They gave us wooden pencils, Eberhard Faber or Ticonderoga. We applied them to sheets of lined, low-grade, paper, bound into pads. Pencil tablets, they were called. Big Chief and Goldenrod were two common brands.
The paper was so pulpy the point of your No. 2 pencil bumped on an unreduced wood chip here and there, a trivial obstacle, no real impediment to learning.
They taught us to form capital letters and small letters. “Lower-case” was not in our lexicon. We practiced our capital and small letters over and over. It was called “printing.”
“Later,” they said, “after you know printing, we’ll teach you writing.”
By early in the third grade, I had gotten pretty good at printed letters. It was time to put them to use, so during a lull when some classmates struggled to finish a silent reading assignment, I created a hard-boiled detective story. Mrs. Winders left me in peace while I wrote—excuse me—while I printed a story that could have been an episode of Richard Diamond, Private Detective, starring Dick Powell, which I heard every Saturday afternoon on the radio.
Considering the materials at hand, you could call it pulp fiction.
By then, we were starting to learn cursive. Mrs. Winders didn’t use such a Latinate word for it. She just called it “writing.” Or “longhand.” You had to run the letters together so they linked up to make a word. You changed their shapes to match ideal examples shown on horizontal cards above the blackboard.
All through fourth and fifth grade, and maybe sixth as well, we studied “penmanship.” You spent fifteen minutes or half an hour making a loopy line like a coiled spring—all the loops the same size, evenly spaced and nicely rounded. Mine never came close.
But they couldn’t teach you penmanship without pens. We graduated to smooth paper, so we could write on it with our new pens. First they gave us steel dip pens with green plastic shafts with which to practice writing with ink. You had to dip the pen every half-word or so. I think they only gave us those things to give us a feel for what Thomas Jefferson must have felt when writing the Declaration of Independence with a goose quill.
It made you long for something better. Enter the Esterbrook student fountain pen: a sleek cylinder that carried liquid ink in its barrel, ink which flowed by capillary action down to the point or “nib” at the business end. Suddenly you could write whole sentences, pages even, before you had to stop and refill.
Many companies made fountain pens, but Esterbrook seemed to have the market cornered on elementary school students. The companies in cutthroat competition to serve the adult market in the Midwest were Sheaffer Pens of Fort Madison, Iowa, and Parker Pens of Janesville, Wisconsin. (Full disclosure: My mother worked, right out of high school, as a steno/typist in the secretarial pool of Sheaffer Pens.)
All fountain pens, of whatever make, worked the same. You pulled out a lever on the barrel to compress the rubber ink bladder inside the pen.Then you dipped the nib in a bottle of ink and released the lever. Outside air pressure forced ink up the pen into the now expanded ink bladder. It was a clever arrangement.
The smooth flow of ink onto paper was a thing to be treasured. Of course, the complicated machine that delivered the ink was also capable of leaking black or dark blue stuff all over your hands and your clothes. It was a serious skill to handle a fountain pen without leakage.
Within a few years, we were all writing with ballpoints. The old fountain pens were put away, forgotten utterly.
MacLeish. Public Domain.
Luddites there were, of course, who clung to the old technology. In autumn of 1962, I met Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and dramatist Archibald MacLeish, who signed my copy of his play JB. In doing so, the great man flaunted a real luxury fountain pen—a Waterman or a Cross, for all I know—which dispensed indelible black ink. He did it with calm panache.
I doubt Archibald MacLeish, even in his teen years, ever experienced a leaky pen. There were no blots on his escutcheon. (You could use your Funk & Wagnalls on that.)
Today, only re-enactors and fanatics use quill pens or dip pens. But the redoubtable old fountain pen is making a resurgence among the younger set.
What accounts for this rebound? Luxury, that’s what. Today’s consumers value the aesthetic and tactile effects of writing with a time-honored nib wrapped in an elite package. It’s a good thing they value it, because the experience starts at around fifty bucks, and beyond that, the sky’s the limit.
I have pretty much abandoned pens in favor of a laptop keyboard. When I resort to penmanship these days, it’s usually to sign for something on a digital pad, using my fingertip as stylus.
This finger-pen has further degraded my scrawl. But for receiving a case of wine via UPS, it’s mightier than any sword.
Today, we’re looking into word origins. Most words, other than simple words such as “oof,” are actually compounds made of two or more simple words.
Black + berry = blackberry.
Blue + berry = blueberry.
Pod + cast = podcast.
Cur + mudgeon = curmudgeon.
We could easily get carried away with this sort of thing, but that would be ex + cessive.
What’s Your Point?
Kevin McCarthy tentatively investigates podcasting. Still image from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1956. Fair use.
The point is, Dear Reader, this old curmudgeon is now appearing on podcasts. Believe it or otherwise. You can catch one here, and another one here. And I’m lined up for more.
Stay tuned.
Only you don’t really tune podcasts. You just, uh, I don’t know . . . listen?
Six months ago I couldn’t even spell podcast. Now I are one.
Back to compound words.
Raspy all over. Photo by author.
Rasp + berry = raspberry. Did you ever notice how they’re kind of raspy?
But what must a berry do to be cran? Or mul? These things are cloaked in mystery.
As is podmudgeoning.
All I know is, I’m frightfully good at it. You should tune in. Or, uh, listen.
See, Here’s the Thing
I really don’t grok podcasts in their fullness. I’ve never figured out what the point of listening or watching something is, when you can read about it on good old reliable paper.
This wisdom, obviously, does not apply to football. Or Jeopardy! But every rule must have one or two exceptions.
The fact that I don’t listen to podcasts does not disqualify me from starring in them. As mentioned above, I’m frightfully good at it. (See here and here.)
But if I’m just an old curmudgeon, why would I want to star in podcasts, anyway?
To sell books, that’s why!
You see, I talk about my books, and how I wrote them, and millions of podcast listeners will rush to Amazon and buy my books.
Circling the Drain
Do you see the reasoning? Tons of people who like to listen to things, or watch things, are naturally going to rush out and pay good money to buy something they have to crack open and look at. And then it doesn’t say anything. It just sits there.
They’ll have to read it.
Why would they read something, when they can spend the time listening to something else instead?
Just because I’m so frightfully good at mudgeoncasting?
Everybody today knows the misery being inflicted on Ukraine by our Russian dictator du jour, Vladimir Putin. Not everyone may be aware of the MILLIONS of deaths inflicted by the Soviet Communists under Joseph Stalin in the 1930s. It’s a tale of barbarous inhumanity and suffering, a lingering scar on the Ukrainian psyche.
A “Red Train” of carts in 1932 takes grain confiscated from the first harvest of a Ukrainian village, depriving the local people of their usual source of food. Ukrainian state archives, photographer unknown. Public Domain.
Borden’s book, The Harvest Keeper, tells that story. Millions starved to death on account of Stalin’s social and agricultural policies—forced collectivization of agriculture and the seizure of crops from the peasants who raised them. The famine came to be called the Holodomor, a Ukrainian word that simply means “death by hunger” but carries a strong whiff of genocide.
Was starvation a deliberate tool to destroy the Ukrainian people and prevent Ukraine from asserting its independence? What if it was merely a result of stupid policies enforced by callous brutality? What would be the practical difference?
Starved peasants on a street in Kharkiv, 1933. Photo by Alexander Wienerberger. Public Domain.
Historians may argue about such questions, but Tammy Borden does something better: She shows us the results in the lives and deaths of the people who experienced it. The Harvest Keeper is a fictionalized yet accurate narrative of Borden’s grandmother, Amalia Tomtschik, and her farming family.
A horse of the Ukraine in 1932-33. Photographer unknown. Public Domain.
This is the best kind of historical fiction, at once sweeping and intimate. It gives an up-close view of horrific events, with an eye to small details that were passed down in family stories. The travails of the fictional Amalia closely depict the life of the real Amalia. Her epic endurance and survival are guaranteed to give the reader an equal mix of anxiety and satisfaction, as well as righteous indignation toward the brutal Stalinist regime.
I highly recommend this book, both for historical content and literary power. Well done, Tammy Borden!
First you write. Then you REVISE. Then you edit and publish.
Russian writer Evgeny Chirikov. Painting by Ivan Kulikov (1875–1941). Public Domain.
Because revision is an essential step, many writing gurus today advise: “Write your first draft from beginning to end at blazing speed, just to get it down. Stop for nothing—research, grammar, structure, polish—just get it down. It’s great for your first draft to be total crap. You will fix it in the revision phase.”
Your New Favorite Writer does not buy this. Your New Favorite Writer has never bought this. I know of no way to write but with extreme care, right from the start. Gentle Reader, if I had my way, I would write a perfect first draft and have no need for revision. But I am incapable of such a feat.
Thus I revise, over and over again, while producing the first draft of a novel. I go back, re-read the little bit I have written, and improve it based on new insights. Then I go on and write a little bit more.
Using this method, by the time I complete the “first draft” of my novel, what I really have is a fifteenth draft of the early parts, tenth drafts of other parts, sixth drafts of other parts—and virtually no portion of the work that is fresh off my keyboard as a virgin first draft.
Here I stand. I can do no other. (Luther is reputeded to have said that, and I echo him.)
Once I have this multi-layered apparent first draft—what do you think? It still needs revision! Lots of it. I’m talking about author’s revisions, before we get to copy-editing and proofreading.
Let’s raise a toast to the Revision Phase—99 percent drudgery and 100 percent sheer joy.
How Does it Work?
Here’s how it works:
#
I place my cursor at the top of Page One. Then, using the “Find” feature of my word processor, I search for every example of “ly” in the whole manuscript. The two letters “ly” commonly appear at the end of adverbs. There are some adverbs that do not end in -ly, like “slow”, “fast”, “often”, etc. And there are -ly words that do not happen to be adverbs, like “lily” or “family.” But most of the -lys I turn up will be adverbs. I examine each -ly word in the whole manuscript, all 342 of them, checking whether it justifies itself or whether that sentence can be written better.
Why do this? Adverbs can easily sap one’s prose of vitality. It is all too easy to sprinkle your writing with suddenlys, quicklys, smilinglys, and so on. Removing many of these adverbs will make your prose read stronger. Sometimes, you need the meaning of the adverb, but there is a better way to provide it: for example, by choosing a more precise verb. Instead of “He ran quickly to the scene of the fire,” you can write “He raced to the scene of the fire.”
Now, here’s the tricky part: There are adverbs that are necessary and justified. Identifying those, picking them out from the disposable ones, is why we writers are paid, as you know, fabulous sums of money.
Having thrown out every ill-advised -ly adverb in the whole manuscript, I go back to Page One. Now, I insert “ing” into the Find box. As with “ly,” there are innocent words that happen to include “ing,” like “spring” or “harbinger.” But most words that end -ing are gerunds (derivative nouns made from verbs), present participles (derivative adjectives made from verbs), or present progressive verbs (“I’m singin’ in the rain”). Many of these -ing words are accomplices in the mugging of otherwise healthy prose. Once again, I interrogate each one I find, asking, “Are you really necessary? Or can I say this better without you?” Each one, that is, in the whole manuscript, naturally.
Back to Page One to look for ands. Then ors. Then buts. Some are indispensable, but a lot of those conjunctions just force two sentences together that ought to stand alone. Each conjunction must justify itself, OR ELSE.
Next, I scan for “is.” Often, that little linking verb is just a way to change colorful action into pallid assertion. Likewise for all its irregular variants—was, are, were, etc. Each one, in the whole manuscript, must be tracked down and made to answer for itself. I show them no mercy.
Oh, and then sensory words like “saw,” “heard,” “felt,” “tasted,” “knew.”
“What’s wrong with those?” you ask. When positioned to act as filters, they remove the reader from direct immersion in the scene. Compare:
Sam Spade smelled dead fish as he stepped on to the wharf.
OR,
The harbor reeked of rotting cod.
The first is a third-person report of the character’s sensory intake. The second actually delivers the smell, from the character’s perspective. Either approach, in a given context, might be the right one. Your job is to know which one it is, in this particular context. That’s why we authors, of course, achieve fame and glory. You must make this choice for each example of sensory words, in the whole manuscript.
There other kinds of words and expressions I search for, throughout the whole manuscript, in this way. I won’t continue to bore you with them. But I must bore myself with them, because detailed attention to—well, the details—helps make a manuscript great.
The Second Part
Here’s a kind of reward: Having ferreted out all those little word choices and whipped them into shape, I get to do the fun part.
Back to Page One. But now, instead of searching for single words or phrases, I read my book, as a unified whole, from start to finish, for the first time. Now, I feel for the flow of language, the logic of scenes and descriptions, the power of syntax, the credibility of motives, the rhythm of rising and falling tension and conflict. I try to take it all in and improve it as I go along.
After this final pass of revision, maybe, just maybe the book is ready to show to my publisher.
That’s the fun part. Just in itself, it takes a lot of time. But if I do it right, it adds to my riches and fame.
Why Burden You With All This?
At the very least, Your New Favorite Writer finally got this off his chest.
Now, Dear Reader, you have some idea why it takes so long to write a book.
So, when it finally goes to print, please buy a copy. Read it, love it, review it, and sell it incessantly to all your friends. Help me become rich and famous.
Satchel Paige. Bowman Bubble Gum card, 1949. Public Domain.
“Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.”—Satchel Paige’s Rule #6.
#
A few weeks ago, I had a sudden loss in stamina. Suddenly, I was huffing and puffing on the tennis court. I walked my dog around the block and had to rest half an hour afterward. I had to mow my lawn in three separate installments over the course of two days. One drink after dinner knocked me out.
Something was drastically wrong.
“You’re getting older, you know,” said my wife.
“I’d have it checked out, if I were you,” said my daughter.
Out of an abundance of self-solicitude, I went to see my doctor. I explained it all to him.
“It’s not like chronic fatigue syndrome or anything like that, Doc,” I said. “I mean, I don’t feel exhausted all the time. I just get worn out easily whenever I exert myself.”
My doctor, a nice young man who knows far more than anybody half my age ought to know, frowned and pulled on his lip.
He had me get me up on his table, and he listened to my heart and lungs, thumped my back, squeezed my calves.
Then he checked my chart on his computer. “You’ve had blood tests recently, and everything looks okay. I’ll order a test today just to rule out thyroid issues or anemia. But . . . .”
He stared searchingly into his computer screen while he tapped on the keyboard. “You were a smoker, weren’t you?”
“Yes,” I said. “I quit forty-five years ago.”
“I’m glad you did,” he said.
“Me too.”
“But you were never a . . . heavy smoker?”
“I was a heavy smoker. Two to four packs a day for about fifteen years.”
He scowled into the computer. “Well, I’m just thinking, if there was some lung damage and you’re having shortness of breath—”
“You’re thinking COPD?”
He nodded. “Have you ever used an inhaler?”
I shook my head no.
“I could give you one, for daily use, not for rescue. It would let you get more oxygen.”
“Hmm.”
“We should do a pulmonary function test first. It’s the gold standard, for diagnosing COPD.”
So we scheduled a pulmonary function test.
#
I must say I was relieved. Now I had a definite plan. COPD made a lot of sense. My mom had it. My dad may have had it, undiagnosed.
I haven’t smoked in almost fifty years, and I’ve never had any trouble breathing. But if all those cigarettes inhaled in a misspent youth actually caused permanent damage to my lungs, that could be just catching up with me now.
I did not like the idea. But it did fit with the increasing shortness of breath I now feel when I do things.
An inhaler might be just the ticket. Maybe it would help me regain a bit of élan.
#
“O new Favorite Writer,” I hear you cry, “say it ain’t so! How could you do such a thing to yourself? Why would a person suck in all that polluted air voluntarily, and pay Big Tobacco thousands of dollars for the privilege? Why did you do something so DUMB?”
Well, I was dumb when I was young, Dear Reader. It took me hundreds of years to get to be the wise guy I am now.
By the way, if you were not born soon enough to have lived in the middle of the last century, you wouldn’t believe what things were like back then.
Everybody smoked. Well, almost everbody.
The meeting must have been well-attended. Photo by Kjetil Ree, licensed under CC-BY-SA-3.0
More than half of adult men smoked, and almost a third of women. There was no Clean Indoor Air Act. Everywhere you went, the atmosphere was stale and blue. Even if you were one of those who didn’t smoke, you could get cancer just walking through a crowded restaurant.
Oh, yes! Everybody smoked in restaurants. Some people took a break in mid-meal to light up a cigarette. They couldn’t put it off till after dessert. There were ashtrays on the tables.
Streets and sidewalks were littered with cigarette butts. People would simply drop them on the pavement and crushed them out under the sole of their shoe. You wouldn’t want to start a fire.
My mom and dad both smoked. I remember being inside a closed car on a winter day, when I was six or eight years old, both of them smoking cigarettes. I complained loudly that I couldn’t breathe. They told me to be quiet.
How could I be a reliable witness to my suffering? I was just a kid, what did I know? Children should be seen and not heard. That’s the attitude many adults had toward children, even children they loved, back in the good old days.
My parents did not want me and my sister to smoke. “Do as we say,” they said, “not as we do.” They tried to quit the habit many times, unsuccessfully until they were much older.
When I went off to college, most of my classmates smoked. Somehow, it seemed to us the adult thing to do. All those famous intellectuals and movie stars smoked. W.H. Auden didn’t get all those wrinkles from existential doubt.
What about Jean-Paul Sartre? What about Beckett?
What about Edward R. Murrow?
Murrow, screenshot from a 1961 TV documentary. Public Domain.
Humphrey Bogart and Agnes Moorehead in Dark Passage, 1947. Public Domain.
Dylan Thomas lighting up in 1937. Photo by Nora Summer. Public Domain.
As college men and women, we considered ordinary cigarettes like Camels or Luckies or Pall Mall or Chesterfields . . . plebeian. French intellectuals, like French cab drivers, smoked Gauloises. In the college bookstore, we could buy English Ovals or Benson & Hedges. You know, really distinguished smokes.
Anyone who was ever in the military can tell you that when your drill sergeant marched your platoon or flight to someplace where you had to stand around and wait for a while, he would say, “At ease! . . . Smoke ’em if you’ve got ’em.” Or just the laconic, “Light ’em up.” At least we were expected to police our butts. Military streets were not littered like civilian ones.
I smoked heavily most of the years from age eighteen until my late thirties.
#
“With all that incentive to smoke, O New Favorite Writer, how did you ever quit?”
The short answer is that, after many failed attempts, I attended a single smokers’ hypnosis session. The post-hypnotic suggestion I was given seems to have worked.
But there is another factor, which I would be remiss not to mention: Society started leaning the other way. Instead of facilitating cigarette use at every turn, Society—that indefinable beast—started to discourage smoking.
Of course there were the standard nonprofits—the Heart Association, the American Cancer Society, the Tuberculosis Association, et cetera—sponsoring anti-smoking radio and TV spots. But even more potent, the government weighed in. With a whole succession of measures—a broadcast advertising ban, cigarette package warning labels, state-sponsored clean indoor air acts, and sharp increases in federal and state tobacco taxes, they changed the normal expectation from smoking to nonsmoking over the course of a few decades.
Simply put: At the time I quit smoking, in the 1980s, it was easier than it had ever been in my lifetime to be a non-smoker. And the downside of smoking—the foul air, the bad breath, the traces of ash and tar almost everywhere—were so much more apparent when contrasted with the increasing number of smoke-free islands that were gradually created.
My political instincts are conservative. I tend to distrust government and look askance at their motives. I don’t want the people who are supposed to guarantee our freedom to intrude on it instead. But one would have to be a fool not to acknowledge the enormous benefits we have all derived as a result of government action to make smoking unattractive.
My daughter has never smoked. Neither have my grandchildren. Thank you, God.
Those public environmental actions, in addition to the more general Clean Air and Clean Water acts, have given us all a much cleaner environment. Hats off to the government for these accomplishments.
#
Spirometry, NIH drawing. Public Domain.
So, I went and took my pulmonary function test at Meriter Hospital. It consisted of putting my mouth on a tube and alternately sucking air in and then forcibly expelling it. This was all done in a glass booth, with the column of air mysteriously linked to electronic sensors which read the results into a computer program.
I got the results on MyChart within a few hours: Normal lung function. No problems. No COPD.
That’s good news, Dear Reader. Great news, in fact. Despite my years of smoking, I seem to have gotten off scot-free.
That should make me happy. But I am crestfallen.
I have no use for an inhaler now. But I still get short of breath and tire much more easily than only a few months ago.
It was a winding watercourse, an evil stream, a creek, but we called it a crick. Like the wryness that seized your spine after you slept the wrong way—“I had a crick in my neck the whole dadgum day”—only in this usage, it denoted a minor flow of water.
The Stink Crick flowed through a wasteland we called The Bottoms, a ragged jungle between the bluffs of Streator, Illinois, and the Vermilion River some eighty feet below. The crick sent a sulfurous odor through the whole Bottoms, that wild gnarly world through which we roved in spring, summer, fall, and winter.
We never supposed that The Bottoms belonged to anyone in particular, as real estate; it was our playground as if we owned it ourselves. It was like the land the boys traversed in Stephen King’s novella The Body, later made into the film Stand By Me. Only we never found a dead body—oops, sorry about the spoiler.
The subcutaneous parts of Jackie Perisho’s lower leg were revealed, however—and you’ve got to admit that’s something.
In those days, I thought the Stink Crick’s bad smell came from the sewage of cheap houses along the southern reach of its meander, but now I doubt that was the cause. I am latterly inclined to believe the all-pervasive smell was the mere outgassing of dissolved hydrogen sulfide from cold water springs in the surrounding bluffs. At least, I hope so.
The smell did not balk us one bit. We scouted the Stink Crick’s basin, ran up and down its banks, along trails faint and broad, at the very edge of the crick, and up over hillocks, through thickets of sumac, wild raspberry, and nondescript green creepy foliage. The lower parts of The Bottoms were choked with rotting trees and hanging, ropy vines.
But we did not fear; we were masters of the jungle, or at least determined to be so. Against the surrounding spookiness we built forts: Indefensible, symbolic palisades of sticks and woven weeds, held in place by twists of discarded baling-wire dumped by some nameless benefactor beside the old shale road that ran down the middle of The Bottoms.
The shale road ran down from the corner of River Avenue and Court Street, through The Bottoms, crossed the Stink Crick on a small bridge, and ran out of the jungle on to a flat plain, which held an old brickyard to the south and a cornfield to the north.
My best pal, Jon Anders, and I, in company with a few friends from LaSalle Street, thought it would be a good idea to explore that cornfield one day, under a hot August sun. We’d gotten about halfway through it when a deep bellow greeted us. “You goddam kids! Get outta that corn right now! I’m comin’ after ya! I’ll get the cops on ya! I’ll tell your mas and pas!”
We ran like the wind all the way back to the Stink Crick and didn’t stop till we got safely on the other side, breathless. It is stored in my memory as an escape in the dark night, with the angry farmer firing several shotgun blasts, narrowly missing our heads. But in reality it was daylight, no firearms were discharged, and we scampered like panicked field mice. The man probably meant us no harm but simply wanted to protect his hard-won crop from damage by heedless children.
I only mention this incident to show you what stout-hearted, Homeric souls we were, and what adventures we therefore had.
If you didn’t go to The Bottoms via River Avenue and the old shale road, you could get there by simply walking down the hill from our backyard. The hill was long and steep, perfect for sledding, half of it bare and half wooded.
You could ride a sled down the bare side of the hill, of course. But what fun was that, compared with riding the Snake Path—a twisting, tortuous track that threaded through the thicket of trees on the wooded side of the hill? We did this on runner sleds, Gentle Reader—Flexible Flyers and American Flyers—and we made them fly!
You laid yourself down on a slim wooden deck, feet hanging off the back end, body kept six inches off the ground by twin steel runners. Those parallel runners gave a fatal directionality to your swift descent. To disrupt that straight-line plunge, in case there was a tree looming—of which there were many on the Snake Path—you yanked hard on the left or right end of the wooden steering bar while planting a galoshed toe to serve as a pivot point.
Once you learned the six or seven hairpin turns on the Snake Path, you could reach the bottom at a pretty good speed. I don’t know what speed exactly, but fast enough to lift you and the sled into the air from the ramp-like hump of earth at the bottom of the path. You flew eight or ten feet, landed with a THUMP!, and if at that moment you yanked once more, sharply to the right, you could coast down the ice-coated shale road all the way to the little bridge.
It’s too bad there was no medal or ribbon given for this feat, for we all earned it many times over, with multiple oak leaf clusters.
Oak leaf clusters.
That bridge, in fairer weather, became the scene of a more sinister moment when Jon Anders and I happened on a couple of local bullies, Paul Reynolds and Tom McCann. They were huddled by the side of the bridge, smoking cigarettes. We probably said something to them about that, like “You shouldn’t be smoking.” We were goody-goodies, and Boy Scouts to boot.
It must have been Jon who shot off his mouth, because he was the one Paul and Tom started shoving around. They said things like, “Who you gonna tell?” and “Mind your own business.” It got tense for a few moments. I could tell Jon wanted to throw a punch, but he held himself in check. The two bullies were each as big as Jon was, but I was a lot smaller, being two years younger. I reckon he didn’t like the odds in that dust-up. Eventually they went away, and we went on about our adventures.
It seemed like any time we got near that bridge, or crossed the crick, trouble found us.
And not just us. The Bottoms and the Stink Crick had it in for girls, too.
One day I was by myself in a tree halfway down the big hill, practicing how to walk out on a long limb, bending it down and jumping off at the last minute—an essential skill for swashbucklers in those parts. I had nearly reached the end of the branch when Cheryl Marvin came charging up the hill, hollering “Get help! Jackie fell and tore her leg open. It’s real bad.”
“Huh?” I said. “How bad?”
“It’s all open. You can see inside her leg and everything.” Cheryl stopped to huff and puff.
“Where is she?”
“Down by the crick!” Huff, puff. “Hurry, run home and call somebody for help.”
I sprang into action. I jumped off the branch and ran down the hill to find Jackie Perisho and see what Cheryl meant by “her whole leg is open and you can see inside.”
When I got there, Jackie was lying on the ground, on the far side of the crick, looking embarrassed. Maybe even mortified, though I didn’t know that word yet.
“Hi,” I said. “What happened?”
“I fell,” she said. “Caught my leg on a stick, and here I am.”
“Yeah,” I acknowledged.
I mean, yes: there she was, all right.
“Looks pretty bad.” I had never seen living calf muscles inside a person’s leg before. “Maybe you should just lay still until help comes. Cheryl went to get some.”
“I know,” Jackie said.
We continued to converse in like manner for several minutes until the fire department’s first-aid squad and a flock of concerned parents showed up. The first-aiders closed the big flap of flesh over the exposed meat of the leg and wrapped it tight in gauze, then put her on a stretcher and took her away.
I never did mention to anyone the fact that by Cheryl’s plan I was supposed to go for help instead of running down to the crick and comforting the victim while Cheryl, out of breath, was left to trudge up the hill and find a responsible adult. I doubt anybody but Cheryl and I ever knew that. And she never brought it up afterwards, perhaps because she did not expect anything better of me anyhow.
Jackie, by the way, recovered. We never had major tragedies in The Bottoms. Only close calls.
One bright summer day some of our relations came visiting from out of town. I took my Aunt Linda, who is about three years older than I, exploring in The Bottoms. I mean, when you have an outstanding local attraction, you naturally want to show it off.
I took her around and showed her all the forts we had built, and the places where the Court Street Gang had built forts that we had torn down for them. And a lot of other neat stuff besides. On our way back, I took a shortcut—a big old log over the Stink Crick, not far from where Jackie had fallen down and opened up her leg.
I scampered across the log as I always did, but I suppose there was some slippery moss or something of the sort on the upper side of the log. Aunt Linda fell in.
It was not life-threatening, but it was gross. Right at that spot there was a little bend where the water eddied and collected in a stagnant pool, about chest deep on Aunt Linda, that was full of all sorts of slimy, stinky, disgusting blackish substances. Smelly, too.
I may possibly have laughed, because she was quite a sight. But she didn’t think it was funny.
I pulled her out and led her up the hill to our house. We made a beeline for the driveway, where our green garden hose was hooked to the side of the house. I turned it on and hosed her down. Though she was upset to be covered in filthy, disgusting slime, being renched down in ice-cold water did not brighten her outlook any, that I could tell.
In the seven intervening decades she has forgiven me. I think.
I could tell you other adventures that happened in The Bottoms, along the banks of the Stink Crick. But you get the idea.
I pulled together some boyhood memories of the Stink Creek, and sandlot baseball and other such things, in my middle-grade coming-of-age novel Izzy Strikes Gold! I had to rearrange reality in order to make a work of fiction—in which the whole is supposed to add up to more than the sum of its parts—but nevertheless, it’s pretty true to life.
All put together, I don’t suppose my childhood doings amounted to a hill of beans. The only thing to commend them is: this is just the kind of stuff life is actually made of, especially when you are young. Or at least, it used to be.
I do wonder if kids today have places like The Bottoms and the Stink Crick, places that give full scope for their curious, questing selves. I suppose some do have them. But a lot of kids today could never have pointless-yet-formative exploits such as Jon and I and our friends had. Many kids, even my own grandchildren, have all their time programmed and every experience curated to remove risk and add enrichment.
We never got enriched and we were constantly in peril. Not because our parents didn’t care about us, but they were just so busy doing important grown-up stuff that they assumed we could keep ourselves entertained.
From having revisited the terrain in recent years, I can tell you that sledding hill is now only half as long and half as steep, and most of the trees are gone. The Bottoms and the Stink Crick, bulldozed and fenced off by a private contractor, are nowhere to be seen.
They persist in my mind, and perhaps a few other old folk’s minds, for a few more years into the future. Then they’ll just dry up and blow away. As if they were never there.
But it was a great place to be a kid. I pray future generations will find enchantments of like dimension.
In the mid-twentieth century, Ten Chimneys was the home of America’s foremost theater couple, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. A charitable foundation has preserved it, just as it was in that heady era. In case you’d like to visit.
But don’t just drop in, as Noël Coward might have done. These days, you need to schedule a tour.
“Hang on a sec, O New Favorite Writer. What did you say this was? A lunch place with a fountain?” No, no, O Gracious Reader: Alfred LUNT and Lynn FONTANNE. You know, “the Lunts.” As in . . . well . . . Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. If you don’t know the names, it’s because you were born fifty years too late, that’s all.
The Badger State has spawned or attracted much entertainment royalty, that’s for sure. The Ringling Brothers, circus entrepreneurs of Baraboo. The Ameche brothers, actors Don and Jim, of Kenosha. Erik Weisz of Appleton, who became escape artist Harry Houdini. The great guitarist/inventor Les Paul of Waukesha. And the late comedian Chris Farley of Madison.
A 1923 publicity photo of Lunt. Public Domain.
But none could outshine the luster of the Lunts, Alfred and Lynn, of Genessee Station.
Alfred Lunt, Jr., was born in 1892, the son of a Milwaukee timber baron. The senior Lunt died when young Alfred was two, leaving him to be raised by his eccentric spendthrift mother and her second husband, a physician. The family lived in the small village of Genessee Depot when Alfred was in his teens, before moving for three years to a Swedish colony in Finland. Later, after returning to Wisconsin, he launched an acting career that took him to New York. About the same time, he came into an inheritance from his father and used it to puchase land on the edge of Genessee Station, where he designed and built a small but stylish house.
Lynn Fontanne, photographed by Carl Van Vechten in 1932. Public Domain.
Meanwhile, Lynn Fontanne, an English actress, had come to America in 1918 to join Laurette Taylor’s acting company in New York. As successful young actors on the rise, Lunt and Fontanne were bound to meet. When they did, they fell in love. The two were married in 1922.
As top-shelf actors, they performed in plays from autumn through spring but had some time off in the summer. When Alfred and Lynn came “home” to summer in Genessee Depot, where he had installed his widowed mother and his step-siblings in the little house, the place became cramped. Besides practical space limitations, friction was inevitable between the new bride and her willful, imperious mother-in-law. So Alfred and Lynn set to work expanding a chicken coop into a charming cottage big enough for them to inhabit in the summer months.
The Cottage at Ten Chimneys, expanded from a chicken coop. Photo by James Steakley, licensed under CC-BY-SA-3.0.
In later years, they added a log-built Swedish-style “studio,” which became a favored rehearsal space for them and their actor friends. Eventually, they greatly expanded the main house, moved back into it, and moved Alfred’s mother into the cottage. Altogether, the three buildings—main house, cottage, and studio—had ten chimneys. That will give you a clue how they named the property. They also dug a small, L-shaped swimming pool complete with poolhouse, and they had a few other practical buildings.
The place has been described as a “gentleman’s farm.” They did have chickens, and for a while during the Second World War they got around rationing by having their own cow. But nobody would ever describe Ten Chimneys as a working farm.
It was a sanctuary—a refuge for hard-working creative artists needing to recharge their batteries after a brutal working season. Upon arrival in early summer, Lynn would sit on the terrace for days on end, just gazing into the woods and feeding snacks to her three dachshunds.
Noël Coward in 1925. Public Domain.
Helen Hayes in 1948. Public Domain.
Many friends from among the theatrical and literary glitterati appreciated the opportunity as well. In the days before interstate highways and jet air travel, famous New Yorkers would arrive in Milwaukee by train or plane and be driven the thirty miles, mostly on gravel roads, to spend a few days, or more, relaxing with the Lunts in their bucolic retreat. In the rarefied circles they traveled in, you knew you had “arrived” if you received an invitation to Ten Chimneys.
Alexander Woollcott, photographed by Carl Van Vechten in 1939. Public Domain.
Actor and playwright Noël Coward, actress Helen Hayes, critic Alexander Woollcott—the real-life model for the irascible Sheridan Whiteside in Kaufman and Hart’s 1939 play The Man Who Came to Dinner—and younger actors such as Carol Channing, Montgomery Clift, Dick Van Patten, and Laurence Olivier all visited whenever they could.
The hospitality was first-rate. Lynn was a demon seamstress, often whipping up dresses and other items for friends on the spur of the moment. Alfred had a flair for cooking and a large kitchen in which to exercise it. Think of the dinner-table conversation!
Lunt and Fontanne in 1950. Public Domain.
To visit Ten Chimneys is to step back into an era of glamor and a level of wealth and comfort, despite Depression and War, that most of us can hardly imagine. Lunt, besides cooking, was obsessive about the design and décor of the estate, painting many of the distinctive murals and embellishments himself. He also had the help of prominent scenic and costume designer Clagett Wilson. And wherever in the world he went, he collected interesting and classic bits of furniture, and other conversation pieces, which were then designed into the ongoing project which was the house.
Ten Chimneys is not just an old house tour. Unlike most such tours, in houses furnished with pieces “typical of the era” or “such as [the principals] would have used,” restored to appear “much as it would have looked”—at Ten Chimneys, everything is original and unchanged. About all they have done is dusted, polished, and refreshed.
After the widowed Lynn Fontanne died in 1983, her caretaker, brother-in-law George Bugbee, simply shut up the house. Thirteen years later, Madison-area restaurateur Joseph W. Garton purchased the estate and launched the Ten Chimneys Foundation to restore it, open it to the public, and operate it as “a world-class museum and national resource for theater and arts education.” It opened to the public on May 26, 2003, which would have been the Lunts’ eighty-first wedding anniversary.
In addition to public tours, the estate is opened for a week to about ten journeyman actors from America’s regional theaters, who get what amounts to an intensive tutorial from a first-magnitude star such as Alan Alda, Joel Grey, or Marsha Mason. This year’s special guest instructor is Phylicia Rashad.
So in many ways, Ten Chimneys perpetuates the cultural legacy of the Lunts. We visited last week and found it a treat.
By the way, the Cornerstone Restaurant is a good place for a spot of lunch after your morning tour or before your afternoon tour. Tell them Your New Favorite Writer sent you.
Last week in this space I extolled friends, specifically those with whom I share a national church-linked existence. They are wonderful people. I place a high value on their friendship.
But, returning from the church convention in Massachusetts, I came back to my first friend: Teddy.
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Teddy is a bear, seeing his eighty-first summer. He gazes from the dresser top as I do my daily exercises. His chubby legs are splayed just right to support his body, his stubby arms akimbo, black eyes glittering, tongue vacant.
He stares at me. I know I must complete all my twists and turns and arm swings, because I’d hate to let Teddy down.
He was my first friend; I do not remember a time before Teddy. We’ve been together more than fourscore years.
I don’t know what he looked like when I first met him. In my first memories, he was already worn and bedraggled. Mom told me that he once had a flapping tongue made of red felt. I must have torn it off somehow, for he now sports only a small red dot where his mouth should be. Without a real tongue, how can he speak?
Sphinx-like, he looks on from the top of the dresser. Silence is his superpower.
What he lacks in loquacity, Ted makes up in loyalty—a key virtue in a friend. Over the past eighty years, I’ve done many stupid things, manifested many weaknesses, harbored petty grudges and neurotic insecurities. Teddy has seen it all. It would be only natural if he held me in low esteem. But, like the best of friends, he never says a word.
Teddy seems content to have watched my evolution from a brash and conflicted child to a wise, if decrepit, old man. He, on the other hand, never changes.
One day I will shuffle off to my next stop on the way to Eternity. I’ll leave behind friends and lovers, child and grandchildren . . .
. . . and Teddy, the only one who has seen it all.
by Julie Holmes, Rob Jung, Brian Lutterman, Chris Norbury, and John Baird Rogers
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This collaboration knocks the ball out of the park, in my humble opinion. It’s the kind of good, clean fun that will hold your attention on the beach, at a cabin in the woods, or in bed before you turn out the lights.
I first heard of The Kill Code Collective when my friend Chris Norbury announced that he and four colleagues from the Minnesota-based Midwest Mystery Works had begun a joint challenge in which their favored sleuths combine to solve a thrilling medical mystery. The work proceeded apace and was published just a month or two ago.
The plot starts fast with a death among passengers getting off a plane in Minneapolis. Aircraft mechanic Sierra Bauer and her partner, police detective Quinn Moore, try to solve the puzzle of what seems an unlikely heart attack. Half a dozen diverse characters are drawn into the mystery: international traveler Gina Apate, a former operative for the Greek intelligence service; medical device company exec Stephen Hartsburg; jazz musician Matt Lanier; computer whiz Weezy Napolitani; investigative lawyer Pen Wilkinson; and the enigmatic international fixer Henri Harte.
Each character is intriguing in his or her own right. Together, like the proverbial blind men describing an elephant, they stumble and fumble until they begin sharing information. It makes for an exciting and spellbinding ride.
The work of five different authors comes together seamlessly to make a book that’s hard to put down.
What do you do when you’re busy inserting a SEAL team on a rescue mission and your octocopter gunship is suddenly zizzed to bits by an advanced directed energy weapon, leaving you a disassembled person mingled with a pile of twisted metal?
If you’re Navy Lieutenant Jazmin Hassani, you get a batch of bionic body parts and a two-step promotion to emerge as Commander Hassani, an aircraft accident investigator. Your arms, legs, and eyeballs can now do amazing new things, but the price you pay is constantly living on a razor edge of post-traumatic anxiety.
Don’t worry, Dear Reader, I haven’t spoiled a thing. All this comes within the first ten pages; it’s just setup. Electromagnetic Assault offers 339 more pages of nonstop action and military conflict, broken only by quick explanations of next year’s technology, and punctuated by every whiz-bang in the newly-invented arsenal of directed energy weapons.
Yes, there is a human story behind Commander Jazmin Hassani. She has a mother, a father, a raffish love interest, and other close connections. But it’s the astounding hardware, software, and kinetic battle scenes that provide sizzle for this elegant military techno-thriller.
Bruce Landay, the author, is a retired Air Force officer and writes a fascinating “Future Trends and Science Fiction” newsletter on Substack. I’m happy to say Bruce is a friend of mine. He was, in fact, the first writer I met at the 2016 UW Writers’ Institute when we were both neophytes in the novel-writing business—I in historical fiction and he in science fiction.
We walked down State Street to find a place for dinner, and Bruce regaled me with his work-in-progress, a tale in which the hero was busy solving problems in two different time streams, to the best of my recollection. Somewhere in the intervening years, the time travel was lost, and Bruce’s debut novel became one of the best-written techno-thrillers you’re likely to read.
In case you don’t know the genre, a techno-thriller is a form of speculative fiction with a thriller-style plot structure, a near-future setting, and a strong focus on technical details, which often have to do with espionage, geo-politics, and military systems.
If you like techno-thrillers, this will be right up your alley. If you’re new to techno-thrillers, read this one: you may get hooked.
By the end of Bruce’s book, you will have explored a world of the not-so-distant future in which global power relationships are radically altered and frightening new weapons systems decide the fate of nations and individuals.
It’s a bit spooky, Gentle Reader—but it’s worth thinking about.
