Do you recall my blessing you, a couple of weeks ago, with about 1,300 words on podcasting and its relevance to the practice of struggling authorship?
Tom Bodett. I don’t think he looks like he sounds. What do you think? Image from Brattleboro Community TV, licensed under CC BY 3.0.
Maybe not enough was said.
In that post I mentioned that podcasters are the Arthur Godfreys of today. I could have gone on to call them latter-day Tom Bodetts, as well. But for once, I exercised restraint. (Please count that in my favor, come the Final Tabulation.)
Ben Patterson, Motel 6 ad for Roswell, New Mexico. Fair use.
You may or may not know Tom Bodett as the guy from Motel 6 who says “we’ll leave the light on for ya.” The motel chain’s ad agency hired him because somebody heard his voice on NPR and thought he sounded like a guy who would stay at Motel 6. You know, a regular joe.
First edition cover of The Body Snatchers, illustrated by John McDermott. Fair use.
But I digress. What I was going to say is that podcasting makes me think of pod people, as in, you know, Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Actually, the locus classicus of the species was just The Body Snatchers, a 1955 book by Jack Finney (one of Your New Favorite Writer’s favorite writers, by the way). When they made it into a movie in 1956, they added “Invasion of.”
Kevin McCarthy prods a pod in the 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Fair use.
Finney’s book was a sweet little story of spores or seeds or something that drift in from outer space, ripen into duplicate human beings inside large pods, and systematically replace the actual people they have emulated. Pretty soon the protagonist catches on, and then it’s a race to prevent all of Mill Valley, California, being replaced by a colony of soulless avatars. Once the premise is developed, Finney pretty much leaves off any pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo and just tells the thrills and spills of the human resistance movement fighting off the invaders. The book has been criticized for its want of Heinleinian (Asimovian? Clarkeian?) authenticity, but once Jack Finney starts spinning a yarn, it’s hard not to get tangled in its web . . . or pod, or whatever.
Which brought to mind the fact that podcasting is one of those arcane disciplines that rely on the development of modern, computer-based technology in order to have any basis at all. That’s only one of the things that makes it daunting to yours truly—a Twenty-first Century Man with the technical know-how of the Tooth Fairy.
I am firmly convinced, for example, that when my telephone dims its screen to 90 percent darkness without my commanding it to do so, it is exercising a purblind, autonomous, malicious will of its own.
A Rube Goldberg machine: “Professor Butts and the Self-Operating Napkin (1931). Soup spoon (A) is raised to mouth, pulling string (B) and thereby jerking ladle (C), which throws cracker (D) past toucan (E). Toucan jumps after cracker and perch (F) tilts, upsetting seeds (G) into pail (H). Extra weight in pail pulls cord (I), which opens and ignites lighter (J), setting off skyrocket (K), which causes sickle (L) to cut string (M), allowing pendulum with attached napkin to swing back and forth, thereby wiping chin.” Public Domain.
And yet, Jack Finney stands as a shining example. A man with only a general liberal arts background, and some experience in the advertising business, he made a good living—as well as contributing to American mid-century culture—by writing stories that often fell under the science fiction rubric. He pulled it off by never letting pesky scientific details get in the way of a good story. His Time and Again stands as one of the great time-travel novels despite its resolute refusal to offer even a Rube Goldberg-style explanation of how time travel was supposed to have worked. He just massaged his protagonist’s psyche until he found himself in the 1890s.
Some chutzpah.
This is enough to give a techno-klutz renewed hope. If Jack Finney can do science fiction, surely Larry F. Sommers can wiggle cyberspace enough to snag a few guest shots on literary podcasts.
Stay tuned for further developments, but don’t stop the presses. Yet.
Yes, you have surmised correctly, Dear Reader. Your New Favorite Writer is almost a day late on his regular post to this blog site. The lame excuse is: My new smart phone came.
I have spent the past twenty-four hours alternately scratching my head and poking the darned thing’s face with my finger.
I took my friend Rob’s advice and switched carriers. So now my monthly rate has only increased to fourteen dollars. That’s all right.
I bought a low-end smart phone outright for $119.95.
Just getting it set up and working was a bit of a trial. I honestly don’t think I could have done it by myself, without my smart-enabled wife’s extra smart help.
Excuse me, please, Gentle Reader. I’ve got to go figure out how to send a text.
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
Grandpa Sommers was the first person I knew who died. I was eleven. Less than a year later, Grandpa LaFollette would die. Not long after, my friend Norbert—a fellow Boy Scout, luminous in his wiseguyness—would be snuffed out while unwisely trying to halt a runaway bulldozer in his father’s construction yard.
Since that time, many other people I knew have passed into Eternity. Now that I am old, it has become a trend.
Grandpa, 1944
But the first to depart was my father’s father. When we got the phone call, I threw myself down on our couch and tried to cry. But I had no tears for Grandpa. I had always feared him. Now he was gone; it was hard to see a downside.
I was ever a timid child; Grandpa was no monster. But he had a cross-grained, profane, pugnacious personality. “Hey, you goddam kids, cut that out!” His continual outbursts were mere blips on the scale of human conflict, but they terrified me. Grandpa was also a genuine eccentric who lived on an exalted plane that no ordinary man could grasp.
It is more than sixty years now since Grandpa last walked the earth. Perhaps the time has come to give the old buzzard his due.
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Sommers band cutter
William Peter Sommers was born 26 January, 1884. He grew up in Metamora, Illinois, a German farming community where his father was a Big Cheese—building contractor, implement dealer, owner of the local telephone company, and inventor of a band-cutter for threshing machines. The Sommerses, you see, were not farmers themselves but townsmen and technicians, who drank from the Pierian Spring of science and technology.
Grandpa immersed himself in telegraphy and telephony. As a young man, he worked for his father but even then showed signs of a truculence that may have been genetic; the old man, hence the whole family, had broken with the Roman Catholic Church over a money dispute with the parish priest, whom they saw as a robber baron.
Grandpa at telephone company, early 1900s
William P. Sommers expected to beat the world through natural superiority, by mastering the new field of communications technology. The Metamora Telephone Company, however, was a cramped corporate space. There was not room enough for two egoes such as Will’s and his father’s. Will left the family business in 1907 and went to work for the Chicago and Alton Railroad as a telegrapher.
Millie Marie Gunsten at 18
In 1912 he married Millie Marie Gunsten, a telephone operator from Springfield. They begat children, five in all: Edward, Mabel, Stanley, Lloyd (my father), and Franklin.
In April 1917, the United States declared war on Germany. Telegraphers were nationalized and deployed strategically where the government thought best. Grandpa at age 33 went to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to help move freight shipments across the U.S./Canada border. This may have been his first travel beyond central Illinois. Later that year, he was sent by train to the Pacific Northwest, leaving Illinois on 23 September and arriving in Seattle six days later. Judging by his breathless dispatches home to Millie by postcard—two or three per day—long-distance travel made his blood race.
Grandpa, age 30
He returned to Metamora and continued as a railroad telegrapher until 1927, when he jumped to the Sinclair (Oil) Pipeline Company. It was the same kind of work he had done for the railroad, only now he dispatched flows of oil by telegraph, not carloads of freight and passengers by rail.
He moved his family to Dahinda, tiniest of prairie towns but the location of a pipeline pumping station. They lived there three years before moving to the metropolis of Knoxville, Illinois (population 1,867), which had its own high school. Grandpa drove nine miles from Knoxville to his job in Dahinda every day in his Pierce-Arrow touring car, the one with isinglass curtains. When the Depression made money scarce a couple of years later, he had to sell the Pierce-Arrow; then he walked nine miles each way three or four days a week.
Franklin’s Purple Heart and Distinguished Flying Cross
In 1942, when he was 58, his second son, Stanley, was killed while flying a B-17 mission in the Southwest Pacific. Stanley was a golden boy, bright and handsome, with a captivating smile, a fluent swing clarinet, and a lovely young wife. Less than a year after Stanley’s death, the youngest son, Franklin, was killed in a B-26 over occupied France.
Bear in mind, Gentle Reader: I was not born yet when all this happened. I did not observe how Grandpa took these wartime deaths; nor did it ever occur to anyone in the family to tell me. I do know that people in those days—not just my family, not just Germans, but Americans in general—kept emotions to themselves. When I first became acquainted with Grandpa, after World War II, he was a hard-bitten old man. But he was that, quite likely, even before losing Stanley and Frankie.
Will and Millie Sommers at Frankie’s grave, 1950s
In 1949 he “retired” from the pipeline; that’s the word used in his 1957 newspaper obituary. The word Dad told Mom was “fired.” I remember that very distinctly. I was four years old. When Daddy said Grandpa had been “fired,” my mind’s eye saw him as a blackened cinder. My parents had to persuade me it only meant he had lost his job.
It’s easy now to guess how he got fired: He lipped off to somebody whom he regarded as a moron but who held the power of dismissal. It turned out all right, though. He was 65; no point looking for another job. He devoted himself to his large vegetable garden, probably half an acre; to a couple of long trips he took with his wife, Millie (additional details here, here, and here); and to a whole raft of personal eccentricities and foibles.
The CB&Q railroad ran just behind his house. As an old railroad man, he had a duty to count the cars on every freight train that went by, many of them more than a hundred cars long.
He drank a bottle of Hires Root Beer every day. He had a theory it was a health tonic. And not to waste the drop or two of this elixir remaining at the bottom of the bottle, he refilled the bottle with water and drank it down.
He also advocated eating the royal jelly of bees—not that he could afford to buy it—and the white insides of orange peels. Again, health measures.
He wrote long, typewritten letters to editors and to politicians in Springfield and Washington, favoring them with his definitive views on how to run things.
He bought tiny shares of wildcat oil-drilling ventures in Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado. He had a large U.S. geological map of the region. He could and did—for the benefit anyone in hearing range—pinpoint the location of each of his wells and rattle off incomprehensible data about its production prospects, or at least the plain fact that it was about to “come in a gusher.”
He purchased, for his own use, a Violet Ray Machine. It was a Bakelite handle on an electrical cord, with glass tubes of varying shapes that could be locked into the handle. When he plugged it in, there arose a penetrating hummmm; a gas inside the glass tube glowed bright lavender; and the air smelled of ozone. He would fire this up in a darkened room and move the radiant purple tube across his joints, or sometimes across mine. It was a marvelous device. Cured arthritis and rheumatism. Guaranteed.
Violet Ray Machine.
He took nitroglycerin pills for periodic chest pains and was vastly amused that the most explosive stuff on earth was prescribed as a balm for his heart.
He never bought a car from the Big Three automakers. After he lost the Pierce-Arrow, the next car he bought was a Hudson. After that, in the mid-1950s, he bought a neat little sky blue Studebaker Commander. He would have argued forcefully, to anyone who would listen, that these were better-built products than Fords, Chevrolets, or Chryslers. Really, he was simply contrary.
His one-thousand-one-hundred-eleven weird sayings and doings, in my mother’s view, added up to a strange, disgusting old crank. But he was Dad’s father. What could she do?
On 27 January 1957, the day after his 73rd birthday, he drove the Studebaker to the post office, five miles away. He picked up his mail and drove homeward. Something happened. The car came to rest against the corner of the Steak & Shake Drive-in on East Main Street in Galesburg. Grandpa lay slumped over the wheel, dead.
1953 Studebaker Commander, part of the Studebaker National Museum collection in South Bend, Indiana. Photo by Tysto. Public Domain.
All the world’s royal jelly, orange peel linings, and root beer could not repair his old heart. The world’s first coronary bypass surgery was still three years in the future, and it would be another decade or two before the procedure became common.
Grandma drove the Studebaker until she was no longer able, then it came into our family and I drove it to work most of the summer of 1965. Nice car.
Those crazy oil leases that Mom ridiculed have brought our family a minor yet welcome flow of dollars right up through the present day.
I don’t know what became of the Ultraviolet Ray Machine. I’ll bet if I had it now I could sell it to a rube for a buck two-eighty.
