Category Archives: Story and Narrative

Reflections on the art and craft of storytelling

05.02.23
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Create a Discussion Guide for Your Book

Note: The guest post which follows, by my friend Joy E. Held, is a timely discussion of why authors should create discussion guides for their books, why it is important, and how to approach it. Happy reading!

As an author and educator, I believe in the value of reflection as a way to better comprehension. I like finding discussion questions at the back of books, but when it came to create one for my own books, I couldn’t find anything. I discovered many examples, but no specific guidance on building one. I put on my teacher hat and built a template that any author can use.

When the COVID-19 pandemic made it difficult to gather in person and talk about books, readers, authors, and publishers quickly pivoted to virtual meetings. Zoom, Facebook, Vimeo, Kaltura, Google Meet, Skype, Cisco WebEx, Microsoft Teams, and others filled the void offering free or reasonably priced options for keeping the conversations about books moving forward. 

At the time, I was serving in a volunteer role as the vice president of programming for a nonprofit writer’s group with a writing craft book club. I was stunned at how easy it was to get popular authors to agree to meet with a group of writers via Zoom on a weeknight to talk about their books. The practice is still in place today because authors and publishers discovered how easy and valuable it is to connect with readers virtually to extend the discussion about a book. It’s a great way to make published books accessible to more readers when in-person and virtual options are combined to accommodate everyone regardless of location. 

Why Not Discussion Guides?

This was also the moment I started looking for reading group discussion guides to support our conversations when an author wasn’t available to meet with us. I discovered that guides were out there, but not in the numbers I expected. That’s when my experience as a college English professor reminded me that I had written dozens of reading guides to accompany the literature I taught in my courses. Why didn’t more authors include study guides with their books?

The answer is probably because developing a study guide is not an intuitive process for most people. Authors may know their subjects inside and out, but designing a set of stimulating questions for readers may not seem like an easy process. Because it isn’t. However, there are reader’s guides available from many publishers as their marketing and promotions departments know the value of providing thought-provoking questions for readers to consider after they have read a book. The priceless value is the fact that a discussion guide extends the amount of time and interaction a reader has with a book. Also, a decent discussion guide helps educators assign deeper study of a book and expands the understanding of the message or theme of a story.

One way to engage readers beyond the last page of your book is to provide a set of discussion questions. Educators, book clubs, librarians, and curious readers appreciate the extra information because a book discussion guide takes them behind the scenes, so to speak. How do you go about developing this tool?

Online Course

Enter the educator (me) with a template to help authors create a discussion guide for their books. Once an author understands learning styles, teaching methods, and how a reader typically engages with text, the process can be replicated for as many books as they write. I created an online course to teach writers how to create a discussion guide for their books.

I’m excited to share this practice with authors, editors, publishers, educators, librarians, book clubs, readers, students, and anyone who wants to encourage deeper engagement with a book. The broad topics of the course include:

  1. learn the value of book discussion guides to many different consumers of media
  2. understand research practices that support your knowledge and abilities to create discussion guides
  3. receive tools and a step-by-step plan
  4. have the option to share your guides with me/other students. 

The course is divided up into these SECTIONS:

  1. What is a book discussion guide?
  2. Typical contents of a book discussion guide.
  3. Discussion categories and how to create questions from your book.
  4. How and why a book discussion guide will help you and your readers.
  5. Downloads of worksheets, progress journals, infographics, checklists, a resource list, a sample fiction book discussion guide, and a basic book discussion guide template.
  1. What is a book discussion guide?
  2. Typical contents of a book discussion guide.
  3. Discussion categories and how to create questions from your book.
  4. How and why a book discussion guide will help you and your readers.
  5. Downloads of worksheets, progress journals, infographics, checklists, a resource list, a sample fiction book discussion guide, and a basic book discussion guide template.

Writing a book is generally about connecting with other people. Authors typically have an intention in mind when writing a book be it fiction or nonfiction. Call it a message, theme, or purpose, writing and publishing a book is one way to reach more people with your story. 

You may or may not have a finished or published book at this point. It doesn’t matter because this formula can be put into action at any stage of a book’s life. It can boost interest in a new book and lengthen the shelf life of an older title because of the way a good book discussion guide adds dimension and interest to a publication. Once you have the process in hand, anyone can go from “how do I extend the life and interest in this book?” to increasing sales and expanding engagement almost indefinitely. What do I mean by “expanding engagement?” 

Expanding Engagement

Expanding engagement with a book means ways to keep a book “top of mind” for a reader. There is social media, of course, but a good book discussion guide has the potential to do so much more than posts or even paid online advertising. It works the same for any genre and any writing style because once a reader finishes the last page of your book, you want them to keep thinking about the content, wondering about you, the author, and having ways to delve deeper into the book’s meaning, purpose, construction, and more.

“Create a Discussion Guide for Your Book” course provides a step-by-step action plan about the why, how, when, and what of developing a knockout discussion guide to accompany your books. Even poetry! Every published work has a history, a construction period, and more that readers are eager to learn about. The course contains printable worksheets, checklists, text lessons, videos, and progress journals that will give you the tools to design, create, analyze, and share a discussion guide based on your book. Once you have the formula, it is repeatable for every book you publish.

The course retails for $197.00, but readers of this blog have access to the sale price for a limited time. To get started, click this link and start immediately. 

Only $97.00 for a limited time.

All good things,

Joy

Copyright 2023 Joy E. Held

04.25.23
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Same Old Soapbox

Simple Steps to Literary Lionhood, A Retrospect

At age seventy, I abandoned myself to the literary craving and became a full-time writer.

That was in January 2016. 

During an apprenticeship marked by small successes, the possibility of “doing a blog” was often brought to my attention.

The notion was preposterous. It would suck up all my time, leaving me none for serious writing. Besides, how could I ever think up enough new content? 

Every fiber of me railed against it, but in April 2019 I started this blog. In the process, I conferred on myself the title: “Your New Favorite Writer.” Well, if I didn’t do it, who would?

That was over four years ago. I have posted about a thousand words almost every week since then. It does take a lot of time, about a day a week. But on the other days I have still gotten some serious writing done. 

Besides, I have made an interesting discovery:  The blog itself is serious writing. 

“Be that as it may, O New Favorite Writer—how do you balance such unequal tasks as posting a blog and writing the Great American Novel?” 

The answer, Dear Reader, is that it’s all of a piece. (And thank you for asking.)

It’s All One Thing

Sherman

When I say “all of a piece,” I mean the writing life cannot be forced into small, separate pigeonholes—or narrow silos, if you prefer a farm metaphor. It is not that you must move your book forward at the expense of your blog. It is not that you must spend all your time writing, to the exclusion of reading what others have written. It is not that you must devote yourself only to the art of narrative and pay no attention to sales, trade, and the soil of commerce. 

No, Gentle Reader. You must do it all at once. 

General Sherman said, “War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.” Your New Favorite Writer says: “Writing is a mess, and you cannot parse it.”

Lionhood

Lion. Photo by Kevin Pluck, licensed under CC BY 2.0.

About the time I started this blog, it dawned on me that to be a serious writer you must become a Literary Lion, and you dare not put that off until your first Nobel Prize. If you are to have any chance at all, you have to jump into the Literary Lion business right away. 

Armed with this stunning insight, I posted a series titled “Six Simple Steps to Literary Lionhood.” The six steps are:

  • 1. Cut the line. Skip straight to literary lionhood.
  • 2. Write.
  • 3. Get feedback.
  • 4. Associate.
  • 5. Submit.
  • 6. (Develop Your) Platform.

When I wrote six pieces, one a week for six weeks, about these six steps, I continually warned readers that “simple” does not mean “easy.” Each step is simple. But you have to do them all together, continuously. If they were easy, everybody would be Stephen King.

Some time later, I was compelled to revisit my six simple steps several times to enlarge or clarify, based on my new experiences. But in the main, the six steps have held up well.

Proof of the Pudding

It seems to be a law of language that common sayings and nostrums get simplified over time. One example has to do with proof and pudding. People today commonly say, “The proof is in the pudding.” That’s an interesting saying, but in isolation, rather mystifying. Why should proof be in pudding? Why conceal evidence in pudding?

Listen, Fair Reader: Your New Favorite Writer is old enough to remember when the saying was used in its original form: “The proof of the pudding is in the eating.” Ah! Clarity. If you want to know how good the pudding is, eat it. The eating will tell you what you want to know. 

I offer my journey as proof of the pudding of achieving Literary Lionhood in Six Simple Steps. 

I have been on the loose in the literary world for slightly longer than seven years. During that time, besides establishing and tending this blog (“One of the best writer’s blogs on the planet,” according to Laurie Scheer), I have:

  • Had a dog story published by Fetch! magazine.
  • Had three short stories published by The Saturday Evening Post.
  • Had my debut historical novel, Price of Passage, published by DX Varos Publishing, under a traditional, royalty-and-advance author’s contract. 
  • Completed a middle grade novel, Izzy Strikes Gold!, currently seeking representation and publication.
  • Begun a World War II historical.

But that’s not all. Besides these obvious milestones, I have been busy associating. I have attended six or seven writing conferences. I am a member of the Wisconsin Writers Association, the Chicago Writers Association, and the Authors Guild. I am de facto leader of two small but important writers’ mutual critique groups in my home town.

Selling books at Literatus in Watertown.

The moment you sign a book contract you become a salesman. So I am learning about that. I visit bookstores and ask them to stock my book. I do author events from time to time—signing and selling fests, where the books are purchased one by one after actual conversations with readers. I am scheduled as the featured speaker at a couple of events in the near future. And, with the help of publicist Valerie Biel I am learning how to sell books through Facebook advertising. 

I have become a fixture at my local public library, regularly reserving and carrying home more books than I have time to read. Stacks of books—all kinds of books—litter every horizontal surface of my home. I read as much of this conveyor-belt feast as I can manage.

And a lot of great books are being published by folks who have become personal friends of mine—Nick Chiarkas, author of the excellent, heart-filled New York gang novels Weepers and Nunzio’s Way; Gregory Lee Renz, whose debut firehouse novel Beneath the Flames delighted critics and book buyers alike; Christine DeSmet, author of the Fudge Shop Mysteries series; Kristin A. Oakley, author of Carpe Diem Illinois, God on Mayhem Street, and the forthcoming The Devil Particle—and many others. 

Me, Me, Me

This is all about me. Does it sound like boasting? 

So be it. But my purpose, Gracious Reader, is to show how all these activities lean in on one another. A writer’s life comprises all of them, and more. If it’s just one thing—or two, or three—it will not sustain itself. It will not endure.

And what is success? Like beauty, it’s in the eye of the beholder. If literary success is measured in dollars, I am, to date, a miserable failure. But if personal satisfaction may be considered, the past seven years have made me a wealthy man. 

The proof of my pudding is in living the dream. You can quote me on that.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

04.18.23
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Shooting the Curl of AI

A Writer’s Nightmare

Suddenly, it’s upon us. 

We stand unprepared, all thumbs and fumbles, wondering what to do. Like always.

It’s AI, artificial intelligence, and it’s coming to get you. Elon Musk said recently that artificial intelligence “has the potential of civilizational destruction.” Never mind that he might have had selfish reasons for saying that. You’ve got to consider the possibility that he told the truth.

Photo by Andrea De Santis on Unsplash.

We’ve known for decades that someday machines would learn to think. I once read a futuristic short story in Playboy magazine, back in the days when we all read Playboy for the articles (nod, nod, wink, wink). In this story, a worldwide group of computers had been connected with one another. Their pooled intellect gave birth to an über entity which took over the world, cutting biological humans out of the picture. 

I don’t remember the story’s title, or who wrote it, but it appeared in the 1960s. 

So we can’t say we didn’t see this coming. 

But now, it’s here, arriving on our doorstep last week, in a COVID-style sneak attack. Remember March 12, 2020, when they canceled March Madness?

It now seems the second full week of April 2023 will be remembered as When AI Became a Serious Matter.

Playing Around

People—not scientists necessarily, but the kind of dreamy folks I hang out with, i.e., writers and philosophers—now report playing around with something called ChatGPT. In their playing around, they have discovered that ChatGPT can write prose that seems remotely like something a human being might have written. 

Enrico Fermi in 1943. U.S. Government photo, public domain.

Let me assure you, Dear Reader, I am not among those who have played with ChatGPT. I would not have been among those playing with nuclear fission in 1942, either. 

The first nuclear reactor, in the West Stands section of Stagg Field at the University of Chicago. Drawing by Melvin A. Miller of the Argonne National Laboratory, public domain.

But I gather, from what those others are saying: The problem is not that one cannot detect the output is computer-generated. Rather, it is that for the first time one can imagine that in the future—for example, later this afternoon—ChatGPT or a similar program will get good enough that one can no longer tell the difference.

Never mind the potential end of world civilization; AI could impact writers. 

This is serious.

Colloquium

I took part in a recent colloquium of concerned authors. Scores, maybe hundreds, of authors attended. Many of these authors, unlike Your New Favorite Writer, earn all or part of their income by writing. 

I started out puzzled but eventually caught the drift. Or, rather, drifts. 

  • 1. AI programs will soon start writing better than we can . . . or almost as well as we can . . . and we’ll all go broke. Publishers will no longer need human authors. They’ll just push a button on a machine and get a book, ready for release. No royalties will be owed to any humans. The AI machines, we assume, will accept their wages in electricity and silicon.
  • 2. Since AI is already quite useful at discharging the kinds of tediosities with which we writers are burdened, some of us hunger to use AI programs or bots—or whatever they are—in our own writing practice. Not for writing, you understand. Oh no, never!! Rather, we would use them as slave labor for menial tasks—up to and perhaps including the elaboration of trial texts which the writer may then modify. Thus we would reserve the higher functions of authorship for us who so richly deserve royalty checks. This would be, I suppose, something like the way research professors use graduate students. In this sense, AI is merely a tool, like a dictionary or thesaurus, clearly beneath the mystical heights of creative writing.

But you’ve already seen, have you not?—It’s so hard to get ahead of you, Astute Reader—how in some vague way this second concern is already at odds with the first?

  • 3. So, to reconcile the first and second concerns, some participants declared we authors ought to embrace AI to whatever extent is warranted, so long as the publishers are required to attribute each published work to a specific human author—one who gets paid. 

It would take at least an act of Congress to make this happen. But a squadron of intellectual property lawyers is already cranking up its engines to bombard publishing contracts and book copyright pages with model provisions—“guardrails,” they call them—protecting authors’ rights to control the use of their product, and importantly, to get paid. 

This drafting of guardrail language, all by itself, strikes me as a Herculean task. But it may be necessary work, because as you know, what people can do, they will do. 

There is no holding back this tide of AI. It’s a giant wave, and we shall either find a way to shoot the curl or be crushed in the collapsing pipeline.

  • 4. Beside the three areas of concern already mentioned, there is another. It seems existing AI platforms already incorporate the output of human authors as a training aid. The chatbots are learning to write better because their creators feed them sample text from published books that are the copyrighted property of authors—without acknowledgment or compensation, as far as I can tell. 

It may be possible, through legal action by authors’ groups, to prohibit the use of authors’ works as training materials for AI bots, or even to claw back some form of payment for the unauthorized uses that have already occurred. 

It’s yet another messy area for the lawyers to sort out. But I take it as a mere corollary of two more basic questions: 

1. Who’s going to do the writing, people or machines? And,

2. Who’s going to reap the benefits, authors or publishers? 

Pardon my chutzpah, Gracious Reader, but I suspect we’re still missing the Big Picture. 

Story

It’s all about the power of narrative. I once heard a lecturer say that when it’s time for bed, kids ask for stories. They don’t say, “Mommy, please read me the telephone book” or, “Daddy, I want to hear a grocery list.” They say, “Read me a story” or even, “Tell me a story.”

Authors are storytellers. Even technical writers owe their jobs to the particular skill of stating scientific or technical facts in a way that allows readers to understand those facts as a sequence of events including a chain of causation. In other words, they tell stories, no less than novelists or playwrights do. What’s true for technical writers is even more obviously true for freelance journalists and for the authors of narrative nonfiction books. 

So, if we storytellers are afraid that publishers will gain access to computer programs that allow them to cut us out of the profits, ought not the publishers worry that they, likewise, will be cut out of the profits?

If AI can write as well as human writers, will there not come a day (perhaps next Tuesday) when you can pull a cell phone from your pocket and command: “Tell me a story.” And the phone will make up a story on the spot and either speak it or type it to you. Maybe it will even assemble a complex dramatic video for your entertainment. 

And—get this, Dear Reader— the product will be first-rate. It won’t be merely grammatical. It will be tense and compelling. Maybe not hilarious—humor is notoriously difficult, and it may exceed the capability of machines to learn. But they’ll be able to assemble great suspense and action films. They’ll do it all by themselves. You can order up an original story at the touch of a thumb.

Originality

Oscar Wilde in 1888. Photo by Napoleon Sarony, 1821-1896. Public Domain.

Oscar Wilde is supposed to have said, upon viewing a flawless forgery of an art masterpiece, “It has all the virtues of the original, except originality.” The same may be said of these future machine-generated stories. Readers, however, will still gobble them up.

BUT SO WHAT?  What difference does all this make? 

If we can get stories concocted instantly by our phones, what impact will that have on literature?  Surely it will mean authors and publishers as we know them will no longer exist—at least, not in any traditional framework.

Yet story will survive. 

If we look to our phones for stories, that’s only because story is a basic requirement of the human race. You might even say the capacity for story is what makes us human. 

One can easily imagine machines telling stories. 

One cannot imagine machines needing stories told.

Only humans need that. And those who hear stories can also invent other stories. In fact, some of us can’t help ourselves. 

So story will survive. Humanity will go on. There will still be human storytellers.

I’ll still be here, writing the old-fashioned way, regardless what the machines may be doing. Whether I’ll be paid is another question; but then, I’m not being paid now. 

It’s not about the money. It’s about the story.

Keep reading. Keep writing.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

04.11.23
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Space Cadets

Last week, NASA revealed the four astronauts who will fly on Artemis II, the first crewed moon mission since Apollo flights ended fifty years ago. 

NASA group photo of the Artemis Four. Public Domain.

U.S. astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Hammock Koch, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, posed in their spiffy orange spacesuits, offering visual proof they are diverse as well as handsome. Their resumés show that three of the four also come densely packed with traditional test pilot skills.

Exciting as this news is, I had to stifle a yawn. 

We have stood on this threshold before. The first astronauts, the Mercury Seven, were Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, Alan Shepard, and Deke Slayton. When they were introduced in a Washington, D.C., press conference on April 9, 1959—sixty-four years ago—America stood enthralled.

I was thirteen. It was an electrifying moment. These seven would be the world’s first spacemen. They would transform science fiction into history. 

The Pre-Space Era

Commando Cody title frame grab, 1952. Public Domain.

I can’t say how the moment seemed to adults. For us kids, the Mercury space-flight program was both exciting and satisfying. It was the due fulfillment of a long-held dream. We had been reared and nurtured on science fiction. 

Frankie Thomas as Tom Corbett, Space Cadet. Radio-TV Mirror 1951, public domain.

On radio and TV, we had ventured into space with Commander Buzz Corry and his sidekick, Cadet Happy, on Space Patrol; with Tom Corbett, Space Cadet; with Captain Video, Commando Cody, and Flash Gordon. These shows had wildly fluctuating production values, but some of their writers would appear in the enduring pantheon of the science fiction genre—Damon Knight, James Blish, Jack Vance, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and Cyril M. Kornbluth, among others.

Meanwhile, at the Streator Public Library, we checked out books like Step to the Stars and Mission to the Moon, by Lester Del Rey; Rocket Ship Galileo and Citizen of the Galaxy, by Robert A. Heinlein; Islands in the Sky and Childhood’s End, by Arthur C. Clarke; and I, Robot and Foundation, by Isaac Asimov. These writers and others informed us of scientific facts and expanded our horizons beyond comic-strip space operas. 

Yeager in front of the Bell X-1 rocket plane. USAF photo, public domain.

While all this fiction intoxicated us, we were well aware of the real-life space heroes who were making science fiction come true. Men like Robert Goddard, Wernher von Braun, Colonel John Stapp, and Chuck Yeager. How could we not know about key developments when they were chronicled by such hardy publicists as Willy Ley? 

Galaxy magazine cover featuring space station article by Willy Ley. Public Domain.

The Leap Into Space

A significant subtext of all these books, stories, and articles was the blithe assumption that Americans—who else?—would pave the way to the stars. Which is why, on October 5, 1957, we kids were so well-prepared to be keenly disappointed by the news that Russia, not the United States, had launched the first man-made satellite, a healthy 184-pound baby named Sputnik.

It shocked us to learn that the much-maligned Soviet Union had the physical and intellectual wherewithal to beat the United States into space. Our whole nation had egg on its face. 

Yuri Gagarin in Finland, 1961. Finnish Museum of Photography. Public Domain.

There ensued a furious campaign to raise up more scientists and engineers, on the quick. By the time rocketry had been developed to the point where humans could ride on the front ends of the darned things, we had almost caught up.

Alan Shepard in 1961. NASA photo, public domain.

Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin rode into space on a Soviet rocket less than a month before American astronaut Alan Shepard did the same. Still, the Russians were ahead.

Later that spring, on May 25, 1961, our new president, John F. Kennedy, laid down a marker he thought America stood a good chance of redeeming: Set foot on the moon, and return safely, before the end of the decade—and, incidentally, before the Russians. 

JFK addresses a joint session of Congress May 25, 1961, and proposes the goal of a moon landing. In background, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson and House Speaker Sam Rayburn listen. NASA photo, public domain.

The Mercury and Gemini manned space programs laid the groundwork for this achievement, and the Apollo program did it, with months to spare, by landing Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon July 20, 1969. 

The Big Letdown

Once science fiction had become fact, the wind went out of NASA’s sails. 

Five subsequent Apollo missions landed people on the moon, for a total of twelve men. Further programs like Skylab, the Space Shuttle program, and the International Space Station have kept us in space almost continuously. But these programs have the feel of a turning inward. Since reaching the moon, we have not ventured beyond.

This has come as a bit of a surprise to us children of the Fifties. Most of the science fiction we read plotted space flight as a continuous progression from the moon to Mars, and from Mars on to interstellar space. Certainly latter-day science fiction vehicles like Star Trek and Star Wars have taken that long line of development as a given.

Human affairs, however, are always a start-and-stop thing. There are wars. There are recessions. There are hesitancies and second thoughts. Funding is re-allocated. Things happen.

Now, NASA has its sights set on Mars. Establishing a permanent continuous presence on the moon will be a big first step. The Artemis Four will have their work cut out for them.

Time will tell.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

04.04.23
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Woman River

Last fall, I attended the Wisconsin Writers Association’s annual conference, which was held in Superior. 

Doug Lewandowski, a Duluth writer, introduced himself and told me about his book—a collection of related short stories about people and events in a small Minnesota town called Woman River. He was rather low-key and matter-of-fact about the book. He gave me a copy, free of charge. I promised I would take it home and read it.

Time went by. 

You have no idea, Dear Reader, how many books I feel compelled to read—not only for my own enjoyment, but also in pursuit of my literary career. Woman River went to the bottom of my pile. Finally last week—about six months after Doug gave me the book—it reached the top of my pile.

POW! Take that, O smug, self-satisfied one-book wonder who brashly claims to be “Your New Favorite Writer”! 

I was, as the Brits would say, gobsmacked.

Let me belatedly assure you Gentle Reader: Doug Lewandowski is the real McCoy. Woman River is a great book. I wish I could write like that.

So I’m passing this recommendation along to all my friends. Get hold of a copy of Doug Lewandowski’s Woman River and read it. You won’t be disappointed.

Here’s the review I posted on Goodreads.com a day or two after finishing the book:

The town of Woman River is filled with flawed people. They mostly smoke Luckies and drink Hamm’s beer—but it’s 1959, so that’s pretty normal. None of them sought to be flawed, but all of them want love. And—in a small but difficult miracle arranged by author Doug Lewandowski—we the reader get to see their love bulging from every wound and pressure point. 

The book is a great affirmation of life with all its worries. One comes away feeling this is what writing is for. 

Woman River is a novella built of short stories, each related to all the others as the varied residents are bound to one another by ties of affection, loyalty, and eternity. 

A young farmer recoiling from a failed marriage pits his stern father against his lifegiving lover. The innkeeping couple face a dread illness with stoic devotion. The local pariah and the capable police chief share an affliction of combat stress. The town’s ethos revolves around its church, which comforts and challenges in equal measure. The priest clings to his precepts while falling under the spell of his gracious housekeeper, who must choose her own destiny. 

The text could use a bit of proofreading, but the narrative is sure, deep, and compelling. As Midwest regional literature, this book might be compared to Nickolas Butler’s Shotgun Lovesongs, Michael Perry’s Pop. 485, or the works of the late David Rhodes. But I almost feel it’s the book Steinbeck would have written, rather than Tortilla Flat or Cannery Row, had he grown up in Minnesota, not California.

You should read Woman River. Don’t miss out on great writing.

#

I mean it. Read Woman River. You’ll be glad you did.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

Author of Price of Passage—A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.

Price of Passage 

Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois 

FREE FOUR-CHAPTER PREVIEW!

(History is not what you thought.)

03.21.23
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Irrepressible Meets Inevitable: Big Doings at the Wigwam

A literary agent asked what book I had most recently read. It was a kind of litmus test. 

Between you and me, Dear Reader, my short-term memory is on its last groove. Had I not just polished off a book that very morning, I might have been struck speechless.

But it happens I had. So I spoke right up—“The Lincoln Miracle: Inside the Republican Convention That Changed History, by Edward Achorn.”

Do you suppose I passed the agent’s litmus test? 

At least I knew the name of a book. There’s that to be said in my favor.

But I digress. 

My purpose today, Fair Reader, is actually to acquaint you with that particular book.

The Crisis

In the mid-nineteenth century every American knew trouble lay ahead. The words “civil war” increasingly rolled off people’s tongues.

Southern politicians wanted to expand the geographic limits of the institution of slavery, while many in the Northern states wanted to limit slavery to the places where it already existed. These two agendas were incompatible—and people on both sides cared deeply about the question. 

Abraham Lincoln summarized the situation in a famous speech, saying:

Abraham Lincoln February 27, 1860. Matthew Brady photo. Public Domain.

“A house divided against itself, cannot stand.”

I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.

I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided.

It will become all one thing or all the other.

Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become lawful in all the States, old as well as new—North as well as South.

But Lincoln was only a provincial politician, a self-educated man whose highest public office had been a single term as United States Representative from Illinois’ 7th District. Even after he skewered the great Stephen A. Douglas in Senatorial candidate debates in 1858, that did not make him a national figure. He won the debates but lost the election. So much for the upstart prairie lawyer.

William H. Seward, 1859 or before. Public Domain.

William H. Seward was a two-term U.S. Senator from New York, a former governor of the state. He was the dear friend and the special project of a top kingmaker, Thurlow Weed of Albany. A long-time Whig, Seward was the most prominent figure to join the new Republican party when it formed. He could have been nominated for president in 1856, but his political manager Weed forced Seward to withdraw his name, throwing the nomination to grandiose political novice John C. Frémont. “We do not want him nominated for fun,” Weed explained to a friend. He was convinced the new party was too weak to win in 1856; better to sacrifice Frémont than Seward.

The Nomination

Four years later, in 1860, Seward’s time had come. He and Weed were ready. Seward, a top architect of the Republican party, believed he was owed the presidential nomination. 

Seward, like Lincoln, had spoken of the North-South divide in stark terms. 

“It is an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces, and it means that the United States must and will, sooner or later, become either entirely a slave-holding nation, or entirely a free-labor nation.” 

Seward’s Irrepressible Conflict Speech “set off a firestorm,” according to author Achorn, whereas Lincoln’s House Divided Speech “had been all but ignored outside of Illinois.” Seward was a big-name politician; Lincoln was not.

Thurlow Weed, ca. 1860. Matthew Brady photo. Public Domain.

The Republican Party chose Chicago as the site for its 1860 nominating convention. Seward and Weed approved the decision, perhaps considering Illinois a neutral ground, the home of no major rival candidate. When Thurlow Weed and a united New York delegation steamed into Chicago on a special train Saturday, May 12, it was to ensure Seward’s coronation. 

Achorn’s book, The Lincoln Miracle—which I highly recommend—is a detailed examination of how a small team of Lincoln’s Illinois supporters, working feverishly around the clock over the course of the next week, spoiled Seward’s party.

The Convention

The stakes were enormous.  Not only was the entire nation gripped in the fear of civil war; the Democratic Party had split in a major debacle at its convention in Charleston, South Carolina. It looked like there would be not one, but two or even three Democratic candidates. Thus, it seemed the Republican nominee would win the White House.

Neither Lincoln nor Seward, nor any other potential candidate—Bates, Cameron, Chase, or any other—was present in Chicago. It would have been unseemly. Candidates were expected to stay home, serenely attending to personal or professional matters. They communicated with their floor teams daily by telegraph. 

Judge David Davis, ca. 1860. Public Domain.

Lincoln’s campaign was run by his old friend, Judge David Davis. Just as Lincoln seemed a minor figure compared to Seward, so Davis—a purely local commodity—was eclipsed by the fame of Thurlow Weed, the great newspaperman and political boss. 

But Davis was a long-time politician and knew just what to do.

Lincoln started with a home field advantage the New Yorkers were slow to grasp. The convention was held in a fresh-built wooden auditorium called The Wigwam. It was large enough to hold ten thousand people. And Lincoln supporter Norman B. Judd had charge of the seating arrangements. The Illinois delegation was seated close to those of wavering or undecided states, the better to lobby their delegates during the balloting, whereas the New York delegation sat isolated, separated by a broad aisle from those same delegates. 

A drawing of the Wigwam’s interior during the convention. Public Domain.

All week long the Lincoln men had been buttonholing delegates from other states. Their orders from Lincoln were never to speak ill of other candidates. They only sought to make Lincoln, so far as possible, every delegate’s second choice. 

Seward was a great American, they granted, and a leading foe of slavery. Only—just in case his support was not quite as strong as everybody imagined—then Lincoln, not Bates or Chase or anybody else, was the logical second choice. 

After all, his House Divided Speech said the same thing Seward’s Irrepressible Conflict Speech did. It was just maybe a bit more carefully worded, with its language looking to slavery being placed “in the course of ultimate extinction.” The pro-slavery firebrands already agitating for secession would not be happy with either Seward or Lincoln, but conservative Union men in the Border States might be able to stomach the more cautious and politic Abe.

When the balloting started on Friday, it came as a great surprise to Weed and his cohorts that Lincoln, not Bates or Cameron or Chase or McLean, stood in second place with a strong showing of 102 votes to Seward’s 173½. 

Since 233 votes were needed for a majority, a second ballot was taken and showed Seward at 184½ and Lincoln at 181. A hushed crowd suddenly realized that Seward did not have it sewed up. 

Enough delegates swtiched to Lincoln to give him the nomination on the third ballot.

The Illinois delegation, other Lincoln supporters, and local residents of Chicago generally went wild. Fireworks erupted. There was pandemonium. There were joy and tears in distant cities as telegrams went out to announce the stunning news. 

A committee of party poo-bahs took a train to Springfield the next day to formally tender the nomination to Lincoln in person. Most of them had never met the Railsplitter and wondered whether the party had made a great mistake by nominating the ignorant country bumpkin of hostile press accounts. 

Imagine their delight when the candidate and his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, received the little group of big men in their modest and tasteful home with grace, dignity, and irresistible warmth. 

They decided Lincoln would do.

The Book

Reader, intending to tell you about Achorn’s book. Instead I have told you some little bit of what the book says. 

Why do I like the book? Because, in addition to explaining in perfect detail the political machinations behind Lincoln’s nomination at The Wigwam in May 1860, it gives memorable and insightful portraits of the main characters.

William Seward is no villain. He is a man of towering stature, better qualified than Lincoln in many ways. He is kind-hearted, generous of spirit, unwilling to overstep the bounds of propriety. He is also a man of no small ego, and he genuinely believes he has a date with destiny as president of the United States. But the smart and hard-working campaign engineered by David Davis deprived him of it. It was a bitter pill to swallow. He did find a way to swallow it, accepted the post of Secretary of State, and became a key Lincoln ally throughout the war and the far-sighted purchaser of Alaska afterwards. 

Thurlow Weed comes in for sympathetic treatment. Too often dismissed as a crude machine politician, he emerges in Achorn’s telling as a man of great intelligence, sensitivity, and magnetism, a man of high Christian principles. He, too, was bitterly disappointed by the 1860 result. He, too, made the best of it and forged a strong working relationship with the new president.

Horace Greeley, ca. 1860. Public domain.

The Hon. Horace Greeley, founder and editor of the New York Tribune, is the joker in the deck at the 1860 Republican convention. Formerly a great friend of Seward and Weed, he turned on both of them in the years just before the convention, apparently because they would not help him achieve public office. Neither Seward nor Weed seemed to realize the depth of Greeley’s animus, but the old curmudgeon spent a lot of time and effort lobbying delegates with the notion that Seward could not be elected. Though he was ostensibly working for Edward Bates of Missouri, the seeds of doubt Greeley sowed about the front-runner worked in Lincoln’s favor. With his demanding, querulous nature, he went from bedeviling Seward at the convention to bedeviling Lincoln once the new president was in office.

Finally, there is Lincoln himself. Honesty was a big part of his brand at Chicago in 1860. Whether or not people felt he was the right candidate, they knew they could trust him not to be corrupt. That is because he genuinely was honest and not corrupt. 

He was a shrewd politician, for sure. But one reason he stood head and shoulders above other politicians in his mastery of the whole political scene was his ability to see the long picture. Throughout his political career, whenever anyone did him ill, he bore no grudge. He turned the other cheek. He suffered a lot of insufferable people. So when the time came to make his move, there were not a lot of people holding specific grudges against him.

He gave Davis and his team a clear written instruction: “Make no contracts that will bind me.” Yet Lincoln was in Springfield; his flying squad was in Chicago on the convention floor. It appears that, when push came to shove and they needed to shift a few more votes to accomplish the miracle, they promised cabinet posts to Pennsylvania strongman Simon Cameron and Indiana politico Caleb Smith. 

Lincoln may not have felt “bound” by these undertakings but he did appoint Cameron Secretary of War and Smith Secretary of the Interior. Neither man was well-qualified, and Cameron was soon replaced by the zealous and effective Edwin M. Stanton.

By the standards of the time, only two cabinet posts was a remarkably light obligation for a successful candidate to have incurred. That his campaigners did not obligate him for more than this is probably because they knew the candidate would object. Mister Lincoln’s command not to “bind” him had its effect. But as a practical politician, he did what he had to do to cover his operatives afterward.

All in all, The Lincoln Miracle sheds welcome light on the 1860 convention and is a very enjoyable and entertaining read. It uncovers new meaning in our common past.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

Author of Price of Passage—A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.

Price of Passage

Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois

FREE FOUR-CHAPTER PREVIEW!

(History is not what you thought.)

03.14.23
by

Jack’s Big Show

Jack Benny, 1964 publicity shot. Public Domain.

The new thing called television was run by the same networks that ran the old thing called radio. 

Popular radio programs, from The Lone Ranger to Art Linkletter’s House Party, were carried over to TV and brought their loyal audiences with them. 

A great radio show was The Jack Benny Program, a weekly half-hour of hilarity and running gags that ruled the air from from 1932 to 1955. Benny, like many others, made the jump from radio to TV, appearing on CBS television from 1950 to 1964 and on NBC for one year after that. For five years, he and his ensemble pulled off the frenetic trick of appearing regularly in both media.

An Overnight Success

Benny Kubelsky with violin, early 1900s. Public Domain.

He was Benjamin Kubelsky, a violin player from Waukegan, Illinois. After achieving great mediocrity in school and business, the dreamy 18-year-old took his fiddle to the vaudeville stage in 1912. 

Audiences yawned. 

Famed violinist Jan Kubelik hinted at legal action because of the similarity of names. Kubelsky, adding jokes to his routine, changed his billing to “Ben K. Benny: Fiddle Funology.” 

Ben Bernie, a well-known “patter-and-fiddle” star, was not amused. The new kid’s name was too similar.

Kubelsky—having meanwhile served in the U.S. Navy for World War I—adopted the name Jack, common parlance for a sailor (“Jack Tar”). 

After two decades of scratching out a living, first as a vaudevillian, then as a movie novice at MGM, Jack Benny auditioned for NBC Radio and became an overnight success.

Show Within a Show

Jack Benny, newly-minted radio star, in a 1933 NBC publicity shot. Public Domain.

For NBC, Benny—billed as “the star of stage, screen, and radio”—exercised his dramatic skills by portraying a radio comic named Jack Benny. 

This fellow Benny lived a sedate bachelor life in Beverly Hills. He employed the gravel-voiced Rochester, a butler-valet-chauffeur played by black actor Eddie Anderson. Benny’s girlfriend Mary Livingstone (in real life his wife, Sadie Marks) dropped by often, as did people from the cast of his radio show: bandleader Phil Harris, boyish tenor Dennis Day, the closely harmonious Sportsmen Quartet, and rotund announcer Don Wilson.

Mary Livingstone, 1940 publicity photo. Public Domain.

Add a rotating cast of quirky character actors including multi-voiced Mel Blanc, supercilious Frank Nelson (with his famous baritone “Ye-e-e-s-s-s?”), and race track tout Sheldon Leonard (“Psst! Hey, Bud!”), and you had the basic ingredients. 

Dennis Day. ABC publicity photo, 1960. Public Domain.

A show’s plot would focus on some minor incident in the life of stage-screen-radio star Jack Benny. One week he, Mary, and Dennis would go to the race track to play the ponies. Another week Rochester would drive him to the train station for a trip to Palm Springs. Another week, Benny went Christmas shopping or stewed about an impending meeting with his show’s sponsors. Odd things happened to Benny in these commonplace situations, with disparaging commentary by the screwball characters in his cast. 

A comedian playing a comedian in a show about nothing. Are you listening, Jerry Seinfeld?

Pay No Attention to That Man at Center Stage

With kooks on every hand, Jack Benny himself seemed like the normal person in the show. But not exactly . . .

Each episode revolved around Benny. He was center stage. The shady characters, uppity store clerks, band members in a constant state of carousal, wry Mexican villagers, and most of all Benny’s long-suffering household intimates—Mary, Don, Dennis and especially Rochester—all served to call attention to Benny’s eccentricities.

He was vain and vainglorious. Blue-eyed and never ageing beyond 39, he admitted freely to being a violin virtuoso and a comic genius, with leading-man looks thrown in. 

He was indecisive, sometimes making a store clerk wrap, unwrap, and rewrap a purchased gift half a dozen times so that he could change the sentiments expressed on the card inside.

Most of all, he was cheap as only the rich can be. He had fabulous wealth, which he kept in an impregnable basement vault, while pathologically resisting any effort to part him with a dime. This miser image was displayed in every show and developed in almost every joke, until no American could have been unaware that Benny was a skinflint. 

His stinginess was the tacit explanation for his car, a 1908 Maxwell roadster, always on the verge of death. When Rochester, as chauffeur, would suggest Jack acquire a new car, he always insisted on coaxing a few more miles out of the Maxwell. The car’s throes of anguish in its brave attempts to start were given voice by the great Mel Blanc.

Jack Benny and Eddie Anderson as Rochester from the television version of The Jack Benny Show, with Jack’s 1908 Maxwell—one of the rare times an actual car was shown. CBS Television, 1951. Public Domain.

When Benny encountered a hoodlum demanding cash, the studio audience and every fan at home could see the punchline coming.

Jack was a master of the long pause. Comics to this day rave about Benny’s comic timing.

Fred Allen 1940 publicity photo. Public Domain.

Audiences, who may not have understood such subtleties, roared.

To boost ratings, Benny and rival comic Fred Allen concocted a feud, which played out on both shows over a period of almost twenty years, until Allen’s sudden death at 61 in 1956. A typical exchange:

Allen: Jack, you couldn’t ad lib a belch after a plate of Hungarian goulash.

Benny: You wouldn’t say that if my writers were here.

But Benny’s writers were there, every Sunday night. And when he moved from radio to television, “audiences learned that his verbal talent was matched by his controlled repertory of dead-pan facial expressions and gesture” (Wikipedia).

A Smooth Transition

Except for that discovery, the transition was seamless. Of all shows that went from radio to TV, Benny’s had the least noticeable format change. The Jack Benny Program on television was exactly what we radio listeners had always seen in our mind’s eye.

Benny trouped on for another fifteen years on television and continued making stage and TV appearances until shortly before his death in 1974. 

Audiences gradually learned that Jack’s on-air persona was a carefully constructed myth. In person he was warm and generous. And his devotion to music was real, even if his musical talent was less than stellar.

He donated a Stradivarius violin purchased in 1957 to the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. At the time of the gift, Benny said, “If it isn’t a $30,000 Strad, I’m out $120.”

If you’re interested in a more complete account of the Jack Benny Program, try  https://www.wikiwand.com/en/The_Jack_Benny_Program.

Next week: Something completely different. Tune in.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

Author of Price of Passage—A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.

Price of Passage

Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois

FREE FOUR-CHAPTER PREVIEW!

(History is not what you thought.)

03.07.23
by

Add Pictures and Stir

Guglielmo Marconi, in 1896, figured out how to send Morse’s telegraphic code through the air, over great distances, without wires. 

Guglielmo Marconi. Photographer unknown. Public Domain.

Microphones, also invented in the late 19th century by a series of audio pioneers, were added to the radio signal, and by the 1930s commercial radio had become an established medium. Popular programs included The Lone Ranger, Amos ’n’ Andy, and the National Barn Dance.

Antique radio, photographed by Doug Coldwell, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. 

After supper, American families now sat around large wooden boxes warmed by the orange glow of vacuum tubes to hear concerts, dramas, comedies, mysteries, westerns, news, and quiz shows. Your New Favorite Writer remembers it, Dear Reader. When I was a boy, in the Fifties, “old-time radio” was still going strong. 

But the seeds of its destruction had been sown. Somebody—a group of somebodies, actually—figured out how to transmit motion pictures using radio waves. 

At the end of World War II in 1945, almost nobody owned a television set. By 1955—only ten years later—almost nobody did not own a television set. 

Continuity is a recurring theme in human affairs. The first automobiles resembled horse-drawn buggies or carriages, with a combustion engine taking the place of the horse. 

Early TV set, an RCA Model 630-TS, sold in 1946-47. Photo by Fletcher6, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0

Likewise, the first TV sets were built like radios: lovely mahogany furniture filled with vacuum tubes, with the addition of a luminous picture tube, the front surface of which served as a screen. That one extra tube brought moving pictures of the world to us in glorious black-and-white. 

Continuity of design ruled content as well. The early television shows were often just radio programs with pictures added.

Cowboys and Indians

Moore and Silverheels as the Lone Ranger and Tonto. ABC photo, Public Domain.

The Lone Ranger and his “faithful Indian companion” Tonto galloped across our living room three nights a week on ABC Radio. When TV came along, they became movie stars, their cinematic exploits piped into our homes once a week on Saturday mornings. 

George W. Trendle produced both the radio and television series, but other personnel changed. On radio, Brace Beemer played the Lone Ranger and John Todd played Tonto. But Beemer was only marginally photogenic, so Clayton Moore was hired to wear a mask and ride the great horse Silver, while authentic Native American Jay Silverheels took over the Tonto role. He looked the part.

Gunsmoke was another western that began on radio and switched to TV. Manly-voiced radio actor William Conrad played U.S. Marshal Matt Dillon. But Conrad was inescapably rotund, so he was replaced in the TV series by tall, lanky James Arness.

William Conrad. CBS Radio photo, Public Domain.
James Arness. CBS Television photo, Public Domain.

What’s a Question Worth?

The radio quiz show show Take It or Leave It premiered in 1940 and rapidly became popular. Wikipedia describes its format perfectly: “Contestants selected from the audience were asked questions. After answering a question correctly, the contestant had the choice to ‘take’ the prize for that question or ‘leave it’ in favor of a chance at the next question. The first question was worth $1, and the value doubled for each successive question, up to the seventh and final question worth $64.”

Because of the show’s popularity, “That’s the sixty-four dollar question” became a widely-used catchphrase applied to any especially difficult conundrum. 

When something you have created becomes a household word, use it. Take It or Leave It changed its title in 1950 to The $64 Question. The program went off the air two years later.

But in 1955, CBS revived The $64 Question as a television show, hosted by actor Hal March. The producers added three zeroes and called it The $64,000 Question. It was the first big-money game show. For that kind of dough, they made the questions hard.

IBM card sorter, 1955. Photo by Atomic Taco, licensed under CC-BY-SA-2.0.

For TV, they added visual gimmicks to the program. When a contestant chose the category to compete in, a lovely young lady pushed the start button on an IBM card sorter—at that time the most decorative aspect of computer technology. The machine whirred and shuffled. The lovely assistant scooped up a deck of IBM cards from the end of the sorter and delivered the deck to Hal March. 

It seemed that an all-knowing machine, the computer, had spun out a graduated series of questions on the spur of the moment. A modern marvel!

There was another gimmick: Once a contestant reached the $8,000 level, he or she was sequestered in an “isolation booth,” able to hear only the quizmaster. It was show biz, folks.

Dr. Joyce Brothers in 1957. World Telegram photo by Phyllis Twacht. Public Domain.

The show spawned imitators: The $64,000 Challenge, Twenty-One, The Big Surprise, Dotto, and Tic-Tac-Dough—all quiz shows with tough questions and high stakes. We TV watchers could not get enough of shows like that. They made instant heroes of brainy people nobody had heard of before. People like eleven-year-old science wizard Rob Strom; polymath Teddy Nadler, a St. Louis stock clerk who made $264,000 answering questions across a broad range of categories; and everybody’s favorite, psychologist Joyce Brothers, a demure young blonde with an uncanny knowledge of boxing. All us regular folks out in TV-land were deeply impressed.

What’s an Answer Worth?

Then, in August 1958, CBS cancelled Dotto without explanation. A federal probe revealed a contestant had been given answers in advance. The G-men expanded their inquiries and found hanky-panky going on in several shows. The bloom was off the rose for big-money game shows. They all went off the air that fall and did not return until forty years later (Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?, 1998).

Soon after, in 1959, the U.S. Congress launched grim hearings exposing “payola.” The Congressmen were shocked, shocked!, to learn that record companies were paying radio disc jockeys to plug their records, manufacturing smash hits by the simple expedient of playing them more often than other records. This actually might have been legal had the source of funding been disclosed; but it was not.

The quiz show scandals, followed soon by the payola scandals, were a one-two punch to the solar plexis and jaw of Middle America. Perhaps not since the Black Sox scandal of 1919 has the American public been so let down. (“Say it ain’t so, Joe!”)

It was hard to know exactly how we’d been cheated. The quiz shows, after all, were entertainment. Seeing all these smart people answer tough questions was engrossing and entertaining, even it it was rigged. After all, for years we’d been watching professional wrestling, which everybody knew was rigged. We liked it anyway.

Likewise, the smash hits produced by the payola system were great songs. We still play them on the oldies stations today. Did anybody really care how they made their way onto the air? 

Still, there was something unsettling about unseen people manipulating contests we had no reason to think were not on the square. Our stubborn innocence was under attack.

I’m not sure it has ever recovered. 

A Ray of Hope

Fortunately for all of us, Jack Benny remained steadfastly on the air, first on radio, then TV.

Benny and cast members, 1946. Public Domain.

Be sure to tune in next week.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

Author of Price of Passage—A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.

Price of Passage

Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois

BUY NOW

(History is not what you thought!)

02.28.23
by

Train Ride

One bright morning in 1952 I boarded the Santa Fe Chief in Streator, Illinois, and rode to Galesburg, a hundred miles away. 

The Santa Fe Chief pulls out of Chicago in 1957. Kansas Historical Society.

All by myself. 

I was seven years old.

Mom had given a small tip, probably a dollar or two—equal to ten or twenty of today’s dollars—to the porter, a smiling man in a white coat and brown skin, for the extra trouble of looking after me. It was a commonplace transaction.

But for me, a train ride was an adventure. 

You could take a train from almost anywhere to almost anywhere. This was near twenty years before the railroads gave up on passenger service and turned it over to a tax-funded company called Amtrak.

It was more than twenty years before computerized ticketing and reservations. To ride the train, you spoke to an agent through the metal grille of a ticket window. In small towns the ticket agent might also be the station agent and telegrapher (although by the time I was riding the train, manual telegraphy had been replaced by teletype machines). 

You told the man—it was always a man—where you wanted to go, and he gave you a rectangle of pasteboard which conveyed that information to the conductor of the train. If you were going on a long trip that required changing trains, or even changing railroad lines—starting on the Milwaukee Road and ending your journey on the C.B.&Q., for example—your ticket might be a long, multipart form with two or more sections stapled together. 

The conductor punches a ticket. Photo by Donnie Nunley, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0

The conductor—a white man in a dark blue uniform—came through the car soon after the train left the station and asked for your ticket. He punched it with a hand punch to show it had been used. He kept the ticket and placed a slim paper tab in a clip above your seat. The tab was color-coded and marked to show your destination. 

I wore my best clothes—of course one did that for such an important thing as a rail journey—and carried a small cardboard suitcase and my best friend, Teddy. The stuffed bear rode in the seat beside me, at no extra charge. If a grown-up sat there, Teddy could ride in my lap.

A great panoply of the Heartland blurred by the large train window at sixty miles per hour. We sped past the clotheslines, tenements, and scrapyards of Moon, Ancona, Leeds, Caton, Toluca, LaRose, Wilburn, Atlas, Holton; crossed the Illinois River and stopped for several minutes at the important town of Chillicothe; then clackety-clacked through the stockpens, car lots, and water towers of North Hampton, Edelstein, Princeville, Monica, Laura, and Williamsfield; jumped the Spoon River at Dahinda, and rolled on through the quaint backyards and byways of Appleton, Knoxville, and East Galesburg, to stop at Galesburg, where I got off and was met by Grandma Sommers, with her big old Hudson sedan. 

(Confession time, Dear Reader. My brain does not contain the full litany of railside towns after seventy years. I cheated by looking at an old railroad map.) 

The smiling porter, who had checked my well-being from time to time during the two-hour trip, handed me down the passenger coach steps onto the platform, where Grandma waited. She and I  walked through the station—or, as we called it, the depot—on the west side of North Broad at Water Street.

Santa Fe depot interior, 1950s. Kansas Historical Society. Between the bulletin board, left, and the ticket window, center, stands the shiny metal Chiclets dispenser.

Where you left the passenger waiting room there stood a gum machine. You could put in two of Grandma’s pennies and choose among four flavors of Chiclets. Down a little chute they slid, two pieces of hard-shell chewing gum in a bright-colored cellophane packet. Tutti-frutti was the best flavor, and its packet was peach-colored, not unlike Tennessee Avenue on a Monopoly board.

That color, halfway between orange and pink, marks in my mind not only tutti-frutti Chiclets and Tennessee Avenue, but also Tuesday, my favorite day of the week. For no reason I can think of, Tuesday is peachy in color. 

That may be peculiar to me. If you don’t like it, Fair Reader, you’re free to paint your Tuesdays a different color. Go ahead, I dare you.

The grand exploit of soloing by rail into the wilds of western Illinois, like most of my youthful pleasures, is denied to young people now. Today, minors under twelve may not ride unaccompanied on Amtrak, and those of twelve years and older may do so only subject to numerous regulations. 

In the safe world of my childhood, we did not think strangers were likely to be perverts. It was unspoken and universal that adults would protect children. Adults trusted other adults to safeguard their children; and we who were children believed that adults—even the legions of grouchy ones—would watch over us if need be.

Others may remember things differently. Perhaps my memory wears rose-colored glasses. But those growing old along with me can testify that in those days, though we were often fussy and formal, sometimes about trivial things, we were at the same time more relaxed and confident in the major departments of life. 

Thomas Wolfe said you can’t go home again. Galesburg, however, is still served by Amtrak. But Amtrak rides the old Burlington main line, now owned by the mega-railroad company called Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF).

That means you can go home again, but you get off the train at a different station. The old Santa Fe main line tracks still run just north of Water Street, owned and operated by that same Burrlington Northern Santa Fe. But that line is traveled only by freight trains. The old depot that had the Chiclets machine is long since demolished.

Santa Fe depot at Broad and Water, about 1962. Kansas Historial Society.

That stately old depot, and the way of life it embodied, are now gone with the wind, as Margaret Mitchell might say. They are with the snows of yesteryear, per François Villon. 

The old depot site at Broad and Water, as it is today. Google Earth screenshot.

No matter. Those trains and stations and clackety-clack journeys still exist in memory . . . for a few years yet.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

Author of Price of Passage—A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.

Price of Passage

Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois

BUY NOW

(History is not what you thought!)

02.21.23
by

BOOK REVIEW & INTERVIEW

CHARRED

by G.P. Gottlieb

Charred, the third book in G. P. Gottlieb’s Whipped and Sipped mystery series, puts the reader deep in the mind and heart of Chicago café owner Alene Baron at a time when Covid seems to have shut down everything except arson, murder, and chicanery.

A construction site is torched, an unburned body found in the debris. Amidst pandemic-imposed precautions, protest marches, and opportunistic looting, it’s all too much. A dead body at a fire scene shouldn’t have anything to do with Alene’s café, but—as things turn out—it does.

Baron is hardly an eager sleuth. She just wants to protect her family, her friends, her business—and her love commitment to divorced police detective Frank Shaw. The rhythm of these concerns as they overlap and clash in Alene’s brain forms a distinct heartbeat for this engaging story. Everything is further complicated by the skeleton in Alene’s closet—an estranged uncle who wants absolution for his role in a long-ago bank robbery.

Juggling characters, relationships, and conflicts in a way that flows swiftly to a compelling conclusion is Gottlieb’s special strength as a mystery writer. This is the third literary outing for Alene and her coterie, and the author strikes a confident pace with a narrative which, though complex, always moves forward.

Readers of the first two books, Battered and Smothered, will certainly enjoy Charred. And so will anyone else who enjoys mysteries whipped, sipped, and basted with the juice of uptown intrigue.

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INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR

G.P. GOTTLIEB

Dear Reader,

Few authors I have met since entering the literary world can match Galit Gottlieb for hard work, organization, and brains. It was Galit who introduced me to my book publisher, DX Varos Publishing. And when the book was published, she helped me spread the word by interviewing me on her New Books Network podcast, New Books in Literature. Besides organizing and conducting this weekly half-hour author interview show, she has found time so far to write and publish three engaging murder mysteries, the Whipped and Sipped series from DX Varos.

These are great books, and if you like a mystery, they’ll be right up your alley.

A few days ago, on your behalf, I asked Galit these questions:

ME: What made you become a novelist, and more specifically, a mystery writer? 

G.P. GOTTLIEB: In 2014-15, I made it through an epic cancer battle by dreaming of the novel I was going to write if I made it out on the other side. I’d written stories, poems, and songs, but because I loved reading mysteries, I wanted to write one. I read a lot of classics, and especially enjoyed Rex Stout’s descriptions of the gourmet food his protagonist enjoyed. In my book, I thought, I’ll also include recipes, and the food will be what I like best-vegetarian, healthy, clean. So, I sat down and started writing a story about a café owner in Chicago, very close to where I live. I worked with a fabulous teacher, spent three years perfecting that first novel, and won a publishing contract in a rare stroke of good luck!

ME: How much of your protagonist, Alene Baron, is G.P. Gottlieb? How do the two of you differ?

G.P. GOTTLIEB: Alene is nothing at all like me; she’s from a different generation, a different neighborhood, and had different dreams. Also, I have no business ability and can’t imagine running a café, dealing with employees, or facing endless dilemmas. I do love eating and drinking in cafes though, and I enjoy being around people, so maybe there’s just a little bit of me in her.

ME: What is next on your horizon as a writer? 

G.P. GOTTLIEB: I’ve started another novel in the Whipped and Sipped series (it might be called POUNDED), I’m writing lots of essays to submit to journals and as guest posts, and I’ve been working on and off on a novel in short stories for several years. I enjoy most of the process except for the marketing, which I wish wasn’t as necessary as it is. My plan for this launch is to write so much that every day people around the world look at social media and see another essay by me – some are standard, but some might be (and have been) referred to as “odd.”  As long as it entertains me to write it, I’m okay if anyone thinks it’s odd!