Library is a US Landmark Carnegie facility that was constructed in 1903. The Fuchs murals that were installed, around the interior of the lower dome, were painted on leather in a local shop and installed in 1905. The original grand stair case, woodwork, shelves, and stained glass are still in place. Many of the original oak tables are still utilized.”
Andrew Carnegie in 1913. Photo by Theodore Marceau. Public Domain.
Carnegie started his philanthropy by building a library in his birthplace of Dunfermline, Scotland. Then he gave a library to his adopted hometown of Allegheny, Pennsylvania, and another to Braddock, Pennsylvania, the site of one of his steel mills.
Eventually, it got out of hand.
As Carnegie began to realize how much money he had, he entertained library proposals from all over. In 1897 he hired a personal assistant, James Bertram, and put him in charge of screening all the requests. They developed a questionnaire to determine whether a town applying for a library actually needed and could support one. They made sure local officials were committed to funding the ongoing costs in perpetuity.
Once a town was declared eligible to receive a Carnegie library, a handsome edifice was built—in any of several different styles, but with quality and elegance. It was almost always entered by a flight of stairs, symbolizing the elevation of the public mind through reading. There was also a lamp post or lantern near the entrance, a symbol of enlightenment.
Carnegie pioneered the open stack library. Until then, most library stacks were closed. You submitted a request for a book, and then a librarian went and got it for you. Carnegie figured self-service would reduce operating costs for libraries, and he was right.
But open stacks brought a greater risk of pilferage. So the circulation desks at Carnegie libraries are usually large, imposing, and placed conspicuously near the main entrance.
That Desk is a Friend of Mine
The new Endres circulation desk. Screenshot from Streator Public Library website. Fair use.
In 2013, a new circulation desk was installed at the Streator Public Library, dedicated to the memory of Oral and Dorothy Endres, the donor’s parents. As it happens, I remember Oral Endres. He was an insurance agent for Metropolitan Life. A nice man. When I was a boy, about seventy years ago, he spent time at our kitchen table often enough so I knew his name. He made sure we were adequately covered.
Mr. Endres’ son, who gave the new circulation desk, was not as big a donor as Andrew Carnegie; but it’s the thought that counts.
Visit your local library soon. While you’re there, take out a book.
The Zambezi River rolls across a vast plateau in southern Africa and falls into a deep cleft in the earth. This sudden descent is known as Victoria Falls.
Victoria Falls is twice as wide as Niagara, and twice as high. Though neither the widest nor the highest waterfall, when height and width are combined it is the largest sheet of falling water anywhere on the planet.
Your New Favorite Writer visited Africa a few years ago. On takeoff from the airport at Livingstone, Zambia, our pilot flew a slow S-curve at low altitude, so passengers on both sides of the plane could get a good gander at the falls.
It was an astonishing spectacle.
Another view of Victoria Falls. Photo by Diego Delso, delso.photo, License CC-BY-SA.
The trench into which the Zambezi tumbles is cross-wise to the river. It is so wide, so narrow, and so deep that the water seems to plunge straight into the bowels of the earth. There is an outflow stream at the bottom of the gorge, but it is narrow, dwarfed by the immense falls.
Victoria Falls—white horizontal line in center—seen from the International Space Station. Public Domain.
Wait For It
I have reached that point in life when old friends, whom I’ve known for ages, are dropping dead one by one. It concentrates the mind. One dwells on death.
Now here, on a different continent, an image presented itself: Picture all of us, all humanity, moving across a wide plain. And somewhere in that plain is a crevasse. But it can’t be seen from any distance.
Perhaps the crevasse is crooked, so you may reach your part of it it before or after I reach my part of it, even though we march abreast.
From my point of view, a friend or aquaintance suddenly drops out of view—yet here I am, still sauntering forward. Someday, without warning, it will be me—and people I know will keep strolling or marching along, wondering what became of me.
Now, Here’s the Payoff
Like the waters of the Zambezi, I may appear to have been swallowed whole. But actually, I will just flow out sideways, like everyone else, through new channels, into wide lakes, past twisty creeks and broad estuaries, to God’s eternal sea.
In the Old Testament Book of Exodus, God revealed himself to a man named Moses in the semblance of a burning bush. Moses thought it odd that although the bush was aflame, it was not consumed by the fire. So he decided to take a closer look.
Landscape with Moses and the Burning Bush (1610–16) by Domenichino (Italian, 1581-1641). Public Domain.
When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!”
And he said, “Here I am.”
Then he said, “Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.”
—Exodus 3:4-5, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition
One must not go shod, you see, on holy ground.
Writing a Sermon
Dear Reader, you already know Your New Favorite Writer is . . . a writer.
I’ve written many things: Utilitarian items like training manuals, instructions, official reports, news releases, magazine articles, photo captions, even the occasional speech. Literary products like poems, screenplays, short stories, and novels. Desultory or occasional outbursts like this blog.
You may be unaware that I also write sermons. I don’t mean sermons in a figurative sense, like “Did you see Larry’s rant about civil public discourse last Tuesday? It was a regular sermon!”
No, I mean actual sermons. I sometimes preach on a Sunday morning, because I am a lay preacher in the Congregational tradition. Some denominations only allow ordained clergy to preach, but in our chuches, official credentials are not necessarily required. It’s more about being called to preach the Gospel.
A local church may be deprived of its regular preacher for a time. My name is on a list of people who may be called to fill in. This week I am readying a sermon to be preached in a small town a couple of Sundays from now.
Sermon writing is not like any other kind of writing. It’s not just that it must be from the heart; all good writing should come from one’s heart. It’s not even, exactly, that it’s informed by the Spirit of God; I like to think the Holy Spirit is there somehow in everything I do.
But mainly, this is writing produced on commission for a Very Special Customer. When writing a sermon, and when delivering it, one stands in the presence of God. One ought to go barefoot.
The Homiletic Tradition
Some preachers, taking a cue from Exodus 3, go so far as to stand barefoot, or stockingfooted, in the pulpit when preaching on Sunday morning. (They do! You could look it up.)
Some preachers don’t even write their sermons down—convinced, as a theological tenet, that when preaching, they must simply be a spontaneous instrument, tuned in to God’s frequency. The Almighty will put words in their mouths at the right time. And He always does. Almost all of those whose preaching is completely spontaneous also spend a great deal of time reading Scripture. When God gives them a message on the spur of the moment, Bible verses are automatically embedded in it.
George Whitefield. Engraved by J. Cochran, 1877. Public Domain.
Jonathan Edwards, mezzotint print from Welsh Portrait Collection. Public Domain.
Methodist evangelist George Whitefield (1714-1770) made up his sermons on the spot. Congregationalist cleric Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) mostly wrote his out in advance.
I, like Edwards, write my sermons. I write what I want to say, so that when it comes time to say it, I will remember what it was I wanted to say. A revelation is neither more nor less divine for having been written on paper before it is spoken.
Authenticity
“All well and good, O New Favorite Writer,” I hear you cry—“but how do you get the divine part in, in the first place? How do you know that you are preaching what God wants people to hear? Or are you merely an unshod charlatan, after all?”
I am glad you asked, Gentle Reader.
I think my sermons have some spiritual validity because I start from the Bible. When preachers write sermons, there are generally two different ways of “starting from the Bible”:
1. Refer to the lectionary. The lectionary is a table that associates a set of scripture passages with each Sunday of the year. It was worked out, many years ago, by clergy who wanted a systematic way for a congregation to work through large parts of the Bible over a three-year period. So the lectionary repeats itself every three years. And its pattern is complicated. But it’s all written down, so on any given Sunday, you can easily find out what the readings are. In some chuches, use of the lectionary is law; in others, it’s a respected tradition. Still others disregard the lectionary entirely.
2. Use some other method. You simply choose a Bible verse to preach about. You may pray to God for a passage of Scripture to be sent to you. You may reflect on something important the congregation ought to hear, and your reflections may put you in mind of something from the Bible. You may don a blindfold, open the Bible to a random page, put your finger down on the page, take off the blindfold, and see what you’re going to preach on. Any of these methods, or others, can work; any of them can be useful if you are preaching in a church that does not use the lectionary but prefers to leave the choice of text to the preacher.
Which method do I use? Sometimes one, sometimes the other. Mostly it depends on the local custom of the church I’m addressing. If they love the lectionary, far be it from me to disturb their idyll; I’ll simply preach on the lectionary text. If they are lectionary-independent, I will find a verse on my own.
More important than the specific verse chosen is the approach and attitude of the preacher. This brings us back to the burning bush, and the sandals. When preaching a sermon, one stands quite consciously in the presence of God. It is presumptuous to speak a word purporting to be God’s word, when in the actual presence of God. The only approopriate attitude is humility, whether one shucks one’s oxfords or not.
So when starting to write, before I open the Book to the verse chosen, I first pray to God that a new understanding of the verse may be sent through the Holy Spirit. That’s a good approach. If you pray thus, and pray sincerely, something interesting and useful will pop off the page and into your consciousness. Then it’s just a matter of writing it down.
Chutzpah
What gives one the sheer, gosh-awful audacity to write messages on behalf of God, for delivery to God’s people?
While God was speaking to Moses from the burning bush, he commissioned Moses to go to the pharaoh of Egypt and liberate the Children of Israel held in thrall there. And Moses said, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” And God said, “I will be with you.”
But Moses continued to demur. His Impostor Syndrome prompted this plea: “O my Lord, I have never been eloquent, neither in the past nor even now that you have spoken to your servant, but I am slow of speech and slow of tongue.” And God replied, “Who gives speech to mortals? Who makes them mute or deaf, seeing or blind? Is it not I, the Lord? Now go, and I will be with your mouth and teach you what you are to speak.” (Exodus 4:10-12, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition.)
There are many more examples of people wholly unqualified to speak for God, who have been commissioned by God to do so anyway.
The Bottom Line
I have received the gift of writing. I believe in the Triune God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—and someone has to speak to his people on Sunday mornings. So here I am, Lord: Send me.
