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Let Us Now Praise Famous Editors

Bombarded by communication we may be, but there is still the possibility for something personal within our over-ripe and festering mass media.

We can watch television — doesn’t matter if it’s traditional network or streaming — and not really have a sense of who’s running the business. 

Same thing goes with traditional news organizations, those things we used to call newspapers that now have little to do with paper. We may read The New York Times, but where do we see the publisher’s personality reflected?

Those big media conglomerates that produce our music and entertainment are as bland as soda crackers — and could well aspire to be that imaginative and crunchy.

But consider the magazine. Good and important magazines still exist and carry forward the DNA of their founders or longtime editors.

Hugh Hefner

Think of Playboy. Its founder. Hugh Hefner, made sure his magazine reflected his interests and tastes. 

When he hopped off to the bunny ranch in the sky, the magazine went into an immediate skid. 

Does it still exist? Does it matter? Let me know, will ya?

In the early 1960s, Helen Gurley Brown took Cosmopolitan, a men’s magazine that had published fishing and hunting stories by Ernest Hemingway, and turned it into the bible of the single working woman. 

It was a brilliant move because it created an ever-renewing demographic. Brown is getting mani-pedis in the sky, but her work lives on.

Helen Gurley Brown

The New Yorker has been blessed with strong editors. Its founder, Harold Ross, liked humor, cartoons and fiction. There was no doubt who ran the place in his lifetime. 

But when Ross died, his No. 1 assistant, William Shawn, became editor and changed the magazine as he served for the next 35 years. 

This is the New Yorker issue that published John Hersey’s masterpiece of reporting, “Hiroshima.”

Shawn’s interests in long-form nonfiction reinvented the magazine. Few venues of any kind will give storytellers the space that Shawn allowed. 

This is a blessing yet also a curse. Some New Yorker writers began writing sentences in the 1980s that have yet to conclude.

Time shuffles on.

Esquire magazine (under Harold Hayes’s editorship) became the defining voice of the 1960s. 

The magazine published so much brilliant stuff in that era that it’s difficult to think of a publication with a better voice for the times. 

Its collection of articles from that decade was titled by Hayes: Smiling Through the Apocalypse. (Has there ever been a better title for anything?)

Harold Hayes

As Hayes was leaving the editor’s chair, along came a rowdy rock’n’roll magazine based in San Francisco that put itself on the cultural map by publishing a full-frontal nude photograph of John Lennon and Yoko Ono. (This exposure of celebrity genitals drew the fans-of-famous-foreskin demographic.)

College dropout Jann Wenner founded Rolling Stone in 1967 and for the next quarter-century, under his tight control, the magazine published things he found interesting. Those things became our interests.

Wenner also liked to put his friends on Rolling Stone’s vaunted cover, which was fabled in song.

As Wenner withdrew to the ski slopes and left running the magazine to others, it began losing its way and discovered its problem was the reverse of what happened at Cosmopolitan. 

Whereas there will always be single working women to read Cosmo, Rolling Stone was faced with a critical problem: its core readership was tied to a generation that was rapidly aging and dying. In the early years, when Wenner was young, so were his readers. He published the magazine for his peers.

Advertisers looked at Rolling Stone as a clear connection to young, affluent buyers.

But then we got old. The magazine had a core interest in popular music. As the subscribers aged, the magazine sometimes tried to push flavor-of-the-month artists at the Classic Rock audience. It was like the old guy showing up at a college kegger wearing a gold medallion in a desperate stab at youth.

Jann Wenner, when Rolling Stone was in San Francisco

For a while, Rolling Stone was the magazine that defined its times. 

I was part of its target demographic from the start. When it would arrive in the post, I used to go into what my then-wife called my “Rolling Stone coma” until I had sucked all of the marrow from all of the worthy articles I found between the covers.

The magazine peaked in the early 1970s, when its roster included David Felton, Grover Lewis, Hunter Thompson, Ben Fong-Torres and Annie Leibovitz, among others.

You’ll notice Leibovitz is the only woman mentioned. The only way a woman could get a job on Rolling Stone‘s editorial staff was to start as a secretary — perhaps another reflection of the founder’s personality. (Leibovitz was the exception. )

Wenner developed so much talent at the magazine, but once the magazine had made it, he sought the big names — Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote and Caroline Kennedy, who acquitted herself in her coverage of Elvis Presley’s funeral. (Her kicker quote was from the Elvis minion who shaved the King’s sideburns one last time before he was planted in the back yard.)

But Rolling Stone’s relevance dried up by the end of the 1970s, around the time it moved from San Francisco to New York.

Tina Brown

The magazine that assumed the mantle of most-likely-to-send-me-into-a-reading-coma came along in the 1980s: Vanity Fair.

The original VF had died before the Second World War, and when it was revived . . . who could tell? It was underwhelming.

The revived magazine committed the worst sin in journalism: it was boring.

Fortunately, it was saved by Tina Brown, the British editor brought over to turn it around, two years after its weak re-launch.

For the subsequent three decades and change, few magazines could compete with Vanity Fair.

Brown left the magazine after eight years to breathe life into its sister publication, The New Yorker, which was staggering along after the departure of Shawn. 

Brown prepared that venerable publication for the 21st Century by making necessary overdue changes. For one thing, she acknowledged the existence of photography. Until she took over in 1992, the magazine had never published a photo with any of its editorial copy.

Graydon Carter

It’s Brown’s successor who deserves the lion’s share of credit for Vanity Fair’s brilliance. He made it into the must-read magazine for a couple of generations.

Graydon Carter recounts his life as a magazine editor in his new memoir When the Going Was Good (Penguin Press, $32).

Journalism is my jam, so naturally his inside baseball stuff is appealing to me.

But I ended up liking the book more for the pleasure of getting to know this guy.

I think this is what I admired the most:

Carter at Spy.

Here is the editor of one of the greatest magazines on the planet. Sure, there are a lot of social obligations and events and dinners and balls. That’s what we expect of the high life, right?

Instead, we find a guy who passes up all of that stuff in favor of a family dinner. He’s home by six every night, and the whole Hee-Haw gang sits down to the table. Everyone talks, everyone learns about what everyone else did all day … you know, wholesome stuff.

Graydon Carter is Ward Cleaver with a better wardrobe. I admire parents who take their job seriously.

He could be hanging out with some boldface names, but prefers family dinners, game nights and fishing in the wilderness with his children.

His tale is a successful story of work-life balance.

Carter was born in Toronto and attended a couple of Canadian universities without graduating. The rigidity of schooling sometimes gets in the way of education, which is something best left to the individual.

He learned on the job, starting with The Canadian Review, which unfortunately went bankrupt.

He moved to New York, worked at Time and Life, co-founded Spy magazine, edited The New York Observer, then took over Vanity Fair in 1992.

Carter belongs in the history books if for no other reason than this: while at Spy, he coined the term “short-fingered vulgarian” to describe President 45-47. What a rush it must be to have a quip remembered so.

Still, this isn’t a book of journalism gossip. It’s an absorbing, superbly-written account of a well-lived life with a lot of accidents and surprises that led to the pot of gold. It could serve as a guidebook on how to be a good parent.

When Carter edited Vanity Fair it was a work of art, essential to life. Each issue was a king’s feast to be devoured.

Since he left — and started the digital-only Air Mail — Vanity Fair is skidding. It’s no longer a must-read.

Magazines are bound to the personality of the editors. They follow a life cycle, like a human being.

Carter has left the building and that great magazine is having a midlife crisis.

For now, read Carter’s book and remember the great times and the great stories.

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Swimming Through the Library

John Cheever came up with an interesting premise for one of his greatest short stories. 

In “The Swimmer,” Cheever’s protagonist, Neddy Merrill, lounges, hungover, poolside at a friend’s home on a Sunday afternoon.

It’s a muted gathering, suburbanites recovering from the night before, questioning the wisdom of drinking so much.

As he sits there, Neddy hatches a plan: he will swim home. 

“The Swimmer” appears in Cheever’s Pulitzer-winning collection. Click on the cover to order.

All of the homes in his neighborhood have pools, so he will follow a chain of them to home.

It’s an odd story that takes a surreal twist and ends in a gut-punch of sorrow and devastation.

If you haven’t read it, you should.  It’s a brilliant piece of work.

Last week, I decided to follow Neddy’s lead, but with my own twist. 

I never learned to swim and few homes in Massachusetts have pools anyway.

But I found myself in my former town for a doctor’s appointment.

When I was done, it was a brilliant summer day and I thought, “I’m going to do a Neddy.”

Instead of driving straight home, I decided I would go home via the libraries in each of the small towns that freckle the South Shore.

Every library has a Friends of the Library book sale. Maybe I’d find some books for sale — books for which I have no more room in my house (but that’s another story).

Here’s some of what I found.

. . . . . . . . 

John O’Hara, The Big Laugh (Random House, $4.95)

Before you get all excited about that bargain price, I should point out that $4.95 was the list price when the book was published — in 1962.

I got this one at the Scituate Library, which has the best second-hand store of all the South Shore libraries.

Click on the cover to order

I’ve read a lot of John O’Hara — a lot. Yet I’d never encountered this novel.  How did I miss it on the “Books by John O’Hara” pages?

O’Hara seems to be largely forgotten today, which is a shame. He’s been credited with sort of inventing the New Yorker short story, and was an early and prolific contributor to that magazine. 

His writing was tight. I’ve read some stories of his that were all dialogue, yet he managed to describe without describing.

He’s one of those writers I encourage students to read. There’s nothing flaccid in his work. Reading him [and James M Cain, Robert B Parker, Michael Connelly and others], I tell my class, is like giving your mind a suppository. You empty your brain of needless words, in the manner of a colon cleanse. 

In addition to his terrific short stories, I’ve read his big novels — Ten North Frederick and From the Terrace — but The Big Laugh was a tremendous surprise. It told a stirring tale over the course of two decades and never did it drag. Turned out to be a quick read, unlike some of his other novels, which went on too long.

It’s the story of a shithead who goes from black sheep of his family to one of the reigning movie stars in the early days of talking films.

Don’t wait for a redemption arc, though the main character does prove himself to be more likable by tale’s end. There are some surprises along the way, and O’Hara keeps the story moving. He was a master at that.

John O’Hara in his natural habitat

Now to folks of the current generation, whatever your moniker may be: you did not invent sex.

Same goes for my generation. We Baby Boomers like to think that various carnal acts were unknown until our arrival and that we invented many non-Euclidean variations on the basic premise. 

So here is a novel written by a man who was there in the 1920s and 1930s when the novel takes place. And the characters fuck like monkeys. There’s a lot of fucking here.

A lot.

I was a little surprised — not that people sportfucked so much back then but that the novel was so frank, being as it was published in 1962. 

That’s either a note of caution or encouragement.

For me, I’m always happy to find a book by a favorite author that I have not read. The presence of so much fucking is like finding a bonus track on an album.

. . . . . . . . 

Ben Mezerich, The Midnight Ride (Grand Central, $29)

This one caught my eye at the Norwell library. 

Ben Mezrich

I knew of Mezerich from his nonfiction books — The Accidental Billionaires and Bringing Down the House, two books I have not read.

But he’d always gotten good reviews and I was curious how he was as a novelist.

Turns out he is deeply entertaining.

This novel takes place in Boston, and those sorts of stories are always of interest to those of us who trudge through that insane city’s streets daily.

The book also focuses on a local mystery — the unsolved theft of priceless artwork from the Isabella Gardner museum decades ago. It brings together a plucky card-counter who makes her living at the gaming tables of the Encore casino, and an ex-con trying to start over.

Click on the cover to order

These protagonists — Hailey Gordon the card counter and Nick Patterson the ex-convict — have an unusual meet-cute: it happens over a dead body in a hotel room.

The Gardner theft is only part of the story. The rest is steeped in Boston’s rich history and, as the title suggests, Paul Revere plays a part. 

It has echoes of The DaVinci Code and National Treasure, but it’s a lot more fun.

Hailey and Nick returned in The Mistress and the Key, which came out last fall. 

Looks like it’ll be back to the library-swim to find that one.

. . . . . . . . 

Mario Puzo, The Fortunate Pilgrim (Random House, $25.23)

I read Puzo’s The Godfather not long after it was published and always considered it kind of trashy, because of one particular narrative thread.

Turns out Francis Ford Coppola felt the same way about that part of the book and it was a reason he initially balked on making a film of Puzo’s book.

We both were repulsed by the subplot that led to a character paying for his girlfriend’s surgery. He had this young woman go under the knife so she would be tightened up — in the non-Archie Bell & the Drells meaning — giving, presumably, greater sexual pleasure to both of them.

Mario Puzo

As I learned more about Puzo’s back story, I’d heard of his first two novels, The Dark Arena and The Fortunate Pilgrim. Both were tagged as “literary fiction” and both were failures.

So he wrote The Godfather strictly to make money. It was a paycheck book, so the trashier the better.

(In the years since, I’ve relaxed more and found The Godfather to be a generally entertaining book and I skip over the surgery scenes.)

I happened across The Fortunate Pilgrim at the library in Hanover and grabbed it immediately. 

I’m not sure I’d say this was literary fiction, but it was a compelling story of New York’s Italian population in the 1920s and 1930s. Putting this story next to Puzo’s own, we can see the elements of autobiography. 

Click on the cover to order

The primary character is Lucia Santa, an emigre from the farms of Italy, who comes to the New World and is deposited into poverty in Manhattan.

She marries, has children, and is left to raise a family herself on the mean streets. It’s a tough, often tragic, life.

Puzo made no secret of the fact that Lucia is based on his mother and that the protagonist of his most famous novel, Vito Corleone, is also based on his mother.

It’s a good and enthralling novel that shows how much American lives have changed in the last century. The violence and the spectre of death look over the shoulder of us all.

This is an entertaining story and becomes a tribute to the immigrants who built America.

But it also has some irritating touches. Puzo has a group of elderly Italian women who sit on the tenement stoop and form sort of a Greek chorus. Puzo calls them crones. One use of “crone” is probably okay. He uses it six or seven times over the course of a couple pages early in the book.

Consider this your crone warning.

. . . . . . . . 

I couldn’t go by the Norwell library without stopping at John Cheever’s grave.

A few years ago, I discovered that his body rests just a few miles from my house, and across the street from The Tinker’s Son, a Irish pub where my youngest son has worked for the last four years. 

Odd, to find one of your literary heroes buried just six feet away from a parking lot serving a convenience store.

Fortunately, Cheever was honored by a local denizen of business who built The Cheever Tavern adjacent to his grave.

I have the feeling he would approve of the place named in his honor. The food and the booze are excellent.

If you’re nearby, visit the place and seek out his grave. Then you can say you were truly (an) over a Cheever.

Back to the swim.

I recently picked up a few more books during my swims– State of Wonder by Ann Patchett and a Pete Townshend novel. I have a lot of good reading ahead.

Come on in; the water is fine.

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The Story of a Song

I sing when I’m alone. I have to; no one wants to hear me.

And the song I sing in the shower, or in the kitchen or while mowing the yard — it’s often this one particular song I choose over the others in my cranial repertoire.

I did not hear the original version first. It came my way thanks to one of my favorite groups, The Byrds.

The Byrds introduced me to lots of things, because the members of the band came from a folk background and weren’t a typical rock’n’roll band.

Thanks to The Byrds, I heard the lovely “John Riley,” a 17th Century English ballad based on The Odyssey.

I first heard the stark and haunting “I Come and Stand at Every Door” on The Byrds album Fifth Dimension. The song was narrated by a child who died in Hiroshima. Now the child appears — “no one hears my silent tread” — to remind us all of the horrors of nuclear war. 

Roger McGuinn

It began as a poem by Turkish writer Nazim Hikmet. American writer Jeanette Turner took a translation of the poem to Pete Seeger and urged him to set it to music. With some help, Seeger did so and then The Byrds took the grim message to us kids.

The song I sing when alone was on the 1969 album by The Byrds called Ballad of Easy Rider, where it was titled “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos).” 

There have been many variations on the title, and this song also owed its existence in part to Seeger.

I was a serious student of record labels and I saw the song credited “W. Guthrie — M. Hoffman.”

Woody Guthrie, I figured. 

I was an ignorant 14 year old, but I knew who he was. Two years before, I was a junior high student in Fort Worth, Texas. There was a music-loving girl who sat next to me in Mrs Brock’s speech class. She was a non-stop talker and that spring, she was obsessed with Arlo Guthrie, who had just released his debut album, Alice’s Restaurant. 

Woody Guthrie

“He’s Woody’s son, you know.” 

I nodded; she was cute and I pretended I knew more than I did.

Guthrie — was that the guy who wrote “This Land is Your Land”?

“You know, Woody died the same month Arlo’s album came out,” she said. I nodded again. “I hope Woody got to see Arlo’s album before he died.”

Nothing ever happened with that nice girl, due to my ineptitude with women. But she  began to open me up musically. 

The first album I ever bought — years before — was The Concert Sound of Henry Mancini. Thanks to that nice girl and her recommendations, by junior high I was beginning to listen to Simon & Garfunkel and a few other rock artists. I still had a lot of catching up to do if I wanted to be a card-carrying Baby Boomer.

Two years later, Texas in the rear-view, Ballad of Easy Rider came out (I refer to The Byrds album and not the Easy Rider soundtrack) and there, in a spot of honor near the end of the album was “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos).” Roger McGuinn, the head Byrd (and the only original band member left at that point) sang the song in his flat-tire matter-of-fact voice.

I was in better company by then. We’d moved to Bloomington, Indiana, and my classmates rated much higher on the hip meter than had my fellow scholars back at Monnig Junior High. [Though the cafeteria at that school served, every Monday, the best chicken-fried steak I’ve ever eaten. Also, our football coach, Spud Cason, was the inventor of the Wishbone offense.]

I began listening to a lot of stuff. I discovered Bob Dylan and Neil Young and Crosby, Stills and Nash. And, of course, The Byrds.

McGuinn sang “Deportee” in a somewhat neutral voice, and didn’t need to push any buttons to elicit a response. He wanted us to hear this story, which Guthrie had written as a poem, and he wanted us to feel. He did not want to feel for us.

His stark singing gave the song heart-breaking power. It was also in my vocal range. I think.

Looking for survivors in Los Gatos canyon

What we learned: a plane had crashed in a California canyon. In addition to the small flight crew, there were migrant workers on board, being deported to Mexico after the end of harvest. Without being told the story was true, we could tell this crash had really happened. Later, we’d learn that the plane caught fire and crashed on January 28, 1948.

There was a problem with a gasket in the left engine. As the plane lost altitude, it splintered into flame and the left wing fell off.

Witnesses to the crash said they saw some passengers jump from the plane before it hit the ground.

When Guthrie heard news of this on the radio, he was enraged by the off-hand way the announcer dismissed most of the passengers on the plane. As he told it:

The sky plane caught fire over Los Gatos Canyon,
A fireball of lightning, and shook all our hills,
Who are all these friends, all scattered like dry leaves?
The radio says, “They are just deportees”

Guthrie had long championed the cause of migrant workers. One of his best songs, in my mind, is “Pastures of Plenty.”

In the angry verses of that song, Guthrie spoke in the voice of farmworkers addressing those who lived off their backs and labor:

California, Arizona, I harvest your crops
Well it’s North up to Oregon to gather your hops
Dig the beets from your ground, cut the grapes from your vine
To set on your table your light sparkling wine

Further back in my musical history, I recalled third grade in South Florida, on the southernmost military installation on the mainland, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. (But that’s another story.)

When the denizens of Air Base Elementary congregated in the cafetorium, we sang Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” and other American songs, including the spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.”

When I was a kid, I’d hear rumblings now and then about “This Land is Your Land” becoming our new national anthem. Everybody, it seemed, hated “The Star Spangled Banner.” Me, I always liked it because we only sing one verse of the song at ballgames and it ends with a question we can ask ourselves every day: Are we still the land of the free and the home of the brave?

What I didn’t learn until much later was that “This Land is Your Land” was an angry answer song to Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America.” That uber-patriotic song infuriated Guthrie. 

The original chorus to what became “This Land” was: “God blessed America for me.”

And, in another key verse, Guthrie may have been supplying a Marxist answer to Irving Berlin’s jingoism:

There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me.
The sign was painted, said ‘Private Property.’
But on the backside, it didn’t say nothing.
That side was made for you and me.

Some might say his songs were bitter, but to me they carried the fragrance of optimism. We can do this, we will endure. Those were the sentiments I took away.

Often attributed to Guthrie: “A folk song is what’s wrong and how to fix it.”

But then: “Deportee.” There was no optimism there, just human beings whose lives were devalued because of their skin color. 

The passengers, the friends scattered like dry leaves, do not even earn the dignity of being known by name. They were “just deportees.”

The plane’s manifest named the crew, but for passengers, they were listed as a group of “Mexican nationals.” The passengers were buried in a mass grave.

Demonize the immigrant, demonize the undocumented. It’s the American way. The more things change, they don’t.

Guthrie wrote the “Plane Wreck at Los Gatos” poem on his kitchen table, within hours after hearing of the crash. He didn’t write it as a song because he was beginning to lose his musical ability, as the degenerative neurological condition known as Huntington’s disease began its destruction of his body. He was beginning a long, slow decline that within a few years would leave him without his voice.

It took 20 years to kill him.

A decade after the crash, Pete Seeger was on a campus tour, singing the songs that had gotten him blacklisted during the McCarthy Era.

At Colorado A&M in Fort Collins, he did his show then gathered afterward at the home of a member of the college’s folk song club. Seeger played more songs, the students played some songs, and Seeger was about to fall into slumber on the couch, when one of the students — it was his living room — said he’d taken a poem of Guthrie’s, the one about the plane crash, and set it to music.

Pete Seeger

Martin Hoffman based his melody on a Mexican waltz, which made such sense with the words. Seeger listened as Hoffman sang “Deportee” but didn’t say much. He was tired.

But when Seeger got back to New York, he called Hoffman and asked him to send a tape of him singing the song, so he could get it copyrighted, with authorship split between Guthrie and Hoffman. That was 1958.

And then Seeger began performing the song. Judy Collins recorded it. Arlo Guthrie recorded it, as did Dolly Parton, Bruce Springsteen and Joan Baez. And so did The Byrds.

Recently, a 1948 recording of Guthrie talking / singing “Deportee” has been unearthed. He was losing his ability to sing, but he got through it. It was not long after the crash and he wanted to make sure his poem would live longer than he would.

Hearing that voice from 70 years ago, despite Guthrie’s pain and ravage, the  song that began as a poem still has its power.

And the question returns: “Who are these friends who are scattered like dry leaves?”

It began with a poem, so it’s fitting that a poet answers the questions in the song. 

Tim Z Hernandez is an associate professor in the creative writing program at the University of Texas at El Paso. He is a renaissance man, producing art in a variety of media.

Tim Z Hernandez

Hearing “Deportee” had the effect on Hernandez that it had on me, but he did something about it. He set up a website to solicit donations to his project to make a documentary about the crash and the plane’s passengers.

He found out who those dry leaves were and he told their stories. No longer were they “just deportees.”

Hernandez produced an excellent and compelling book a few years back called All They Will Call You (University of Arizona Press, $13.35).

He deserves to add “historical researcher / journalist” to his list of talents.

Where the passengers had been listed a “Mexican Nationals” on the manifest, he now offered names and stories of the passengers — what their lives were like, what dreams they had, how their families carried on.

With his poet’s license, he indulges in speculation about the last moments on the plane, but he has researched the passengers enough to know them and his conjecture is not out of line.

Hernandez is transparent in the book, bringing readers into his interviewing process and gathering stories from descendants of the crash victims.

Across the decades, Hernandez answers the song’s question about the doomed passengers. Guthrie would approve of this other poet’s work.

Writer Joe Klein called “Deportee” Guthrie’s last great song before the disease crippled him. Guthrie recorded it with only the whisper of accompaniment, chanting the words, unable to sing as the disease began its torturous dance on his body.

Martin Hoffman in 1970, a year before his suicide

The words waited a decade before they were found by Hoffman and his Mexican waltz, which gives the song its razor edge of tragedy and beauty.

One evening in 1971, Martin Hoffman walked through his neighborhood and knocked on doors, telling his friends how much he appreciated them.

Then he said goodbye.

The next evening, he played guitar, took a slug of Scotch, then went into his bedroom, pulled out his double-barrel shotgun from under the bed. He put the barrel square in front of his face, then pulled the trigger with his big toe.

The song leaves us another mystery.

With the grace and beauty of a poet, Hernandez tells the story of the passengers, the small crew, Guthrie’s life and work and Hoffman’s short and tragic time on earth.

I marvel at his achievement. The storytelling tribe can do great things, right past wrongs, and find the truth behind the stories.

If just for a moment, Hernandez brought those friends back to life, honoring them by giving us their names and telling their stories.

All They Will Call You is a beautiful piece of work.

Click on the cover to order.

The passengers: Ramon Perez, Jesus Santos, Ramon Portello, James A. Guardaho, Guadalupe Ramirez, Julio Barron, Jose Macias, Martin Navarro, Apolonio Placentia, Santiago Elisandro, Salvadore Sandoval, Manuel Calderon, Francisco Duran, Rosalio Estrado, Bernabe Garcia, Severo Lara, Elias Macias, Tomas Marquez, Louis Medina, Manuel Merino, Luis Mirando, Ygnacio Navarro, Roman Ochoa, Alberto Raygoza, Guadalupe Rodriquez, Maria Rodriguez, and Juan Ruiz. The pilot was Frank Atkinson and the co-pilot was Marion Ewing. Both Atkinson and Ewing were deeply experienced and flew with distinction in the Second World War. The regular flight attendant had called Atkinson that morning and said she was unable to fly. Bobbie Atkinson — the pilot’s wife, newly pregnant — said she would fill the flight-attendant role. She’d get to spend more time with her husband. There was another passenger: Frank E. Chaffin was with the Immigration and Naturalization Service. He was to escort the passengers back to Mexico. His job was to make certain the farmworkers got safely home.

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Be All You Can Be. Read.

Will you look at this beautiful thing? 

I’ve had this poster, framed, in my house for more than a half century. Before the United States Army co-opted the slogan “Be All You Can Be” for its recruiting efforts, that was the slogan of National Library Week, with that one crucial addition — “Be All You Can Be: Read.”

I’ve always taken that saying to heart. When I think of my father, who died when I was 20, I think of him with a book in his hand. He was never without. There was a book on the arm of his chair and one at the breakfast table and one in the formal living room. He always had one on the front seat in case he got stuck waiting in a parking lot or at a long stoplight.

And now: I have become him.

Dear Old Dad, as a young man with a pooch. I’d bet good money that there’s one of those wartime paperbacks in his back pocket.

As the saying goes, “Children learn what they live.” I’m rarely without a book. I start my day with coffee, newspapers (one on paper, two digital), then push back in my tattered leather chair for an hour of quiet, alone and lost inside a book.

This poster by Peter Max was published to celebrate library week in 1969. Max’s work was ubiquitous then. Collectors were paying enormous amounts for his work, but I’m proud to report that I got this beautiful thing for free.

I was a mid-teen that year, transitioning to high school, though it was on familiar turf. I was a student at Indiana University High School in Bloomington, part of a kindergarten- through-Grade- 12 school that had been an experiment managed by the university’s School of Education. Super-secret and newfangled teaching techniques were loosed upon students at the school. In fact, the original team name of the school’s mascot was the Guinea Pigs.

But then, in the early 1960s, the school moved from the heart of the university campus to the fringe. The new school was built with shiny metal roofs and was split into a series of buildings. It always made me think of what a small liberal arts college on Mars would look like.

We also became the Univees. I have no idea what a Univee is,

The University School campus. This picture does not do justice to the striking look of the place, but it was a swell joint to go to school.

Soon, we were no longer so experimental and the university passed us off to the local school system and what we called U-School was phased out.

I was in the last class to graduate, the class of 1972.

The building in the heart of our Martian campus was the library. 

Let us now praise wonderful librarians. I can’t tell you how much I’ve learned from archivists and librarians over the course of this life. Because of my work, I’m often in the lovely hives of a library.

Whether it’s a towering university library (Indiana boasted for a time of the largest university library west of the Hudson) or a cozy small-town ediface (I thanked the staff of the Cohasset library in Massachusetts in my book Everybody Had an Ocean), I find some of the finest people I’ve known behind the desk, ready to help.

At University High School, we were blessed with two great librarians: Norma Miller was in charge and was assisted by Pamela Brown.

Keep in mind. I was a kid with my hormones on a full, rolling boil. There was a reason I rarely ate in the Commons, but instead spent lunch hour in the library.

I was in love. I ached to be older, to be someone with whom Pamela Brown wanted to spend time, perhaps over a cup of coffee, discussing great literature. Too bad I had not yet learned to tolerate coffee. Too bad — as her courtesy title made clear — that she was already married.

There was a reason all of the boys in my class enjoyed trips to the library.

Norma Miller and Pamela Brown

Mrs Brown was beautiful but also kind and encouraging. (Can’t seem to refer to her coldly as Brown or Pamela Brown. She was Mrs Brown then and always will be.)

One day, not long after the spring semester resumed, I came into the library and she was standing behind the counter, and for once something other than Mrs Brown drew my attention.

“That just came in this morning,” she said, nodding at the poster. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

I was speechless, a rare thing for me. We both silently beheld the poster for a while, loving the psychedelic artwork, the image of the Youth following a path set by the Seer. 

The Youth and the Seer … or Master and Grasshopper.

And that slogan. It expressed to me the beauty and splendor of reading, of passing on our legends and tales and knowledge, of learning what it was like to be another.

Not that I was much of a reader then. I’d read a few serious books — let’s say “grown-up books,” since “adult books” has a different meaning —and was pleased with myself for moving past my Hardy Boys obsession from a few years earlier.

Carson McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter had affected me deeply, as did A Separate Peace by John Knowles. I read A Shropshire Lad by A.E. Housman and Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology. Those works of poetry have always stayed with me.

Kurt Vonnegut in the 1940 yearbook from Shortridge High in Indianapolis.

Mrs Brown encouraged me to read Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut. “He’s from Indiana,” she told me, as a special inducement. I was always on the lookout for great Hoosiers. (I later learned that my great Aunt Inez had known Vonnegut since he was a little boy.)

Slaughterhouse-Five was followed by other suggestions. Somehow Mrs Brown sensed, without us really talking much, that I was on my way to being a reader. From that point, I was gone.

(We didn’t talk much because I was pathologically shy. I was often nervous and tongue-tied in her presence. Still, she spoke to me a lot. Her eyes told me she was aware of my infatuation.)

Mrs Brown at work. Photo by Skip Augustine.

What was important: Mrs Brown recognized the reader gene in me and made sure it was watered and manured to maturity.

I spent most lunches in the library, usually plopping down in an easy chair to read magazines. ’Twas there, in that library, when I read Joan Didion for the first time.

Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, shared a biweekly column called “Points West” in the Saturday Evening Post.

This particular Didion column was about a young woman so desperate to be a movie star that she used her savings to buy a full-page ad in Variety, announcing that she was going to be famous.

Didion drove to the young woman’s house and took her for a ride, then recounted their conversation in her column.

I saw this as a tragedy in the making and a couple years ago, curious about what happened after Didion’s article, looked up the young woman’s screen credits. She had two: Shattered if Your Kid’s on Drugs and Blood Orgy of the She Devils. No idea what happened to her after that.

For once, I turned the tables on Mrs Brown. At the end of lunch hour that day, I took her the copy of the Post with Didion’s article on the wannabe movie star. “You should read this,” I said. “It’s good.”

When I came in the next day, she said, “You were right. That was a great piece.”

Joan Didion

A few years later, I worked at the Saturday Evening Post and loved to steal afternoons in the archive, reading every column (I’m pretty sure) that Didion wrote for the magazine. 

I owe so much to that library — to Mrs Miller and Mrs Brown. A word of encouragement and a simple act of kindness can mean so much to a kid that age. As a teacher, I always wanted to be like Mrs Brown. She set the bar high.

I was one of the last days of the school year and everyone was getting restless to get the crank rolling for summer.

I came into the library and before I was much inside the door, Mrs Brown was standing in front of me.

“We’re getting ready to close up for the summer,” she said. “I thought you’d want to have this.”

What she handed me was folded into a neat rectangle. I didn’t need to open it to know what it was.

My face must’ve flushed. She smiled indulgently. 

She’s probably in her eighties now. I hope she’s still with us — that she’s out there somewhere, still having a good life. I hope she’s still reading, still helping people.

I want her to know that her gift has been hanging on the walls of every one of my homes over the last half century, and that every time I look at it, I’m reminded of her kindness and encouragement.

Thank you, Mrs Brown. You made such a difference in my life.

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Making the Leap

“What I do in writing of any character is to try to enter the mind, heart and skin of a human being who is not myself. Whether this happens to be a man or a woman, old or young, with skin black or white, the primary challenge lies in making the jump itself. It is the act of a writer’s imagination that I set most high.” EUDORA WELTY


Too true, Ms. Welty, too true.

I used to write fiction — and published several short stories — many years ago. Not sure why I gave it up except that I started publishing nonfiction and I had only one life to live. Rather than live it as a blonde, I decided to live it as a nonfiction writer.

But I know the excitement of which Ms. Welty speaks. I loved entering the “mind, heart and skin of a human being who is not myself.”

I wrote several stories in the voices of people unlike me: a woman bullied by her family into selling the trinkets and baubles of her lifetime, a barber who served in the Second World War and put off his dreams until it was too late, and a radio evangelist shredding fire and brimstone on your AM dial and rhapsodizing about finding a good roasting ear for the church barbecue.

I think that’s why I read so much. I love stepping into some else’s life for a while.

I read a lot of fiction. Our lives are short, so I feel I get more out of living by adopting these lives for the time it takes me to learn about them and hear their stories.

Here’s some commentary on three books — lives — into which I have recently leapt.

. . . . . . . . .

Vulture by Phoebe Greenwood (Europa Editions, $27)

Sara Byrne is a correspondent (not a full-time staffer; a contract reporter) for a London newspaper and she’s assigned to Gaza.

This isn’t 2023. This is the Gaza of 2013.

Click on the cover to order.

Byrne is good at her job. Dropped into the brutality of war, she can still compose an intelligent and accurate account of what she has seen.

But of course, that doesn’t mean she sleeps well and unaffected. When you’ve seen a child severed at the waist and trailing entrails as his father carries him to the hospital, it’s something you are cursed to remember to your deathbed.

I’ve never been a war correspondent but Greenwood tells a good, evocative story and is excellent in giving us a sense of place and drawing memorable characters.

Byrne is one of the younger journalists at the bar of The Beach Hotel in Gaza. It’s the nicest lodging around, even if its walls are freckled with shrapnel. The older reporters are irritating and condescending but Byrne holds her ground.

I wrote my thesis in graduate school about how journalists are portrayed in popular culture. I studied the first two-thirds of the 20th Century, reading a ton of novels. Some were excellent and some were mediocre.

Phoebe Greenwood

I discovered a change in the portrayal of journalists over the years. In the early years, they usually appeared as society’s guardians — not in the noble sense of protecting the free flow of information — but in withholding from audiences anything damaging to society’s heroes or to the myths that keep a nation propped up.

That changed over the decades. In later years, journalists became destroyers of those beliefs and heroes they used to preserve. All that’s good, right?

But the private lives of the journalists were consistently marred by alcoholism, infidelity and ethical breaches. Of course no one trusts the press anymore. When they see reporters portrayed as drunks who sleep with sources to get stories, no wonder they consider journalists to be purveyors of fake news.

It’s a pretty consistent portrayal across books, television and film. I’ve kept up with this stuff for decades.

So of course I was fascinated by Greenwood’s novel. It’s a great portrayal of the press and despite the blood and gore, there are moments of dark comedy. Greenwood draws her characters well — not just Byrne, but also Nasser, her fixer, and the staff of the hotel, still trying to please guests while bombs rein down.

This is is about the Hamas of years ago, and Byrne has the urge to tell her readers back home that these guys are the Keystone Kops of terrorists. Unfortunatly, we know what Hamas became and there’s nothing comic about it.

Byrne is under pressure — she’s in a war zone doing what is, in essence, a yearlong audition for a full-time staff position with her newspaper. In addition, her father has just died, her mother is losing her shit, and she’s still wrestling with the fallout from an affair with a much-older man, a pal of her father’s.

Vulture gives us a sense of time and place and heartbreaking descriptions of war visited on the civilian population. Journalists generally have to develop shells for protection from the horror and some of these exercises of humor might be too dark for those outside the tribe. Byrne suffers collateral damage to her soul.

It’s an intriguing blend of strong narrative storytelling, satire and ruminations on the physical and psychological effects of war.

I look forward to more from Phoebe Greenwood.

. . . . . . . . . . .

The Girls Who Grew Big by Leila Mottley (Knopf, $28)

Sometimes I’m drawn to a novel by the geography. The late Tom Corcoran’s novels took place in Key West. That place has become so expensive that it made economic sense to read one of Corcoran’s books — just plop down $24.95 — in lieu of a trip to the island. Corcoran had the ability to engage our senses of smell and taste. It was like tripping to Key West without leaving the Barcalounger.

Click on the cover to order.

So the first thing that drew me to The Girls Who Grew Big was its setting — a stretch of the Florida pandhandle, near but not part of the high-rise condominiums that have begun to tower over the once-desolate beaches.

I used to camp there a few decades back, at a place called Grayton Beach. It was at once wild and pristine. Over the years, I watched the coming of the condos and the inevitable spoilage. It was heartbreaking.

The protagonists here are single teen-age moms. Some have birthed, some are soon to birth.

Simone’s twins are four now and she becomes the spirtiual leader for these younger girls. They congregate on the beach — the Redneck Riviera part — and hang out around Simone’s red truck, her only home and the temple of support for these young, discarded girls.

Leila Mottley

There are three narrators. Simone is the group’s griot. Emory is a local girl who idolizes Adela, the new girl in town. Adela’s been exiled from Indiana by her parents who cannot deal with the shame of her pregnancy.

Adela’s pregnancy frames the story. The girls argue, fight, and commit acts that others consider betrayal. Simone basically lives in her truck and she’s wary of the social workers from the Department of Children and Families who threaten to take away her twins. Now she’s she’s pregnant again and access to reproductive care is … well, it’s a fucking mess.

The boys in their lives serve only as sperm donors. The boys fall on various spots of the responsibility continuum, mostly at the take-none end. With a few mild speed bumps, they can go on with their lives. The girls all have dreams that now will be deferred.

It’s an engrossing novel and a great example of why I love to read. I’ve stepped inside the minds of these young women as they wrestle with their intense drama.

. .. . . . . . . .

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin (Knopf, $28)

This book came out three years ago, but it’s new to me. I’ve seen lots of copies of it in backpacks and on the subway, so I know it was a hit. It appeared in front of my face when I was cruising a used book store. How could I pass it up when it was a mere $2?

Click on that hideous cover to order.

I have to tell you about it, because only once or twice a year, as I go through the course of my regular reading, do I fall into a book and enjoy being smothered by the story.

I loved this book, which is about something completely alien to my life. It’s about gaming.

I am not a gamer. I could never be one because it requires hand and eye coordination. The key word is coordination and, since I am from Indiana, that it something I lack.

But this is the story of two young folks from Los Angeles who meet in tragic circumstances as mid-teens and who later end up in the same town for college (Harvard and MIT).

They begin to collaborate on making games — this takes places a couple decades back — and their circle begins to widen with roommates and friends who help with some of the nuts and bolts stuff. Two sophomores huddled together in front of aa computer screen grows into an industry leader over the years.

Gabrielle Zevin

Our protagonists, Sam and Sadie, love each other but are not in love. Don’t wait for them to hook up. Not gonna happen — and that’s not really a spoiler.

Sadie is having an affair with her professor, which is all right with Sam. He wants to use an engine designed by the prof to run the game he and Sadie have made. Later, Sadie is repulsed that her friend did not convince her to abandon the teacher earlier in life.

Sam and Sadie have a complicated, angry and loving relationship. I wanted to leap into the book and get to hang with them. That’s when you know you’ve found a good book.

There were some twists and tragedies I didn’t see coming. When you invest so much in characters as arresting as these, you feel the loss severely.

(Take a look at that book cover. I know what they were going for, but it’s hideous and not worthy of such a fine book. Don’t let it scare you away.)

. . . . . . . . .

William Faulkner said, “The best fiction is far more true than any journalism.” I practiced journalism and later taught it, so I might need to wrestle Ol’ Bill in a vat of creamed corn to settle that debate.

But I know what he meant. I think when we check out of life, we should do our best to make sure we’re better than we were when we checked in. Reading can help us develop the compassion and understanding that makes us better human beings.

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Up the Ol’ Mississippi

Daughter Sarah called the ambulance over my objections, but what else could she do when I had so obviously lost control? I was suffering a cognitive malfunction (I suppose that’s a polite, clinical term for saying I was fucked up) and desperately needed help. 

This is part 45 of my Asshole blog

I barely remember the ride to the hospital, too preoccupied by what had just happened.

I was thinking I was all right, but as I sprawled on my couch with Sarah and the two emergency medical technicians and was unable to come up with the names of everyday items — keys, coffee cups, shoes — that they held up before me.

I was in serious trouble..

I’ve always been the kind of guy who doesn’t want to make a fuss and who is embarrassed by attention. I didn’t quite feel myself stepping backward into the fog (as I had when I first died years before, in New Mexico) but the inability to talk or to approach anything with reason, was scary.

At the hospital, I hoped to find out what was wrong — but also was afraid of what I’d learn.

The ambulance arrived at the hospital’s emergency bay amid lots of shouting and scrambling around by all of the nurses and EMTs. As someone who often wilts from attention — everywhere outside the classroom, where I hope for attention — I was on the verge of humiliation. There I was, inert on a stretcher, with a variety of anxious faces looking down at me, asking questions.

With my cognition so impaired — that was the scariest thing about all of this — it was Sarah who answered all of the urgent questions with an efficiency and urgency. The medical staff found her helpful in the extreme.

I was moved to a three-walled room in the emergency suite, shut off from everyone else by a curtain. They allowed Sarah in with me, and she was repeating everything she had told the EMT’s and the first-line-of-defense people at the ER. Now she was talking to the nurse who would actually be overseeing me.

I was oblivious. My head is usually a gumbo of the long-lost jetsam taken residence in my skull. At any time, I have a bubble of remembered literature floating into some long-forgotten song, as well as the images of family and the pieces of time I store, those moments that for good or ill I’ve replayed in my cranial cinema for all of my life.

But all of that was gone. My brain was empty as a white-on-white room. All things were muted. I was in the hospital bed, but when Sarah and the nurse spoke, it was if I was buried under a Kilimanjaro of pillows. The voices came from far away, traveling slowly. Seemed that a question was followed by a full minute of silence before the answer. I’d stepped inside of time and pushed at the walls, like a low-rent Steve Reeves in Hercules Unchained.

Inside this expanding time, I had trouble following the conversation until the word surgery dropped like a ripple in a pond.

Until the coming of this routine (sorry, Dad) knee surgery, I’d never feared going under the knife. I would add up the number of surgeries I’d had in my life, but I can’t count that high.

In a strange way, my previous surgeries had not only worked, but somehow provided an odd kind of comfort. It was always good to know that I would continue to function, that these trained people had opened me up, goofed around with my organs, and that I’d survived and would, no doubt, continue to live.

When the nurse left to go get some paperwork for Sarah, I turned to my eldest (and trustworthy) child, now a woman in her late 30s, and offered my contribution to the emergency-room discourse.

“Please,” I whispered. “No spinal.”

“I’ll tell them,” she said.

“That’s how this all started.”

My father was a good man and would never want to embarrass anyone, especially his youngest son. He’d never say I told you so, but I felt it. It had not been my choice to go through the knee surgery under a spinal block, but I knew I’d never do it again.

I had the usual meds, the ones that make patients relaxed and silly, and then they came to take me away to surgery.

“Who’s the doctor?” I asked. I wonder if they’d called in Clifford Gluck. He was the urologist I’d first seen a couple of years before, when this whole health walkabout began. I visited him  to see how it would go if my vasectomy was reversed and I would procreate again. 

And then everything happened — cancer and all of the stuff that followed.

“It’s Dr. Tracy,” the nurse said. He’s the urologist on call. 

“My urologist is Clifford Gluck,” I said. “Shouldn’t we call him?”

(I’d never felt so old as I did at that moment when I said my urologist.)

“We don’t have time,” the nurse said. “Dr. Tracy is on duty.”

I did not meet Keith Tracy, my new urologist, until after the surgery. He was a busy guy that day.

I’m not sure about what they did during that surgery, but I came to afterward, back in the same room. Before I opened my eyes, I heard the soft sounds of fingers on keyboard.

Was I writing in my sleep?

When my eyess opened enough to focus, I saw Sarah sitting next to the bed, working on her laptop. She is an artist of multi-tasking. 

She has a demanding and rewarding job in New York, yet kept up with her work while managing our part of the surgery. She hadn’t even had to take a day off. That’s the McKeen work ethic in practice.

I’d have to spend the night in the hospital, but I felt I was recovering well enough for Sarah to leave. I insisted. I felt like I’d disrupted her life enough. Besides, Nicole had volunteered to help if I needed anything.

My room was comfortable, like all of the accommodations at South Shore Hospital. Too bad hospitals don’t give points for each stay. I would have earned a few medical vacations.

If my brain hadn’t been so exhausted, I’d try to recall all the nights I’d spent at South Shore. But I was too tired.

I settled down into the hospital routine. You actually don’t get a lot of rest in the hospital, since you are awakened every couple of hours for them to test vital signs. Plus, I was catheterized, so the nurses also had to keep track of my urine bag.

The day after the surgery, I met my new urologist, Keith Tracy. He was an affable guy, probably about half my age. 

He talked a little bit about the procedure, but he buried the lead, as we say in journalism.

“We came close,” he said. “You were about 20 minutes away from being dead.”

I had sepsis. I knew little about it, but I knew it was serious shit. Thank God for my iPhone. The often moody Siri overcame her grudge against me and offered this definition:

Sepsis is a life-threatening condition that occurs when the body’s immune system overreacts to an infection. This overreaction can lead to widespread inflammation and organ damage. It is a systemic infection with life-threatening organ dysfunction .

From the Cleveland Clinic

So after a few days in the hospital, I was sent home. There was a catheter with a tube down my leg that led to a bag that I had to change now and then.

I could never tell when I was urinating. It was like a tap, turned on all of the time.

I thought, I could live with this. But I knew things were more complicated than that. Of course.

In my follow-up visit at Dr. Tracy’s office, he had one of his nurses show me how to self-catheterize. (Self-cathing as we say in the trade.)

This was tough. First, I had to wash my hands, then put on rubber gloves. Then I had to clean Mr. Happy with an alcohol wipe. Once that was done, I had to face the catheter. It was a plastic tube, about a yard long.

That’s right — a yard. Thirty-six inches of plastic tubing. 

Imagine: you insert that thing up the Ol’ Mississippi and it pulls all that pee from your bladder that doesn’t come out the usual way. 

You use a lubricant, like KY Jelly, to limber up the catheter, and you add a little bit to the crown of Mr. Happy’s head, to make for smooth sailing as the tube is inserted.

For all of your urological needs!

There are many adventures on the journey. At a certain point, the tube has to negotiate its way past the prostate gland. This requires an intake of breath and holding of same. It’s kind of like the Jungle Cruise at Disney World. Once we are safely past the rapids (prostate), we wait for the tube to drop into the pool of urine.

Stop immediately when the flow begins. Push too far and you piss blood. (That happened on several occasions.)

I’d always hated catheterization. I remember my first surgery, a hernia operation when I was 20. The nurse (a male, but insensitive to this procedure) seemed delighted to shove what I was sure was a garden hose up my willy.

That was miserable and peeing was painful for days afterward. From that point on, I asked nurses to delay the cathing until I was under anesthetic. I feared cathing more than any surgery.

All of this happened as the school year was beginning. My administrator and good friend, Sarah Kess, had been managing the office in my absence. There was some concern in the college administration about whether I could return or whether I’d need another medical leave.

I was determined to get back in the classroom.

I was not ready to return immediately, so Sarah K (the K is my Kafkaesque way of keeping her straight from my daughter, Sarah M) covered my classes the first week. She mostly told the students I had had a medical emergency but that I would be back next week.

I wondered if maybe I did need a medical leave. When I looked in the bedroom mirror I didn’t recognize me. There was a haggard, elderly man in my room. Who is that dude and how did he get in here?

But let’s go back a bit, back to when I was still wearing the nurse-installed catheter with the tube down my leg into the bag of whole goodness attached to my ankle. 

Dr. Tracy’s nurse had not yet taught me to self-cath when I made it back to the university. I still had the bag at my ankle, still had to visit my urologist’s office to get the catheter replaced every other day.

I was moving slowly. As often happens after surgery, the primary feeling is of fragility, not pain. And that’s what I felt. I used my cane and treaded deliberately. 

What could be sexier than walking around with a urine bag on your ankle?

Thank God for public transportation, which saved me hundreds of steps. I took the ferry from the next town over, Hingham. It was a quiet, often beautiful ride and afforded time and atmosphere for cat napping. 

When we arrived at the dock, there was a short walk to the subway. There was one transfer and then the subway came above ground and conveniently stopped in front of my building. A wee bit of hobble and I was at my office door.

That would seem to be a full-day’s work, just getting to the office, but my duties were only about to begin.

When Sarah K saw me, I could see myself in her face. She seemed wary and concerned.

“Are you sure you’re ready to come back?”

“I’ve got to do it sometime.”

I sank into the chair across from her desk, where we habitually indulged in our morning debriefing sessions. Those were often the highlights of my day. I know few people with such a terrific sense of humor.

“You look gaunt,” she said. That was my rare moment of joy in those days. Overweight most of my life, I’d longed to be gaunt. Later, Sarah said it would have been more accurate to tell me that I looked near death. Because I was — or recently had been.

My first class was upstairs — and in the same building. I scored on that one, meaning I wouldn’t have to drag my sepsis ass down Commonwealth Avenue to some basement room without windows.

Just one floor up, but I needed to use the elevator.

When I got to class, the students were already there. I made my way to the front of the room.

“I’ve had some health issues lately,” I said. “Would you mind if I sat?”

No one objected, so my carcass collapsed in the chair at the instructor’s desk.

The class was Literary Journalism, something I’ve taught with great joy and relish for decades. I love the subject, so I spent that first day giving the class the lay of the land and getting them stoked — I thought — about journalism that could endure and become art.

I could feel that I was not all there. It’s as if the sepsis had left scar tissue on my brain. I was still not able to retrieve the words I wanted from my skull. But at least I was much improved over my halting, stuttering performance with the EMTs.

Class was a three-hour block, but I asked if we could end early. No one objected.

“Thank you,” I said. “Does anyone have any questions?”

A hand shot up in the second row. “Yeah,” a young woman said. “Are you going to live?”

Good question. I didn’t laugh it off. I told her I’d do my best.

Class over, I moseyed down to my office where I again planted myself in the seat across from Sarah K’s desk.

I told her more catch-up stuff and then ended with what the student had asked in class. I intended that as my closing line of the update, some comic relief.

But Sarah did not find it funny. She urged me to take care of myself.

Then it all hit me: the cancer, all of those medical procedures, my divorce, not seeing the kids daily, my mother’s death. I thought of all of the humiliations I’d had because of my health condition. I’d gotten through it all, but now I had to face this: the self-catherization. This was it. This was the low point of humiliation. I was at the bottom, clawing to get ever deeper.

I had met my limit.

Poor Sarah. She came to work that day to do her job and now there was a blubbering old man in her office. 

I was done. This was it. “I can’t take it anymore,” I told her, choking out the words.

And, for one of the rare times in my adult life, I cried.

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She Was a Good Cat

It is with great sadness that I report the death of my cat, Ramona. She was a sweetheart and I miss her.

I got her from the animal shelter at the urging of my youngest children and she spent half her life with me.

It was a Christmas seven or eight years ago. My wife had moved about a few months prior and so I was alone much of the time. The kids were with me three days a week but the other four days were deathly quiet.

Ramona

To fill the void, I talked to myself. I’d done that all of my life, but usually there was someone in the other room who’d ask, “Are you talking to me?”

After the separation, no one answered, yet I continued talking to myself.

The kids decided I needed someone or something to hear my yammering, so we went to the shelter right after Christmas.

I went into the cat room. There were several needy meowing cats, but I took to Ramona instantly. The shelter had given her a name, but I can’t remember what it was.

Compared to the other cats, she was quiet and mysterious.

She also was withdrawn, and beautiful. The vet tech got her out of the cage and set her on my lap. The kids and I petted her and made the decision quickly.

“The first couple days, maybe a week, expect her to hide,” the tech said. “This one is very skittish, very afraid of people. We think she suffered some trauma. We found her in a dumpster. But be patient. She will come around.”

They weren’t sure of her age, but estimated she was seven or eight years old. She ended up living with me for about the same amount of time. I’d guess she was 14.

To honor Bob Dylan, I named the cat after one of his songs. (Listen to “To Ramona” here.)

I brought her home and she was as advertised. She hid behind the couch.

But that night, after the kids left, I was reading in bed when I felt a slight movement on my mattress. I put my book aside and there she was. She camped out on my chest and her eyes told me she wanted petting.

It was smooth sailing from that point on.

She turned out to be the opposite of the tech’s expectation. Ramona rarely left my side when I was home, and she would root at my hands until she got the underside of her chin stroked.

Years passed. We eventually lived in three homes together. She survived the arrival of my son’s kitten, Carlos. He loved her and wanted to play with her, but Ramona would take none of his shit. She was the boss.

Carlos

When she got sick earlier this year, I took her to a vet. She said there was an impacted and infected gland. She could offer a temporary fix, but it was likely she would die soon anyway.

A second vet told me the same thing. Think of her quality of life, the vet said, and they urged me to have her put down.

I couldn’t bring myself to do that. Maybe I was wrong.

But she was still Ramona.

At home, she could be her usual self, skittering around the house and challenging Carlos when he wanted to chase her.

But I could tell she was getting weaker.

The other night, still up at 2 a.m., I petted her and told her good night. When I got up at 6 the next morning (yes, I know I need more sleep), I found her dead.

She was a good cat and I miss her. I loved her and she loved me.

Rest in peace, Ramona.

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A Full Life, Well Lived

Jack Corn in his younger days.

My friend Jack Corn died this week.

Though he was a quarter century older than me, we became close friends during our years together at Western Kentucky University.

We were both rookie teachers, trying to navigate this mystical new process of education.

Jack came to the job as a much decorated photojournalist.

I was just a punk.

While Jack served as a full-time teacher (his title was Photojournalist in Residence), he also worked on a bachelor’s degree. He’d started work as a news photographer right after his high school graduation, so now he was tying up loose ends and getting a degree.

So he took my journalism history class one summer session.

What a treat that was. Since he’d had such a long career, he knew some of the characters I talked about in class.

Hodding Carter, for example. He was one of my heroes and the definition of an independent, autonomous journalist.

While talking about Carter, I told the class that I might be guilty of over-romanticising the guy, because he was a white newspaper editor speaking out against segregation in the heart of Klan country. Carter’s office was bombed and his home attacked.

“Oh no, Beell.” (That’s how Jack said my name.) “That’s exactly how he was. You got it right.”

Jack asked me to help him do a book on a 1918 lynching in East Tennessee. One of his uncles was part of the mob trying to kill this young man. Jack’s grandmother went into the street and stop it. She was unable to protect the poor kid, who was murdered by the mob.

I wrote most of the book. Jack was handling the visuals. He finally sent the manuscript to journalism guru John Seigenthaler, one of his old pals. Seigenthaler told me later that he stayed up all night to finish it.

He also sent a copy to another old pal — a guy he worked with on several stories over the years, David Halberstam. Halberstam asked his agent to shop it around but nothing came of it. It’s a shame that story is still waiting to be told.

By the way, when Jack and I met Halberstam for drinks, I asked David to sign my copy of his wonderful book, The Powers That Be. He signed it, “From one of Jack’s collaborators to another.”

That’s some good company. I feel that I am part of a special tribe that got to know and work with this man. He was a great storyteller and a great teacher. He sometimes used draconian methods — if he didn’t like a print one of his students turned in, he might drop it to the floor and grind it into the linoleum.

He was tough. I didn’t have his level of gravitas and so I could never do what Jack did. He pushed people to think and to do their best, most compassionate work. I’m not sure you can teach empathy, but students absorbed Jack’s caring and commitment.

His methods worked spectacularly well.

His students went on to tremendous heights in journalism. Jack was proud of all of them and they were lucky to have him as a teacher. I was a colleague but I often felt more like one of his students. He taught me so much and I became a better teacher because of him.

Below is one of his portraits of coal miners. I may look for a few others to post. Watch this space. To me, Jack’s work has the power and intelligence of the work by Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine.

Jack was 96 years old. He was married to Helen Corn for decades. They were beautiful people and their love gave us all something to which we can aspire.

Goodbye, Pal. We’ll miss you.

Photograph by Jack Corn

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Life is Short, So Dance

I am from Indiana, and therefore I am rhythmically impaired. I cannot dance. I would have to improve to become a bad dancer.

But I love watching people dance.

I haven’t seen anything as joyful as the dancing in The Life of Chuck since Fred Astaire danced up the walls in Royal Wedding.

Four actors play Chuck in this new film by Mike Flanagan. As a young boy, Chuck (Benamin Pajak) is taught to dance by his grandmother (Mia Sara; be still my heart).

Against social norms of middle school, the boy joins the dance club. So there are scenes with Chuck and his much-taller dance partner (Trinity Jo-Li Bliss) from an upper grade.

Together, the young couple dazzles their classmates by moonwalking.

You’ll wish you were that age again. I’ve always thought that middle school was the worst period of life. This film makes me want to reassess.

Mia Sara beckons young Chuck to dance with her while she makes dinner.

So there’s some lovely scenes with the young folks.

And then there’s the adult Chuck, played by Tom Hiddleston. He starts dancing in the street, inspired by a drumming busker. He sees a young woman (Annalise Basso) in the crowd, who is recently brokenhearted. He extends his hand and thus begins another life-affirming dance sequence.

The film is also in part, a love note to caring teachers. (Chiwetel Ejiofor and Kate Siegel play the teachers.)

Mark Hamill is wonderful as Chuck’s grandfather and he uses his voice and gravitas so well. And Matthew Lilliard has a deeply moving life-is-short scene.

I’m not going to tell you anything else about the movie, because you should go into the theater knowing nothing. Experience the joy of discovery. I’m sure Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert are in heaven, giving us two thumbs up for this picture. I urge you to see it.

This is based on the novella by Stephen King. l best love King’s stories that do not involve the supernatural. He’s so good at writing about kids. “The Body” (filmed as Stand By Me) is a great example of how he has expertly mined his childhood.

I am rarely so moved by a film. I didn’t cry but I came close.

(Then again, I often get weepy at the movies. I was a blubbering mess when I took son Jackson with me to A Minecraft Movie. He was so embarrassed by my behavior that he made me walk 11 steps behind him when we left the theater.)

Janice (Annalise Basso) forgets her heartbreak when Chuck (Tom Hiddleston) invites her to dance in the street.

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Farewell to a Beach Boy

Sometimes, I feel as if I am on dead-rock-star speed dial.
Ever since publication of Rock and Roll is Here to Stay a quarter century ago (and which you can order here), I get calls from reporters before the body gets cold.

Brian Wilson

And sometimes, the body is still warm.

After Hurricane Katrina, I got a lot of calls from journalists putting together obituaries. Problem was, Fats Domino wasn’t dead yet. He was rescued from the attic of the house where he’d hunkered down. (Or, considering he was found in the attic, let’s make that hunkered up.)

When Maurice Gibb of the BeeGees died, I was happy to talk about the beautiful harmonies those Gibb brothers spawned. Yet the AP reporter didn’t quote my comment on what I thought was one of the singer’s greatest achievements (“He fought a valiant battle against a receding hairline.”)

When Brian Wilson died earlier this month, I missed the call from the BBC and by the time I returned the message we’d passed another full news cycle. I’m not as diligent about responding during the summer.

The Los Angeles Times didn’t call me, but quoted me anyway. In this piece, they had me saying something I have no memory of saying and affiliating me with the University of Florida, with which I have not been affiliated for 15 years.

The Beach Boys in 1970, around the time they recorded Sunflower. Left to right: Carl Wilson, Bruce Johnston, Mike Love, Brian Wilson, Alan Jardine and Dennis Wilson.

It’s just as well that no reporters reached me, since I was blubbering like a baby.

It was a huge loss to the world of music and to my life. Brian has been a part of my world for decades.

All right, I wasn’t really crying. At least I was lucky to get the news from my pal and fellow Brian Wilson believer, Wayne Garcia. Wayne named his firstborn Brian. I’ve never gone that far, but that’s mostly to avoid saddling a child with “BM” for initials.

Brian was the only Beach Boy I never interviewed. In my Saturday Evening Post days, my mentor Starkey Flythe and I collaborated on a profile of the band for the magazine. “The Endless Summer of the Beach Boys” was credited to Samuel Walton, one of Starkey’s pseudonyms. (A plethora of pseudonymns gave readers the impression the magazine had a large staff. This was a time, my friends, before the world at large had knowledge of Walmart and its founder, with whom we shared that pseudonymn. Starkey also masqueraded as F.X. O’Connor. I liked the pen name Captain Asparagus, which I’d seen in a local zine.)

Starkey and I followed the Boys through a couple of gigs to get material for the story.

During the stay in Cincinnati on their annual summer tour, we had dinner with Mike Love and his wife. Mike is a divisive figure with fans, but all I can say is that he was a charming dinner companion, even if he did not accept my revised “California Girls” lyrics for my proposed “Prehistoric Girls:”

Well, neanderthal girls are hip, I really dig the skins they wear
And the cro-mangon girls, with the way they stalk,
They knock me out when I’m down there
The Midwest savages’ daughters really make me feel all right
And the Mayan girls, with the way they kiss,
They keep those temples warm at night
I wish they all could be prehistoric girls

Mike gave me a hard pass. (And yes, I know I am bending science history to put together this paean.)

(Later, in the 1990s, I thought about sending Mike new lyrics to be paired with the “Catch a Wave” music: Get your keyboard and go internet surfin’ with me. The scary thing is, Mike might’ve gone for that one.)

We had a great afternoon interviewing Carl Wilson and Alan Jardine. I still have a song in my head that Jardine was writing about polypeptides. (This was in the days when the Beach Boys were uber-creative, before they were doomed to life as an oldies band.)

Dennis Wilson onstage, 1973.

Dennis Wilson did not want to be intervewed but asked us to his room to watch TV, then ride with him to the concert venue, Cincinnati’s Riverfront Colliseum. He was a wonderful guy. I ended up interviewing him three times over the years and he was always enchanting and hilarious. He was generous with his time and talent.

I never interviewed Brian, but perhaps that’s just as well. Starkey interviewed him when he was on the West Coast for another assignment. He said it was the weirdest interview he’d ever done. Brian was in his chain-smoking 340-pound period.

Starkey told me he’d mentioned me to Brian.

“Brian,” he said by way of introduction, “I bear greetings from your biggest fan.”

“Who’s that?” bathrobed Brian growled.

“Bill McKeen.”

Brian pondered for a minute, searching the fulsome settlings in his brain. “Never heard of ‘im.”

I have been a Beach Boys fan for nearly 60 years. I discovered them during that lost period after their initial fame and before they were rediscovered as an oldies act.

If you truly love the Beach Boys, then they drive you crazy. You know they are / were capable of greatness. And you also know they can / did produce some sub-par stuff.

Years ago, a writer for the Florida Times Union in Jacksonville wrote something like this:

We can put a man on the moon, but we can’t stop people from wearing spandex pants to the mail. The Beach Boys will drive you crazy that way.

I wish I had kept that artice so I could acknowledge the writer and get the quote right.

I hardly ever listen to the early Beach Boys stuff, much as I liked it. Yet when I learned Brian died, my hand — working independetly from my brain — reached into my record bin for All Summer Long (1964).

Cover of a Smile bootleg

Some of those early albums (OK, Shut Down Vol. 2, All Summer Long and Today) were marred by needle-lifting skits that I despise. At least the one on All Summer Long is kind of funny.

I prefer the albums of the “lost years,” after the huge early fame and after Brian’s magnum opus, Smile, went down in flames (which he resurrected in 2004). Those albums were all commercial flops but they remain pure and beautiful healing music: Smiley Smile and Wild Honey (both 1967), Friends (1968), 20/20 (1969), Sunflower (1970), Surf’s Up (1971) and Holland (1973). I leave out only So Tough (1972) because that album was a mixed bag — and short. (In my old age, I’ve grown to appreciate it more.)

So when I feel like listening to the Beach Boys, those albums are the ones I reach for. The band’s last album, That’s Why God Made the Radio (2012) had some of the most sublime moments in the group’s history. The last three songs on the album are heartbreakingly beautiful. The last song on their last album was, appropriately enough, called “Summer’s Gone.” It was grandly depressing and majestic.

A fan’s alternate cover for Pet Sounds

I have reverence for Pet Sounds (1966). Listening to it is often difficult for the emotions it churns up. It has been an indelible part of my life since I was in a teen-ager with an 8-track in my Opal, with Pet Sounds on a continual loop. That tape stayed in the player for a year, and I heard the album so much it seeped into my sinews. Kind of like Steve McQueen in The Blob: this thing absorbed me and became part of my essence.

The album is so good that I can’t listen to it. It takes too much out of me.

Plus, I don’t have to listen to it. Every vocal, every note, every banjo strum, every drum bash, every belching tuba and barking dog is stored in my head.

There’s a lot to be said about Brian. He had an odd (no surprise there) solo career that included the occasional brilliant piece of original work — That Lucky Old Sun (2008) — and intriguing albums devoted to George Gershwin and Disney music.

The Wilson brothers are all gone now. To me, the Beach Boys ceased to be when Carl Wilson died in 1998. With no Wilson onstage, there were no Beach Boys. What’s out there on the road is Mike Love with a very good (I’m told) Beach Boys tribute band.

So. Brian is gone.

We toil in melancholy, but as Brian’s music often helped me to do, I find some kind of joy inside the sadness.

Click on the cover to order the book.

I used the Beach Boys to frame my story of Los Angeles music in the 1960s, Everybody Had An Ocean (which you can order by clicking on the cover at left) and here’s how that book ended:

“Creating art allows us to beat the odds and find immortality, without having to do the whole Doctor Faustus thing. Though Brian Wilson and Mike Love no longer collaborate and Carl and Dennis Wilson are gone, they are all still together on the radio late at night, where they join voices and are young and golden and beautiful forever.”

And now, for fun, here are my favorite Beach Boys songs in chronological order. I realize no one gives a shit about this, but I like to amuse myself.

You will note the absence of “Kokomo” on this list. This is not an oversight. Brian was in California and was told about the “Kokomo” session in Atlanta only 24 hours before the studio was scheduled. He was unable to make the session. Brian was also absent from the recording of “I Can Hear Music” in 1969. That was during a rough period when he had trouble engaging with the human race, and marked sort of a changing of the guard. The Master (Brian) had taught his young grasshopper (Carl) well.

Carl Wilson became the leader of the band onstage and in the studio after Brian withdrew to his room in the late 1960s.

Both “Kokomo” and “I Can Hear Music” feature Carl’s angelic voice. It was funny to see the flurry of posts by fans after Brian’s death. Seems like everyone posted “Kokomo,” a song on which he did nothing.

So here is my list, though no one outside a lunatic asylum cares about this:

1962: “Surfin’ Safari.”
1963: “Surfin’ USA,” “Farmer’s Daughter,” “Shut Down,” “Surfer Girl,” “Catch a Wave,” “The Surfer Moon,” “In My Room,” “Our Car Club,” “Boogie Woodie,” “Little Deuce Coupe,” “Car Crazy Cutie” (musically identical to “Pamela Jean”), “Cherry Cherry Coupe.”
1964: “Fun Fun Fun,” “Don’t Worry Baby,” “The Warmth of the Sun,” “This Car of Mine,” “Why Do Fools Fall in Love,”* “I Get Around,” ” All Summer Long,” “Hushabye,”* “Little Honda,” “We’ll Run Away,” “Wendy,” “Don’t Back Down.”
1965: “Do You Wanna Dance?,”* “Good to My Baby,” “Don’t Hurt My Little Sister,” “Dance Dance Dance,” “Please Let Me Wonder,” “I’m So Young,”* “Kiss Me Baby,” “In the Back of My Mind,” “The Girl From New York City,” “Girl Don’t Tell Me,” “Help Me Rhonda,” “California Girls,” “You’re So Good to Me,” “The Little Girl I Once Knew.”
1966: “Wouldn’t it Be Nice?,” “You Still Believe in Me,” “Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder),” “I’m Waiting for the Day,” “Sloop John B,”* “God Only Knows,” “Caroline No,” “Good Vibrations.”
1967: “Heroes and Villains,” “Vegetables,” “Little Pad,” “Wind Chimes, “Wonderful,” “Wild Honey,” “Darlin’,” “Aren’t You Glad,” “I Was Made to Love Her,”* ” Let the Wind Blow,” “Mama Says.”
1968: “Friends,” “Wake the World,” “Little Bird,”** “Be Still.”**
1969: “Do it Again,” “I Can Hear Music,”* “Cotton Fields,”* “I Went to Sleep,” “Time to Get Alone,” “Our Prayer,” “Celebrate the News,”** “Cabinessence.”
1970: “Their Hearts Were Full of Spring,”* “Slip on Through,”** ” This Whole World,” “Add Some Music to Your Day,” “It’s About Time,”** ” Forever,”** “All I Wanna Do,” “At My Window,” “Cool Cool Water.”
1971: “Long Promised Road,”*** “Feel Flows,”*** “‘Til I Die,” “Surf’s Up.”
1972: “You Need a Mess of Help to Stand Alone,” “Marcella,” “All This is That,” “He Come Down,” “Cuddle Up.”**
1973: “Sail On Sailor,” “Steamboat,”** “California,”# “The Trader,*** “Only With You,”** “Funky Pretty.”
1976: “Palisades Park,”* “In the Still of the Night.”*
1977: “Mona,” “Johnny Carson,” “Good Time,” “Honkin’ Down the Highway,” “The Night Was So Young,” “I’ll Bet He’s Nice,” “I Wanna Pick You Up,” “Airplane.”
1978: “Sweet Sunday Love.”
1979: “Good Timin’,” “I’ll Be in Heaven When My Angel Comes Home,”*** “Love Surrounds Me,” ** “Baby Blue.”**
1980: “Goin’ On,” “Sunshine,” “You Are So Beautiful.”**
1981: “San Miguel.”**
1985: “I’m So Lonely.”
1986: “California Dreamin.’ “*
1993: “Fourth of July.”**
1998: “Soulful Old Man Sunshine,” “Loop De Loop,” “Sail Plane Song,” “Barbara.”**
2001: “Their Hearts Were Full of Spring,”*. “Devoted to You.”*
2012: “That’s Why God Made the Radio,” “Isn’t it Time,” “From There to Back Again,” “Summer’s Gone.”
2013: “Fallin’ in Love,”** “Wouldn’t it be Nice to Live Again.” **

All songs by Brian Wilson, usually with a collaborator (or two). The exceptions are (*) songs written by people outside the group. Other songs written by (**) Dennis Wilson, (***) Carl Wilson and (#) Alan Jardine.

These are in order by release date. “San Miguel,” for example, was recorded in 1969-70, but not released until 1981. “Fallin’ in Love,” another Dennis Wilson gem, was recorded in 1971 but was left off of Surf’s Up (one wonders why) and did not appear on a Beach Boys album until the Made in California anthology in 2013.

A nice tribute.