Bill Bryson’s “One Summer, America 1927,” when “America First” came to call

As I read Bill Bryson’s “One Summer: America 1927,” I realized that our history is comprised of an amazing number of knuckleheads and heroes. And sometimes, they are one and the same.

Charles Lindbergh, for instance. He became a hero overnight when he flew The Spirit of St. Louis over the Atlantic Ocean, the first solo flight by airplane. Many had attempted it. This scrawny bland fellow from Detroit accomplished it. Thousands of Parisians swarmed him when he landed at Le Bourget Airport. Ticker-tape parades in the U.S. followed. Crowds greeted him everywhere. He often took to his airplane to escape into the wild blue yonder.

By the time the U.S. entered World War II, he was disgraced by his embrace of eugenics and Nazism. He participated in the first “America First” campaign and proudly wore an air medal awarded him in Berlin by Herman Goering, one of the architects of the Nazi scourge. He survived to be one of the defendants at the Nuremberg Trials. “Lucky Lindy” tried to redeem himself by training American pilots in the Pacific during the war. But damage had been done. His name was stripped from all those streets and schools and airfields named in his honor.

You can still see The Spirit of St. Louis displayed at the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum along the National Mall in D.C. I’ve taken my family there many times. The plane, so flimsy and tiny when compared to modern aircraft. It’s quite possible those other aircraft wouldn’t exist without it.

Bryson has been one of my favorite writers since his 1989 book, “The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America.” Writing humor is no mean feat and he does it with aplomb in so many books. Humor helps you understand contradictions such as Lindbergh, Babe Ruth, and Al Capone. But that’s why I read, to be entertained and educated in the ways of the world. This book did that. I almost quit several times.

My sister Eileen gave me the trade paperback a month ago. She enjoyed it and knew I was working on novels set in the 1920s. I am of an age where reading big books with small type is difficult. I read to page 80 in bright light but put it down. Then I remembered I have a Kindle Reader for such challenges and I borrowed the book from Libby. Ah, a lit screen and large type. Heavenly. I still put it aside for other things until Libby warned me that I had only five days left on my loan. I hunkered down and read the rest, including a bit of the back matter. So much research!

Sitting in front of another lit-up large screen, I wonder about a century from now, 2125, when a book comes out about 2025. The year of Trump and A.I. Who will be the heroes and villains? As someone who’s been resisting Trumpism since 2016, you can probably guess my answer. “One Summer: America 2025.” A nonfiction tale, told with panache by someone. First we have to survive this period of U.S.-bred fascism and racism. First that. Will books survive?

Big Bill Thompson was mayor of Chicago in 1927. Chicago is in the Trump crosshairs as are all cities in blue states. Big Bill knew that to rule the people must be kept clueless so, writes Bryson, “he started a campaign to remove unAmerican books from Chicago libraries.” He even scheduled a bonfire to burn “treasonous books.” One city employee upped the ante:

“The head of the Municipal Reference Library announced that he had independently destroyed all books and pamphlets in his care that struck him as dubious. ‘I now have an America First library,’ he said proudly.”

America First? Will that be the fate of Chicago’s libraries now that Trump’s goon squads are on their way?

Naomi Hirahara weaves a murder mystery into a 1940s historical novel and it's swell

Just when I think I’ve read every World War Two-era novel….

“Clark and Division” by Naomi Hirahara brings us into the life of Aki Ito. She’s a spirited young woman, smart and attractive and a bit self-conscious living in her talented older sister’s shadow. She yearns for just the right job and boyfriend, likes to hang around with friends, and knows how to dance the Lindy Hop.

So, she’s just like any other Southern California teen. But you add in the setting conjured by Hirahara and things get serious. Aki is Nisei, born in the U.S. of Japan-born parents. In 1942, her entire family is shipped to Manzanar internment camp, leaving behind their home and property and all-American dreams. Aki spends two years at Manzanar and, at 20, lucks out when selected for the government resettlement program which allows Nisei to move to middle America away from the coasts and start new lives. Aki chooses Chicago because that’s where her sister Rose has resettled. Before Aki and her parents can get off the train, her sister is dead, ostensibly by suicide. She allegedly jumped head-on into an El train and is killed instantly. Nobody knows why. Aki is crushed.

A great set-up for a mystery. Aki is still in shock when she discovers the secret behind Rose’s death and realizes she seems to be the only one interested in figuring out what really happened. She plods along at first but then discovers the strength to take the risks that will solve the case. Along the way, we meet the Nisei of the Clark and Division neighborhood. She has to hide her quest from her very traditional Issei parents. Along the way, we learn about Japanese-American lives, the foods they eat, their jobs, their dreams and fears. The most charming thing about this book are life’s daily details. Hirahara writes the Japanese terms for food, clothes, and many other things. I felt the crushing heat of a Chicago summer. I know how people got around in the city. Some especially good details about riding the El or Elevated Train. I got to see the workings of the famous Newberry Library. I know, the details of a library aren’t exactly high drama. But maybe they are. All this makes the book so down-to-earth and thrilling.

The ending is heartbreaking but also guides Aki into the future. And into the just-published sequel, “Evergreen.” In it, Aki has become a nurse’s aide and returns to southern California where she and other Japanese-Americans have to start from scratch – again. There’s also a murder, of course. While the book is listed under mystery, I’m sure it’s filled with the cultural and location detail that also makes for great historical fiction. Hirahara now has a series on her hands which she’s done before with her earlier books: Mas Arai and Leila Santiago. "Evergreen" is now the second book in the Japantown Series. I’ve ordered a copy. You should too.

Nelson Algren lived the writer's life in the 1930s and J. Edgar Hoover was watching

I write a fan letter to fellow writer Colin Asher:

Dear Colin:

Just finished reading “Never a Lovely So Real.” I loved it. Your intro sections read more like an historical novel than standard biography. It helps that Nelson’s origins and his writing life were so real and unpredictable. Overall, I found out so much more about the writer who conducted my creative writing workshop at University of Florida in 1974. Nelson’s reputation preceded him and he took it with him after the 12-week session. Until I read your book, I was content to remember the grizzled old 63-year-old who wandered into the classroom on a hot September night in Gainesville. Now I know better. I’m glad you found his life worth writing about.

Nelson was my first writing teacher. He was a gruff but entrancing presence in the classroom. I only knew him by reputation. As you write it, that was part fact and part fiction, some of it fed by Nelson. I’d read one of his books and a half-dozen stories. His past was checkered but I knew little about it. He’d been friends with James T. Farrell and Richard Wright and lover to Simone de Bouvier, a feminist writer found on many women’s studies reading lists. Two of his books were made into movies and he spent some crazy time in Hollywood. His political activities earned him a file in J. Edgar’s commie blacklist (886 pages – one heck of a file).

Remembering that time almost 50 years later, Visiting Writer Nelson Algren was an unsettling presence on the sprawling University of Florida campus. His clothing was more Dust Bowl Goodwill than Central Florida Casual. He wore rumpled shirts, loose-fitting slacks, and what looked like the army boots he wore during his time with a medical unit in France during World War II. He sported a grizzled beard and a cap that looked better on Tom Joad. He was old, probably the worst sin you could commit on a campus known for frats, football and consistent listings on Playboy Magazine’s “Top Party Schools.” Schools made the grade by earning an A-plus in three criteria: Sex, nightlife, sports. Creative writing is not mentioned. Keggers under the palms were the order of the day and nobody really wanted to take a walk on the wild side or meet the man with the golden arm who prowled The Windy City’s mean streets.

Me – I wanted to take that walk. Nelson Algren was the real thing. Here he was, stuck in a classroom in one of the campus’s oldest buildings teaching writing to kids from Daytona and Apalachicola. I looked at him as a weathered sage. We were a wave of youth in the U.S.A. who knew very little about what life was like for most Americans. We wrote stories about surfing and soured relationships. The stories in Algren’s “Neon Wilderness” might have been about Martians for all we knew. Grifters and gamblers, whores and junkies. I wanted to know these people because I desperately wanted to be a writer. I just didn’t know how to go about it.

Nelson was generous of his time and expertise. He told great stories. One of our fellow students invited us to her apartment where we smoked dope. Nelson partook, noting that he used to smoke it with Chicago’s jazz musicians and the addicts he met when writing “The Man with the Golden Arm.” He even grew his own brand of weed outside his bungalow near Gary, Indiana.

Another night, my pal Big Mike, piled us into his big black station wagon and took us to the strip club where he was a bouncer. Big Mike was a teetotaling Vietnam vet whose studio apartment was piled high with cases of bottled Pepsi because he could never find enough Pepsi in Coca-Cola country. I had a feeling that Algren had been in rougher places but he was a good sport. After his second drink, he demonstrated how he would put his head between the dancer’s big breasts and make motorboat sounds. It shocked me, the idea of this old writer motorboating a stripper. What he might have been saying is this: “Don’t waste any time, boys. Do motorboats when you can. It all goes by faster than you know.” I wasn’t listening then but now know something about the brief span of a lifetime.

In class, Algren was kind to our stories but made suggestions to make them better. I wrote a story about a homeless guy getting evicted from a tent in a mall parking lot. Algren said it needed some work. He handed out his recommended reading list. I wish I still had it. Hemingway was on it along with books I didn’t know: “A House for Mr. Biswas” by V.S. Naipaul, “The End of the Game and Other Stories” by Julio Cortazar, “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “The Good Soldier Svejk” by Jaroslav Hasek, and the collected stories of John Collier. On the last night of class, Algren handed me a slip of paper with his agent’s name and address and told me to contact her. I didn’t see him do that with any of the other students and felt pretty special. I never followed up. I had nothing to show an agent except a half-finished story and late-night journal entries.

A year later, my next writing prof was Harry Crews. I figured he probably knew some of the same people Algren did, ne’er-do-wells and junkies and killers. Algren came from the mean streets and Crews from the mean swamps of the Okefenokee. If you’re curious about how mean it was, read his memoir “A Childhood: The Biography of a Place.” This was before Crews got sober and didn’t always make it to class, regaling the locals at Lillian’s Music Store which wasn’t a music store. When he did, he told great stories. One night, he read aloud his favorite story, “How Beautiful with Shoes” by Wilbur Daniel Steele, a wonderful writer whom nobody in class had ever heard of, This from Wikipeda: “Steele has been called ‘America's recognized master of the popular short story’ between World War I and the Great Depression.” Crews wrote an Esquire column called “Grits” and had stories and essays featured in Playboy. One I remember the best was “The Button-down Terror of David Duke,” infamous KKK grand wizard from Louisiana. Crews wrote about an ill-fated backpacking trip along the Appalachian Trail that ended in a Tennessee town that once convicted and hung a circus elephant for stomping a boy to death.

I was lucky to have two great early mentors. At the time, I didn’t understand it but knew it was important to my imagined writing career. After graduation, I worked in Denver as a sportswriter and edited a weekly alternative newspaper. I was a corporate editor until I decided it was killing me. I wrote a novel and snagged myself an agent in Ray Powers of the Marje Fields Agency. He helped me revise the book and shopped it around. I told him I was quitting my job and he advised me to get a numbing day job so I could have plenty of energy left for writing. Instead, a went off to get my M.F.A. at Colorado State University. It helped my writing and helped me get published. It also sent me off with a career as an arts administrator at a state arts council and then the National Endowment for the Arts. It cut into my writing time. I’m retired now and have time to think about paths taken and not taken. I write every day and have a short list of published fiction. I have a fine family and a house. Still, Ray Powers might have been right. I’ll never know.

Thanks again. I look forward to reading your other work.

Sincerely,

Michael Shay, michaelshaywyo@hotmail.com, hummingbirdminds.blogspot.com

P.S.: Ordered a copy of “Nelson Algren’s Own Book of Lonesome Monsters” after reading about it in your book. Couldn’t resist.

My grandfather left his lung in Chicago

As I was being interviewed Tuesday night by Michael Sweeney and Tyler Rippeteau, a couple of big-city bloggers who host "Progressive Blogosphere on the Air" on WPHK in Chicago, I began to wonder about the audience make-up. Mostly Chicagoans, probably, with a few members of the American Blogosphere -- Wyomingites too -- fishing in the online stream.

I have very few links to Chicago. I spent one long winter weekend in the city interviewing for jobs. My old college roommate, Bob Page of Independence, Mo. (Hi Bob) grew up on the South Side and introduced me to the writings of Mike Royko. For this, I'm eternally grateful.

I do have at least one family connection to the place.

My maternal grandfather, Martin Hett, lost one of his lungs in Chicago.

This is the story as I remember it. When he was 12, Martin walked away from his large family and their hovel in County Roscommon. He made his way to England and worked in a coal mine. He lived with a Brit family who treated him better than his own family. He earned enough money to sail to the U.S. during World War I. He joined up with his older brother in Chicago. They worked in the railyards.

During the winter of 1919, Martin got very sick. Blame the weak lungs of Irish immigrants. Coal dust, too. He coughed and spit and then developed a fever. His brother urged him to go to the county hospital emergency room. After waiting for many hours (some things never change), the doctor gave him the once-over and decided he had empyema which is "the presence of pus in a bodily cavity" (Webster's), usually caused by an infection. The bodily cavity in my grandfather happened to be an important one. Since this was way before antibiotics, and Martin was a poor man, options were limited.

1. Do nothing and hope it goes away
2. Do nothing and die
3. Get rid of the infected lung

Grandpa chose the latter one. The doc couldn't give him the usual anaesthetics --ether or chloroform -- because they tended to cause lung problems, namely pneumonia. So he gave Martin some rotgut whiskey, slit him open, chiseled out two of his ribs, removed the infected lung and sewed him up.

It hurts to think about it.

The doctor advised him to find a healthier climate. He recommended Arizona or Colorado. Dry places with (in Arizona's case) warm climates. At the time, Denver was home to many sanatoriums for tuberculosis patients. So Martin recovered and made plans for life with one lung. That summer, he said farewell to his brother and got on the train to Denver. He arrived at Union Station in the middle of a sunny day. He pondered going on to Phoenix and the baking hot desert. He decided to stay where he was.

Martin Hett was 90 when he died in Denver. All his mortal remains were interred at Mt. Olivet Cemetery. But for the one lung. Its remains are somewhere in Chicago.

Hummingbirdminds interview tonight on "Progressive Blogosphere on the Air"

The Stonecipher Report's Michael Sweeney and Tyler Rippeteau will be interviewing me tonight on "Progressive Blogosphere on the Air" at 12:30 a.m. Chicago time, 11:30 p.m. MST (and 1:30 a.m. for you poor East Coasters). Listen at http://www.whpk.org/

Here's a little blurb on the interview from The Stonecipher Report blog:http://tinyurl.com/yj5axqd

In Memoriam: Studs Terkel, storyteller

Not much you can say when one of your favorite authors passes away. So we'll let Studs Terkel have the last word:

"Who are the best historians? Who are the storytellers? Who lived through the Great Depression of the '30s, World War II that changed the whole psyche and map of the world, a Cold War, Joe McCarthy, Vietnam, the '60s, that's so often put down today and I think was an exhilarating and hopeful period, and, of course, the computer and technology. Who are the best ones to tell the story? Those who've borne witness to it. And they're our storytellers."