This is a book of short stories taken
from the things I saw and heard in my childhood in the factory town of Ansonia
in southwestern Connecticut. Most of these stories, or as true as I recall them
because I witnessed these events many years ago through the eyes of child and are
retold to you now with the pen and hindsight of an older man. The only
exception is the story Beat Time
which is based on the disappearance of Beat poet Lew Welch. Decades before I
knew who Welch was, I was told that he had made his from California to New
Haven, Connecticut, where was an alcoholic living in a mission. The notion
fascinated me and I filed it away but never forgot it.
The collected stories are loosely
modeled around Joyce’s novel, Dubliners (I
also borrowed from the novels character and place names. Ivy Day, my character in “Local Orphan is Hero” is also the name
of chapter in Dubliners, etc.) and like Joyce I wanted to write about my
people, the people I knew as a child, the working class in small town America
and I wanted to give a complete view of them as well. As a result the stories
are about the divorced, Gays, black people, the working poor, the middle class,
the lost and the found, the contented and the discontented.
Conversely
many of the stories in this book are about starting life over again as a result
of suicide (The Hanging Party, Small
Town Tragedy, Beat
Time) or from a near death experience
(Anna Bell Lee and the Charge of the
Light Brigade, A Brief Summer)
and
natural occurring death. (The
Best Laid Plans, The Winter Years, Balanced and Serene)
With
the exception of Jesus Loves Shaqunda, in each story there is a rebirth
from the death. (Shaqunda is
reported as having died of pneumonia in The Winter Years)
Sal,
the desperate and depressed divorcee in Things
Change, changes his life in Lunch
Hour when asks the waitress for a date and she accepts. (Which we learn in Closing Time, the last story in the
book) In The Arranged Time,
Thisby is given the option of change and whether she takes it or, we don’t
know. The death of Greta’s husband in A Matter of Time has led her to the
diner and into the waiting arms of the outgoing and loveable Gabe.
Although
the book is based on three sets of time (breakfast, lunch and dinner) and the
diner is opened in the early morning and closed at night, time stands still
inside the Diner. The hour on the big clock on the wall never changes time and
much like my memories of that place, everything remains the same.
http://www.amazon.com/No-Time-Say-Goodbye-Memoir/dp/
In
1962, six year old John Tuohy, his two brothers and two sisters entered
Connecticut’s foster care system and were promptly split apart. Over the next
ten years, John would live in more than ten foster homes, group homes and state
schools, from his native Waterbury to Ansonia, New Haven, West Haven, Deep
River and Hartford. In the end, a decade later, the state returned him to the
same home and the same parents they had taken him from. As tragic as is funny
compelling story will make you cry and laugh as you journey with this child to
overcome the obstacles of the foster care system and find his dreams.
http://www.amazon.com/No-Time-Say-Goodbye-Memoir/dp/0692361294/
http://amemoirofalifeinfostercare.blogspot.com/
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John Tuohy, member of the Irish National Police Force and John Tuohy, writer, taken in Dublin Ireland
John
William Tuohy is a writer who lives in Washington DC. He holds an MFA in
writing from Lindenwood University. He is the author of numerous non-fiction on
the history of organized crime including the ground break biography of
bootlegger Roger Tuohy "When Capone's Mob Murdered Touhy" and
"Guns and Glamour: A History of Organized Crime in Chicago."
His
non-fiction crime short stories have appeared in The New Criminologist,
American Mafia and other publications. John won the City of Chicago's Celtic
Playfest for his work The Hannigan's of Beverly, and his short story fiction
work, Karma Finds Franny Glass, appeared in AdmitTwo Magazine in October of
2008.
His
play, Cyberdate.Com, was chosen for a public performance at the Actors Chapel
in Manhattan in February of 2007 as part of the groups Reading Series for New
York project. In June of 2008, the play won the Virginia Theater of The First
Amendment Award for best new play.
Contact
John:
MYWRITERSSITE.BLOGSPOT.COM
JWTUOHY95@GMAIL.COM
Excerpt from my book "No Time to Say Goodbye: Memoirs of a Life in Foster Care.
That same week the Clyde Beatty-Cole Brothers
Circus was in town, and had placed an ad in the Republican-American newspaper calling for day laborers for the
minimum wage: a dollar sixty-five an hour, plus three meals for the day and a
free ticket to the show.
I went up
to the site with Jack Battista, whom I knew from school, one of the guys I
would share an apartment with in New Haven in the fall. He was going to
Southern Connecticut State College there. I wasn’t interested in working for
the circus, but Jack was, so I went along. Being too cautious can ruin your
life. We weren’t there an hour before
the hiring boss convinced Jack to join the show for the rest of the summer.
Jack
bounced over to me and said, “You want to join the circus? They’re goin’ all
the way up to Cape Cod.”
He caught me off guard, so I didn’t answer, but he
grabbed my arms and said, “You remember that show on TV, Circus Boy?”
“Yeah,” I
said. “I think so.”
“It’ll be
like that,” he said. I was bored, and traveling with the circus seemed like a
better idea than spending another weekend getting drunk in the park with my
friends.
Classes
began at the University in very late August and because I had some money saved
up, I decided to be an irresponsible teenager for an entire month. So I quit my
job and joined the Clyde Beatty-Cole Brothers Circus.
Jack
cleared it with his parents, who were reluctant, and we signed on as
roustabouts, the circus term for unskilled laborers. We agreed to stay with the
show from Connecticut through the final performance at the Kennedy family
estate in Hyannisport, Massachusetts.
On our
first night we were called together by the straw boss, a man called “The
Chief.” It was the only name he had as far as we knew. A short, pudgy black man
who wore a white straw cowboy hat with a feather, he had a voice as deep as a
bullfrog’s and a thick South Carolina accent.
“You boys
get to takin’ down the seats and load ’em into the truck.” he told us, and we
joined a group of fifty to sixty men of all ages, sizes, and races in a work
gang dismantling the benches.
When we
finished, we were loaded into the back of a tractor-trailer outfitted with
several dozen wooden bunk beds fitted with the slimmest mattresses I have ever
seen. Looking at the bunks, it was easy to tell the newcomers from the
old-timers. The old-timers had plastered the walls in their bunk areas with
pin-ups of naked women, explicit pornography next to pictures of their
families. The newcomers’ walls were undecorated.
The men
were a cross-section of humanity. The only thing they seemed to have in common
was a beaten and haggard look etched into their lined faces, and all of them,
to a man, seemed rougher than hell. Their ages and races varied. Jack and I
were doing this as a lark, but it scared me because they had to do this and I
was only a bare inch away from being one of them.
There were
perhaps eight dim lights in the tin ceiling and the smell of perspiration was
everywhere and on everything. I looked up and down the narrow, crowded center
of the truck for a bathroom, but there wasn’t one.
“Where do
you go to take a leak?” I asked anyone.
“You
don’t,” came anyone’s answer.
The truck
started rolling while Jack and I were still trying to find available bunks. We
found two close together. I climbed into one and Jack was moving knapsacks and
paper bags filled with clothes from the other when a voice boomed out, “I’ll
cut your hands off you touch my stuff.”
The
speaker was a tall, muscular man with long jet-black hair combed back in a
pompadour, a dirty T-shirt, equally dirty jeans and a pair of brown leather
cowboy boots. Topping off that was a switchblade resting on his lap. The entire
end of our side of the trailer went silent. Jack turned and faced the man, who
was lying in his bunk. I stood up from my bunk because—well, I had to. I was
with Jack and it was the right thing to do.
I watched
Jack’s nostrils flare and his eyes open wide. He had been a lethal fullback on
the Wilby High School football team and looked it. His head, almost perfectly
square, was made even squarer by his crewcut. His neck was thick and muscular
and although he was on the short side, his shoulders were broad and dense and
his biceps were massive, at least twenty inches around. Aside from that, there
was something about Jack, as gentle, kind and well-mannered as he was, that
made men step aside.
In one motion
Jack smacked the knife to the floor and had a gigantic hand around the guy’s
neck, his other hand cocked in a fist aimed at the man’s head.
“You are
making me very unhappy,” Jack said, “and I also feel very threatened by your
knife.”
He waited
for the man to acknowledge what he had just said with the long blink of an eye.
“Also,” he
continued, “I feel strongly that you should not be taking up two bunks when
there are not enough to go around.”
I sat back
down on my bunk. Jack didn’t need me. This pompadour guy was toast.
Again,
Jack waited for an acknowledgement, and when he got one he added, “I’m going to
bed now because I’m very tired. Is there anything you would like to add to this
conversation between us at this given time?”
The man shook
his head no. Jack released his grip and held his hand out for the man to shake.
“My name is Jack.”
The man
looked as if he were about to cry, but he shook Jack’s hand silently. Jack kept
the knife and we both agreed, in a whisper, that it would probably be better if
we took turns standing guard throughout the night in case the crazy guy tried
anything, but we both fell asleep within an hour.
The next
day started at sunup in New London, Connecticut, on the shoreline. The chief
pulled open the trailer door and clean, fresh salt air flushed the stench out.
From the sky I could tell there was a heavy storm on its way in from the
Atlantic.
“Y’all new
boys listen on up,” the chief yelled.
“Y’all’s on the house and tent crew. That means we got to get up the Big Top,
put up the seating, and then take it all down again at night. Y’all listen to
me what I tell you out there, or else you could lose a hand or an arm or an eye
or both. I seen it happen more than once. All right, let’s go.”
I
considered losing an eye to a tent wire and spending the rest of my life on a
street corner selling pencils. People with my affliction worry—big, colorful,
misery-type worries.
We jumped
out of the truck and all sixty of us found a spot of grass and flooded it with
urine. At the center of the field the poles and ropes for the Big Top were
already waiting. We formed a huge circle of two-man teams and picked up of the
thick ropes lying on the ground while the chief walked in circles shouting
orders. “Two hands, y’all, two hands, hold it till the ground till I tell you
to pull up, and then y’all pull up.”
Jack and I
had the same rope. An elephant waddled into the circle and was chained to the
enormous metal pole lying in the middle. The chief pointed to the elephant and
shouted, “You new boys, y’all listen up. That elephant go crazy and start in on
a rampage ’cause of the storm, y’all grab a rod and poke his ass back into the
middle.”
Elephants
are big, but they’re even bigger standing next to you in an open field near New
London, Connecticut at sunrise, and this guy expected us to sword-fight this
monster with a wooden stick until he calmed down. I asked, “Hey, Chief, do they
go on a rampage a lot?”
“It
depends,” he answered almost philosophically. “If they’re in heat, they in a
sour bad mood, maybe they go apeshit, maybe not. It depends, really. Elephant’s
tricky animals.” I had never really thought of elephants as tricky.
Then the
skies opened and it started to pour. Not just rain, but big enormous buckets of
rain blowing in from the ocean, and then came the lightning and thunder, and
the elephant cried out in fear and I said to Jack, “You and your freakin’ Circus Boy.”
Surprisingly, it took only about an hour to put up the tent and the
bleachers. We lined up in the rain for breakfast, which was served from the
back of a small truck. Jack, a healthy-foods type, refused to eat, but, as
always I was hungry and had the cook load me up with bacon and scrambled eggs.
But it was still pouring, and the mess tent was far across the field, and by
the time I got there my breakfast was floating across my plastic plate.
When the
rain let up, Jack found a lawn chair and caught up on his sleep and I roamed
the grounds being nosy, asking questions, and interviewing the circus people. I
learned that the clowns, most of whom were from Europe, were on the top of the
circus class system pyramid and my group, the roustabouts, at the very bottom,
below the monkeys, who smoked cigarettes whenever they were offered them and
had learned to give passersby the finger.
I spent
part of the afternoon in the roustabouts’ tent, drinking coffee and listening
and watching. The tent was like some sort of Casbah black market for stolen
goods and dope, and if I had seen Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet at a table
it would have fit the scene perfectly.
Most of
the roustabouts were professional thieves, ranging in disciplines. Pickpockets
worked the crowds at the shows. Second-story burglars spent the days before the
show burglarizing nearby houses, and were seldom caught because the circus
usually rolled out of town within a day or two. As a result, you could buy
virtually anything in the roustabout’s tent: guns, family photo albums, knives,
all kinds of dope, rare coins. But they never stole from each other. That was
the rule. Circus people didn’t steal from other circus people.
Although
the roustabout crews included well-educated adventurers and men who were simply
down on their luck, a fair number of them bragged that they were on the run for
a variety of crimes in different states, and for all of them, circus life was
the perfect escape route. It offered a place to sleep, three meals a day and
cash money on payday, and no one asked about anything, ever.
When lunch
was called, Jack and I got in line but got out again when neither one of us
could name the color of the meat in the sandwiches.
“Let’s go
into town,” Jack said, so we found a railroad track and followed it, theorizing
that sooner or later it would lead someplace.
“I can’t wait
to get to New Haven,” he said. “It’s gonna be great. They have parties every
night down there. Maybe we can join a fraternity.”
“I
dunno,” I said. You got to study pretty hard. It’s not like high school, and
they throw you out if you don’t hit the marks.”
“Naw,” he
said, waving me off. “We’ll be okay.”
We walked
in a comfortable silence for a while, the way friends do, and stopped at a pond
where we spent a half-hour throwing rocks into the water. Then we just sat
there and watched the white clouds sail across the blue sky.
“You
know,” Jack said, without taking his eyes from a cloud that we had agreed
looked like a nuclear explosion, “I don’t even know why I’m going to school.”
I knew why
I was going to school, but I understood what he meant.
“I mean,
like, what else am I gonna do?” he asked. “I don’t want to live at home like
some kind of a bum. I can’t find a job, nobody will hire me. But I’m sick and
tired of school, you know.”
He sighed
deeply and added, more to himself than to me, “I used to know everything and
now I don’t know anything.”
It’s hard
to be an eighteen-year-old boy—you’re a man and not a man. You’re a kid, and
not a kid. It’s a difficult time for young men.
“If I
don’t eat something,” I said to a passing cloud that looked like a fried egg,
“I’m going to starve of starvation.”
“Me too,”
Jack added. “You know, like, they’ll find us here all dead and everything.”
“If a
train doesn’t run us over they’ll find us.”
“And I’ll
die a virgin,” Jack added from out of nowhere.
“Get outta
here,” I said. “You’re a virgin? For real?”
“Yeah,” he
laughed. “Jack the Zipper I ain’t.”
“I’m sorry
for your troubles,” I said. “But I’m still hungry. You got any money?”
“No,” he
said. “You?”
“Yeah, but
it’s at home and in the bank,” I answered, in those days before ATMs dotted the
landscape.
“We can
pull a chew and screw,” he said.
A “chew
and screw” was a high-school prank. Three or four guys drove to a different
town, ate at a local sit-down restaurant and bolted for the door before the
check came. We found a burger place in a shopping center and ordered and sat
silently until the food arrived. We were nervous because we were both
fundamentally honest kids, but when the burgers arrived our hunger got the best
of us and we ate. Then we sat there. We
didn’t want to do this, to run out on a bill; it seemed unmanly.
“Well, I
guess we gotta do this,” I said.
“Yeah,”
Jack whispered.
“I can’t
do this,” I said.
“Yeah,”
Jack whispered.
We walked
up to the counter and addressed the cook. “Sir,” I said, and he turned and
smiled at us. There was a crucifix above the stove and that gave me a little
hope that he would be a reasonable man.
“Look, we
ate and we don’t have any money,” I said.
“We’re
with the circus,” Jack added quickly.
“We can
wash dishes to work it off,” I said.
“Or mop
the floor,” Jack added, not helping. “Your floor is filthy.”
“I’m sure
you will,” the man said, still smiling, “right after you get out of the
hoosegow,” and he picked up the phone and dialed the police.
“All
right,” I said to Jack. “We tried to be nice.” We grabbed an armful of candies
lined up near the register and ran like hell out the door, into oncoming traffic
and into the nearby woods, with Jack a few feet behind me and the short-order
cook a few feet behind him. He was considerably older than we and after a
minute he stopped, placed his palms on his knees and bent over to catch his
breath. We made it to the top of a hill about five hundred yards away, dropped
our drawers, and mooned him. Out of breath ourselves, but exhilarated, I turned
to Jack and said, “Look, I don’t know what’s going in my life, either. I don’t
think anybody our age does.” I paused to take in some air. “Let’s go to college
in New Haven. If nothing else, we’ll get some real laughs.”
Jack
nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, let’s do that.”
I wrote this bill of rights for foster children several years ago.
There many other versions written by other people and almost all of them are
worth trying. It's your county. What's happening in foster care in America is
being carried out with your money and in your name. You have a right to do
something about it.
THE NATIONAL FOSTER
CHILDREN’S BILL OF RIGHTS
As a
child, a ward of the government and as an American citizen, you are protected
by the people of the United States of America, by our laws, by our courts and
by our government.
You
should be aware that you have specific rights while you are in foster care.
Those rights are as follows:
-You have
the right to be treated with dignity and respect and to live in dignity and
self-respect.
- No one
has the right to harm you, to strike you or to commit physical violence upon
you. If anyone harms you, strikes you or commits physical violence upon you,
you have a right to discuss this abuse with your caseworker, your foster care
provider, teachers or police officers. You cannot and will not be punished or
harmed further for discussing the abuse with these people.
-You have
the right to live in a foster home that is safe, comfortable and healthy.
-You have
a right to practice your religion, no matter what that religion might be. You
also have a right not to be forced to practice any religion.
-You have
the right to attend all court hearings that concern you.
-You have
the right to be represented in court by an Attorney. The government will pay
the attorney to represent you.
-You have
a right to meet with your caseworker at least once a month.
-The
information you share with your casework about your placement is confidential.
That is, your caseworker is forbidden by law to discuss your conversations
beyond people with a need to know.
-You have
a right to visit your family. That right cannot not be taken from you and it is
illegal to threaten you with taking that right from you.
-You have
the right to be placed with a relative as an alternative to foster home care.
-You have
a right to live with your siblings, meaning your brothers and sisters.
-You have
the right to live in a foster home as opposed to a group home.
-You have
a right to participate in any plan for your benefit and future.
-You have
the right to be provided with adequate and nourishing food, shelter and
clothing.
-You have
a right to your own belongings. You have a right to keep any money you have
earned or been given.
-You
cannot be forced to take medication that has not been prescribed by a doctor
and that has the prior approval of your caseworker.
-You have
the right to receive confidential phone calls and to have your mail come to you
unopened.
-At the
proper age, you have the right to participate in an Independent Living Skills
Program.
-You have
the right to file a complaint about the type of care you are receiving from
your caregivers or your caseworker.
-You have
the right to prompt medical treatment.
-You have
the right to speak to a counselor or therapist if you feel the need.
-You
cannot be taken out of foster care without a hearing before the proper
authorities.
GOOD WORDS TO HAVE………………..
Kenning (KEN-ing) noun: A figurative, usually compound,
expression used to describe something. For example, whale road for an ocean and
oar steed for a ship. From Old Norse kenna (to know). Ultimately from the
Indo-European root gno- (to know), which is also the source of know, recognize,
acquaint, ignore, diagnosis, notice, normal, prosopagnosia, gnomon,
anagnorisis, andagnosia. Earliest documented use: 1320. Kennings were used
especially in Old Norse and Old English poetry.
Excerpt from my book “On the Waterfront: The Making of a Great American Film”
Thanks largely to the efforts of his mother;
Elia grew into an energetic and optimistic young man with a genuine care for
those around him, an eye for women who found his honesty and sensitivity
charming. To help pay his tuition at
Williams College, he waited tables, washed dishes or tended bar at the Greek
fraternities who barred him from membership because, oddly enough, he was
Greek.
After
graduating cum laude, he entered the Yale School of Drama and returned to New
York after graduation where he joined the progressive and left leaning Group
Theater as an actor and assistant stage manager. At the time, the group was one
of the focal points of artistic life and radical thought and activity in New
York City. It attracted the best actors and directors, as well as a variety of
writers who specialized in the Stanislavsky’s Method form, in which the actor
is experiencing internally the emotion he is to emulate onstage, relating the character's
feelings to his own experience. Although
Kazan was an eager disciple of the practice, he took on another theory,
embodied by the actor Osgood Perkins, in which in acting and film creation,
there is no emotion only skill. Unlike many in the art, Kazan understood that
while both forms…the psychological and the professional (Technical)…. were
strong, if the two forms were combined in the right hands, the result would be
magical. And in his hands, it was. That, the emotional and technical, melded together
would become his trademark in filmmaking.
Although
never even a remotely handsome man, despite his staggering success with woman,
Elia considered himself acting material and in the 1930s, talked his way into
several small roles in a dozen plays, including Waiting for Lefty (1935) and
Golden Boy (1937) by Clifford Odets and The Gentle People by Irwin Shaw (1939)
****
“All
of a sudden I had a family of people that worked in the same way and had the
desire to reveal themselves.” Kazan
At that time, in the mid to late 1930s, the
Group Theater contained a small but influential communist cell that Kazan
joined. At the time, for the practical
and overly ambitious Kazan, it probably seemed like a logical move because he
saw the tightly knit group of armchair communists as a means to forward and
guide his theatrical career.
The
Theaters communist cell was made up by the best the group had to offer, and no
doubt, exclusivity and snob appeal, always-strong attractions in Kazan’s life,
played a larger role in his decision to commit to the party’s ideals then did a
radical change in the core values of this rug merchant’s son. In fact,
throughout his life, Kazan always made it clear that he was highly dedicated to
fat paychecks, dual coastal mansions and the privileges that came with being a
card-carrying member of the artistic elite.
While
the Group Theaters Communist group was lofty and idealistic, the national
American Communist Party was an authoritarian, iron fisted organization
determined to succeed. Controlling the influential Group Theater fit into that
goal and the leadership ordered Kazan (and others in his cell) to seize control
of the Group. Kazan refused, in part because of his ideals that theater and art
were sacred and in part because he was headstrong and simply had a lifelong
problem with authority. He was denounced
by the national party, no small thing at the time, and ordered to repent and
submit to party authority. He resigned instead and so ended the young man’s
foolish 17-month association with the communist party. It was a small,
youthful, meaningless side journey in a long and fascinating life that he would
pay for in the years to come, very dearly and very deeply.
*****
He
became one of the founding members of the Actor's Studio, a place where
thespians could grow and develop their craft with the psychological awareness
that was increasingly needed for the plays that were dominating Broadway
Theater.
It
was here, that Elia began directing more main line, commercial plays winning
critical notice for his energetic delivery of the popular comedy, Cafe
Crown. More success came with The Skin
of Our Teeth, with Tallulah Bankhead, Florence Eldridge, Frederic March and
Montgomery Clift. The play was a huge
box-office hit, won a Pulitzer Prize and brought Kazan his first New York Drama
Critics' Circle Award for direction.
After "The Skin of Our Teeth, he became a
major force on Broadway through his collaborations with Arthur Miller and
Tennessee Williams. His strong direction
of two of Miller’s plays, All My Sons, and Streetcar Named Desire, established
Kazan as Broadway's preeminent director and made a star of 23-year-old Marlon
Brando who was largely a Kazan discovery.
He followed these successes with another powerful theatrical milestone,
Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, with Lee J. Cobb as Willy Loman.
Having conquered the stage, he turned his
considerable talents to the silver screen as a director. (His first work was a
forgettable film called The People of Cumberland). Occasionally, in his salad days,
Kazan
employed himself from time to time as actor, first with a bit role as a
character named Googi Zucco in the 1940
Cagney film City for Conquest and then Blues in the Night (1941) as a bit
character named Nickie Haroyen. Kazan
had also taken a role in the 1935 independent film short called Pie in the sky
made by the left wing Public Theater during the depression.
His
first major film as a director, in 1945, was A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, a tale
about a working class Irish family coping with poverty and an alcoholic
father. (Kazan had attended Yale with
Betty Smith, the books author.) The film
won James Dunn an Academy Award as best supporting actor.
He
followed with Gentleman's Agreement, starring Gregory Peck, which won Kazan an Oscar, beating out George
Cukor (A Double Life), David Lean (Great Expectations), Henry Koster (The
Bishop's Wife), and Edward Dmytryk (Crossfire).
Gentleman’s Agreement was a creation of Fox Studios boss Daryl Zanuck,
one of the first films to deal with the subject of anti-Semitism. Zanuck, who was not Jewish, admitted to
having commissioned the film over his deep regret for making the remarkably
racist Ham and Eggs at the Front (1927) with Myrna Loy who was also disgusted
with herself for being aligned to the project.
The film was a major project for the young
Kazan and gave him a chance to work with Gregory Peck, who was given the lead
in the film over John Garfield who wanted the lead so badly he offered to
change his stage name, John Garfield, to his given name, Julius Garfinkle. However, the studio bosses, who were largely
Jewish, campaigned against making the film, preferring to leave the subject
alone. Instead, Garfield took a
supporting role in the film at a leading star salary. Kazan later added a scene in the film that
reflects Zanuck’s woes with the other studio bosses over creating the film. The
movie was the top grossing film of the year and opened to wide critical
success. Based on the box office
success of those works, other films followed including Boomerang, a 1947
thriller about small-town corruption starring Dana Andrews, Lee J. Cobb, and
Karl Malden. That same year he directed
Sea of Grass, a horse and cowboy opera with major stars Tracy and Hepburn. This
was followed by "Pinky"(1949) dealing with racism and miscegenation
and was yet another atonement film by Zanuck, whom despite the best of
intentions, turned down the light skinned African American Actress/ singer Lena
Horn for the role of a white women.
(Horn filmed much lighter than she actually was and probably could have
carried the part) Zanuck felt that
America was not ready for a Black actor in a lead role that involved several
love scenes with a white actor.
The
film did moderately well at the box office and Fox gave Kazan
Panic
in the Streets (1951), with stars Richard Widmark, Jack Palance, and Zero
Mostel in a taut drama about a manhunt in New Orleans to find the carrier of a
plague. Also in the film are
Waterfront’s Tiger Joe Marsh and Kazan who hired himself for a small role in
the film as a mortuary assistant.
Sculpture this and Sculpture
that
DON'T YOU JUST LOVE POP ART?
m.k spaceman
DON’T WORRY-BE HAPPY
HERE'S PLEASANT POEM FOR YOU TO ENJOY................
My Dad's
Wallet
Raymond
Carver
Long
before he thought of his own death,
my dad
said he wanted to lie close
to his
parents. He missed them so
after
they went away.
He said
this enough that my mother remembered,
and I
remembered. But when the breath
left his
lungs and all signs of life
had
faded, he found himself in a town
512 miles
away from where he wanted most to be.
My dad,
though. He was restless
even in
death. Even in death
he had
this one last trip to take.
All his
life he liked to wander,
and now
he had one more place to get to.
The
undertaker said he'd arrange it,
not to
worry. Some poor light
from the
window fell on the dusty floor
where we
waited that afternoon
until the
man came out of the back room
and
peeled off his rubber gloves.
He
carried the smell of formaldehyde with him.
He was a
big man, this undertaker said.
Then
began to tell us why
he liked
living in his small town.
This man
who'd just opened my dad's veins.
How much
is it going to cost? I said.
He took
out his pad and pen and began
to write.
First, the preparation chares.
Then he
figured the transportation
of the
remains at 22 cents a mile.
But this
was a round-trip for the undertaker,
don't
forget. Plus, say, six meals
and two
nights in a motel. He figured
some
more. Add a surcharge of
$210 for
his time and trouble,
and there
you have it.
He
thought we might argue.
There was
a spot of color on
each of
his cheeks as he looked up
from his
figures. The same poor light
fell in
the same poor place on
the dusty
floor. My mother nodded
as if she
understood. But she
hadn't
understood a word of it.
None of
it had made any sense to her,
beginning
with the time she left home
with my
dad. She only knew
that
whatever was happening
was going
to take money.
She
reached into her purse and brought up
my dad's
wallet. The three of us
in that
little room that afternoon.
Our
breath coming and going.
We stared
at the wallet for a minute.
Nobody
said anything.
All the
life had gone out of that wallet.
It was
old and rent and soiled.
But it
was my dad's wallet. And she opened
it and
looked inside. Drew out
a handful
of money that would go
toward
this last, most astounding, trip
Raymond
Carver, The Art of Fiction No. 76
Interviewed
by Mona Simpson, Lewis Buzbee
The Paris
Review 1988
Raymond Carver lives in a large,
two-story, wood-shingled house on a quiet street in Syracuse, New York. The
front lawn slopes down to the sidewalk. A new Mercedes sits in the driveway. An
older VW, the other household car, gets parked on the street.
The entrance to the house is
through a large, screened-in porch. Inside, the furnishings are almost without
character. Everything matches—cream-colored couches, a glass coffee table. Tess
Gallagher, the writer with whom Raymond Carver lives, collects peacock feathers
and sets them in vases throughout the house—the most noticeable decorative
attempt. Our suspicions were confirmed; Carver told us that all the furniture
was purchased and delivered in one day.
Gallagher has painted a
detachable wood No Visitors sign, the lettering surrounded by yellow and orange
eyelashes, which hangs on the screen door. Sometimes the phone is unplugged and
the sign stays up for days at a time.
Carver works in a large room on
the top floor. The surface of the long oak desk is clear; his typewriter is set
to the side, on an L-shaped wing. There are no knicknacks, charms, or toys of
any kind on Carver's desk. He is not a collector or a man prone to mementos and
nostalgia. Occasionally, one manila folder lies on the oak desk, containing the
story currently in the process of revision. His files are well in order. He can
extract a story and all its previous versions at a moment's notice. The walls
of the study are painted white like the rest of the house, and, like the rest
of the house, they are mostly bare. Through a high rectangular window above
Carver's desk, light filters into the room in slanted beams, like light from
high church windows.
Carver is a large man who wears
simple clothes—flannel shirts, khakis or jeans. He seems to live and dress as
the characters in his stories live and dress. For someone of his size, he has a
remarkably low and indistinct voice; we found ourselves bending closer every
few minutes to catch his words and asking the irritating “What, what?”
Portions of the interview were
conducted through the mail, during 1981–1982. When we met Carver, the No
Visitors sign was not up and several Syracuse students dropped by to visit
during the course of the interview, including Carver's son, a senior. For
lunch, Carver made us sandwiches with salmon he had caught off the coast of
Washington. Both he and Gallagher are from Washington state and at the time of
the interview, they were having a house built in Port Angeles, where they plan
to live part of each year. We asked Carver if that house would feel more like a
home to him. He replied, “No, wherever I am is fine. This is fine.”
INTERVIEWER
What was your early life like,
and what made you want to write?
RAYMOND CARVER
I grew up in a small town in
eastern Washington, a place called Yakima. My dad worked at the sawmill there.
He was a saw filer and helped take care of the saws that were used to cut and
plane the logs. My mother worked as a retail clerk or a waitress or else stayed
at home, but she didn't keep any job for very long. I remember talk concerning
her “nerves.” In the cabinet under the kitchen sink, she kept a bottle of
patent “nerve medicine,” and she'd take a couple of tablespoons of this every
morning. My dad's nerve medicine was whiskey. Most often he kept a bottle of it
under that same sink, or else outside in the woodshed. I remember sneaking a
taste of it once and hating it, and wondering how anybody could drink the
stuff. Home was a little two-bedroom house. We moved a lot when I was a kid,
but it was always into another little two-bedroom house. The first house I can
remember living in, near the fairgrounds in Yakima, had an outdoor toilet. This
was in the late 1940s. I was eight or ten years old then. I used to wait at the
bus stop for my dad to come home from work. Usually he was as regular as
clockwork. But every two weeks or so, he wouldn't be on the bus. I'd stick
around then and wait for the next bus, but I already knew he wasn't going to be
on that one, either. When this happened, it meant he'd gone drinking with
friends of his from the sawmill. I still remember the sense of doom and
hopelessness that hung over the supper table when my mother and I and my kid
brother sat down to eat.
INTERVIEWER
But what made you want to write?
CARVER
The only explanation I can give
you is that my dad told me lots of stories about himself when he was a kid, and
about his dad and his grandfather. His grandfather had fought in the Civil War.
He fought for both sides! He was a turncoat. When the South began losing the
war, he crossed over to the North and began fighting for the Union forces. My
dad laughed when he told this story. He didn't see anything wrong with it, and
I guess I didn't either. Anyway, my dad would tell me stories, anecdotes
really, no moral to them, about tramping around in the woods, or else riding
the rails and having to look out for railroad bulls. I loved his company and
loved to listen to him tell me these stories. Once in a while he'd read something
to me from what he was reading. Zane Grey westerns. These were the first real
hardback books, outside of grade-school texts, and the Bible, that I'd ever
seen. It wouldn't happen very often, but now and again I'd see him lying on the
bed of an evening and reading from Zane Grey. It seemed a very private act in a
house and family that were not given to privacy. I realized that he had this
private side to him, something I didn't understand or know anything about, but
something that found expression through this occasional reading. I was
interested in that side of him and interested in the act itself. I'd ask him to
read me what he was reading, and he'd oblige by just reading from wherever he
happened to be in the book. After a while he'd say, “Junior, go do something
else now.” Well, there were plenty of things to do. In those days, I went
fishing in this creek that was not too far from our house. A little later, I
started hunting ducks and geese and upland game. That's what excited me in
those days, hunting and fishing. That's what made a dent in my emotional life,
and that's what I wanted to write about. My reading fare in those days, aside
from an occasional historical novel or Mickey Spillane mystery, consisted of
Sports Afield and Outdoor Life, and Field & Stream. I wrote a longish thing
about the fish that got away, or the fish I caught, one or the other, and asked
my mother if she would type it up for me. She couldn't type, but she did go
rent a typewriter, bless her heart, and between the two of us, we typed it up
in some terrible fashion and sent it out. I remember there were two addresses
on the masthead of the outdoors magazine; so we sent it to the office closest
to us, to Boulder, Colorado, the circulation department. The piece came back,
finally, but that was fine. It had gone out in the world, that manuscript—it
had been places. Somebody had read it besides my mother, or so I hoped anyway.
Then I saw an ad in Writer's Digest. It was a photograph of a man, a successful
author, obviously, testifying to something called the Palmer Institute of
Authorship. That seemed like just the thing for me. There was a monthly payment
plan involved. Twenty dollars down, ten or fifteen dollars a month for three
years or thirty years, one of those things. There were weekly assignments with
personal responses to the assignments. I stayed with it for a few months. Then,
maybe I got bored; I stopped doing the work. My folks stopped making the
payments. Pretty soon a letter arrived from the Palmer Institute telling me that
if I paid them up in full, I could still get the certificate of completion.
This seemed more than fair. Somehow I talked my folks into paying the rest of
the money, and in due time I got the certificate and hung it up on my bedroom
wall. But all through high school it was assumed that I'd graduate and go to
work at the sawmill. For a long time I wanted to do the kind of work my dad
did. He was going to ask his foreman at the mill to put me on after I
graduated. So I worked at the mill for about six months. But I hated the work
and knew from the first day I didn't want to do that for the rest of my life. I
worked long enough to save the money for a car, buy some clothes, and so I
could move out and get married.
INTERVIEWER
Somehow, for whatever reasons, you
went to college. Was it your wife who wanted you to go on to college? Did she
encourage you in this respect? Did she want to go to college and that made you
want to go? How old were you at this point? She must have been pretty young,
too.
CARVER
I was eighteen. She was sixteen
and pregnant and had just graduated from an Episcopalian private school for
girls in Walla Walla, Washington. At school she'd learned the right way to hold
a teacup; she'd had religious instruction and gym and such, but she also learned
about physics and literature and foreign languages. I was terrifically
impressed that she knew Latin. Latin! She tried off and on to go to college
during those first years, but it was too hard to do that; it was impossible to
do that and raise a family and be broke all the time, too. I mean broke. Her
family didn't have any money. She was going to that school on a scholarship.
Her mother hated me and still does. My wife was supposed to graduate and go on
to the University of Washington to study law on a fellowship. Instead, I made
her pregnant, and we got married and began our life together. She was seventeen
when the first child was born, eighteen when the second was born. What shall I
say at this point? We didn't have any youth. We found ourselves in roles we
didn't know how to play. But we did the best we could. Better than that, I want
to think. She did finish college finally. She got her B.A. degree at San Jose
State twelve or fourteen years after we married.
INTERVIEWER
Were you writing during these
early, difficult years?
CARVER
I worked nights and went to
school days. We were always working. She was working and trying to raise the
kids and manage a household. She worked for the telephone company. The kids
were with a babysitter during the day. Finally, I graduated with the B.A.
degree from Humboldt State College and we put everything into the car and in
one of those carryalls that fits on top of your car, and we went to Iowa City.
A teacher named Dick Day at Humboldt State had told me about the Iowa Writers'
Workshop. Day had sent along a story of mine and three or four poems to Don
Justice, who was responsible for getting me a five-hundred-dollar grant at
Iowa.
INTERVIEWER
Five hundred dollars?
CARVER
That's all they had, they said.
It seemed like a lot at the time. But I didn't finish at Iowa. They offered me
more money to stay on the second year, but we just couldn't do it. I was
working in the library for a dollar or two an hour, and my wife was working as
a waitress. It was going to take me another year to get a degree, and we just
couldn't stick it out. So we moved back to California. This time it was
Sacramento. I found work as a night janitor at Mercy Hospital. I kept the job
for three years. It was a pretty good job. I only had to work two or three
hours a night, but I was paid for eight hours. There was a certain amount of
work that had to get done, but once it was done, that was it—I could go home or
do anything I wanted. The first year or two I went home every night and would
be in bed at a reasonable hour and be able to get up in the morning and write.
The kids would be off at the babysitter's and my wife would have gone to her
job—a door-to-door sales job. I'd have all day in front of me. This was fine
for a while. Then I began getting off work at night and going drinking instead
of going home. By this time it was 1967 or 1968.
INTERVIEWER
When did you first get published?
CARVER
When I was an undergraduate at
Humboldt State in Arcata, California. One day, I had a short story taken at one
magazine and a poem taken at another. It was a terrific day! Maybe one of the
best days ever. My wife and I drove around town and showed the letters of
acceptance to all of our friends. It gave some much-needed validation to our
lives.
INTERVIEWER
What was the first story you ever
published? And the first poem?
CARVER
It was a story called “Pastoral”
and it was published in the Western Humanities Review. It's a good literary
magazine and it's still being published by the University of Utah. They didn't
pay me anything for the story, but that didn't matter. The poem was called “The
Brass Ring,” and it was published by a magazine in Arizona, now defunct, called
Targets. Charles Bukowski had a poem in the same issue, and I was pleased to be
in the same magazine with him. He was a kind of hero to me then.
INTERVIEWER
Is it true—a friend of yours told
me this— that you celebrated your first publication by taking the magazine to
bed with you?
CARVER
That's partly true. Actually, it
was a book, the Best American Short Storiesannual. My story “Will You Please Be
Quiet, Please?” had just appeared in the collection. That was back in the late
sixties, when it was edited every year by Martha Foley and people used to call
it that—simply, “The Foley Collection.” The story had been published in an
obscure little magazine out of Chicago called December. The day the anthology
came in the mail I took it to bed to read and just to look at, you know, and
hold it, but I did more looking and holding than actual reading. I fell asleep
and woke up the next morning with the book there in bed beside me, along with
my wife.
INTERVIEWER
In an article you did for The New
York Times Book Review you mentioned a story “too tedious to talk about
here”—about why you choose to write short stories over novels. Do you want to
go into that story now?
CARVER
The story that was “too tedious
to talk about” has to do with a number of things that aren't very pleasant to
talk about. I did finally talk about some of these things in the essay “Fires,”
which was published in Antaeus. In it I said that finally, a writer is judged
by what he writes, and that's the way it should be. The circumstances
surrounding the writing are something else, something extraliterary. Nobody
ever asked me to be a writer. But it was tough to stay alive and pay bills and
put food on the table and at the same time to think of myself as a writer and
to learn to write. After years of working crap jobs and raising kids and trying
to write, I realized I needed to write things I could finish and be done with
in a hurry. There was no way I could undertake a novel, a two- or three-year
stretch of work on a single project. I needed to write something I could get
some kind of a payoff from immediately, not next year, or three years from now.
Hence, poems and stories. I was beginning to see that my life was not—let's say
it was not what I wanted it to be. There was always a wagonload of frustration
to deal with—wanting to write and not being able to find the time or the place
for it. I used to go out and sit in the car and try to write something on a pad
on my knee. This was when the kids were in their adolescence. I was in my late
twenties or early thirties. We were still in a state of penury, we had one
bankruptcy behind us, and years of hard work with nothing to show for it except
an old car, a rented house, and new creditors on our backs. It was depressing,
and I felt spiritually obliterated. Alcohol became a problem. I more or less
gave up, threw in the towel, and took to full-time drinking as a serious
pursuit. That's part of what I was talking about when I was talking about
things “too tedious to talk about.”
INTERVIEWER
Could you talk a little more
about the drinking? So many writers, even if they're not alcoholics, drink so
much.
CARVER
Probably not a whole lot more
than any other group of professionals. You'd be surprised. Of course there's a
mythology that goes along with the drinking, but I was never into that. I was
into the drinking itself. I suppose I began to drink heavily after I'd realized
that the things I'd wanted most in life for myself and my writing, and my wife
and children, were simply not going to happen. It's strange. You never start
out in life with the intention of becoming a bankrupt or an alcoholic or a
cheat and a thief. Or a liar.
INTERVIEWER
And you were all those things?
CARVER
I was. I'm not any longer. Oh, I
lie a little from time to time, like everyone else.
INTERVIEWER
How long since you quit drinking?
CARVER
June second, 1977. If you want
the truth, I'm prouder of that, that I've quit drinking, than I am of anything
in my life. I'm a recovered alcoholic. I'll always be an alcoholic, but I'm no
longer a practicing alcoholic.
INTERVIEWER
How bad did the drinking get?
CARVER
It's very painful to think about
some of the things that happened back then. I made a wasteland out of
everything I touched. But I might add that towards the end of the drinking
there wasn't much left anyway. But specific things? Let's just say, on
occasion, the police were involved and emergency rooms and courtrooms.
INTERVIEWER
How did you stop? What made you
able to stop?
CARVER
The last year of my drinking,
1977, I was in a recovery center twice, as well as one hospital; and I spent a
few days in a place called DeWitt near San Jose, California. DeWitt used to be,
appropriately enough, a hospital for the criminally insane. Toward the end of
my drinking career I was completely out of control and in a very grave place.
Blackouts, the whole business—points where you can't remember anything you say
or do during a certain period of time. You might drive a car, give a reading,
teach a class, set a broken leg, go to bed with someone, and not have any
memory of it later. You're on some kind of automatic pilot. I have an image of
myself sitting in my living room with a glass of whiskey in my hand and my head
bandaged from a fall caused by an alcoholic seizure. Crazy! Two weeks later I
was back in a recovery center, this time at a place called Duffy's, in
Calistoga, California, up in the wine country. I was at Duffy's on two
different occasions; in the place called DeWitt, in San Jose; and in a hospital
in San Francisco—all in the space of twelve months. I guess that's pretty bad.
I was dying from it, plain and simple, and I'm not exaggerating.
INTERVIEWER
What brought you to the point
where you could stop drinking for good?
CARVER
It was late May 1977. I was
living by myself in a house in a little town in northern California, and I'd
been sober for about three weeks. I drove to San Francisco, where they were
having this publishers' convention. Fred Hills, at that time editor in chief at
McGraw-Hill, wanted to take me to lunch and offer me money to write a novel.
But a couple of nights before the lunch, one of my friends had a party. Midway
through, I picked up a glass of wine and drank it, and that's the last thing I
remember. Blackout time. The next morning when the stores opened, I was waiting
to buy a bottle. The dinner that night was a disaster; it was terrible, people
quarreling and disappearing from the table. And the next morning I had to get
up and go have this lunch with Fred Hills. I was so hungover when I woke up I
could hardly hold my head up. But I drank a half pint of vodka before I picked
up Hills and that helped, for the short run. And then he wanted to drive over
to Sausalito for lunch! That took us at least an hour in heavy traffic, and I
was drunk and hungover both, you understand. But for some reason he went ahead
and offered me this money to write a novel.
INTERVIEWER
Did you ever write the novel?
CARVER
Not yet! Anyway, I managed to get
out of San Francisco back up to where I lived. I stayed drunk for a couple more
days. And then I woke up, feeling terrible, but I didn't drink anything that
morning. Nothing alcoholic, I mean. I felt terrible physically—mentally, too,
of course—but I didn't drink anything. I didn't drink for three days, and when
the third day had passed, I began to feel some better. Then I just kept not
drinking. Gradually I began to put a little distance between myself and the
booze. A week. Two weeks. Suddenly it was a month. I'd been sober for a month,
and I was slowly starting to get well.
INTERVIEWER
Did AA help?
CARVER
It helped a lot. I went to at
least one and sometimes two meetings a day for the first month.
INTERVIEWER
Did you ever feel that alcohol
was in any way an inspiration? I'm thinking of your poem “Vodka,” published in
Esquire.
CARVER
My God, no! I hope I've made that
clear. Cheever remarked that he could always recognize “an alcoholic line” in a
writer's work. I'm not exactly sure what he meant by this but I think I know.
When we were teaching in the Iowa Writers' Workshop in the fall semester of
1973, he and I did nothing but drink. I mean we met our classes, in a manner of
speaking. But the entire time we were there—we were living in this hotel they
have on campus, the Iowa House—I don't think either of us ever took the covers
off our typewriters. We made trips to a liquor store twice a week in my car.
INTERVIEWER
To stock up?
CARVER
Yes, stock up. But the store
didn't open until 10:00 a.m. Once we planned an early morning run, a ten o'clock
run, and we were going to meet in the lobby of the hotel. I came down early to
get some cigarettes and John was pacing up and down in the lobby. He was
wearing loafers, but he didn't have any socks on. Anyway, we headed out a
little early. By the time we got to the liquor store the clerk was just
unlocking the front door. On this particular morning, John got out of the car
before I could get it properly parked. By the time I got inside the store he
was already at the checkout stand with a half gallon of Scotch. He lived on the
fourth floor of the hotel and I lived on the second. Our rooms were identical,
right down to the same reproduction of the same painting hanging on the wall.
But when we drank together, we always drank in his room. He said he was afraid
to come down to drink on the second floor. He said there was always a chance of
him getting mugged in the hallway! But you know, of course, that fortunately,
not too long after Cheever left Iowa City, he went to a treatment center and
got sober and stayed sober until he died.
INTERVIEWER
Do you feel the spoken
confessions at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings have influenced your writing?
CARVER
There are different kinds of
meetings—speaker meetings where just one speaker will get up and talk for fifty
minutes or so about what it was like then, and maybe what it's like now. And
there are meetings where everyone in the room has a chance to say something.
But I can't honestly say I've ever consciously or otherwise patterned any of my
stories on things I've heard at the meetings.
INTERVIEWER
Where do your stories come from,
then? I'm especially asking about the stories that have something to do with
drinking.
CARVER
The fiction I'm most interested
in has lines of reference to the real world. None of my stories really
happened, of course. But there's always something, some element, something said
to me or that I witnessed, that may be the starting place. Here's an example:
“That's the last Christmas you'll ever ruin for us!” I was drunk when I heard
that, but I remembered it. And later, much later, when I was sober, using only
that one line and other things I imagined, imagined so accurately that they
couldhave happened, I made a story—“A Serious Talk.” But the fiction I'm most
interested in, whether it's Tolstoy's fiction, Chekhov, Barry Hannah, Richard
Ford, Hemingway, Isaac Babel, Ann Beattie, or Anne Tyler, strikes me as
autobiographical to some extent. At the very least it's referential. Stories
long or short don't just come out of thin air. I'm reminded of a conversation
involving John Cheever. We were sitting around a table in Iowa City with some
people and he happened to remark that after a family fracas at his home one
night, he got up the next morning and went into the bathroom to find something
his daughter had written in lipstick on the bathroom mirror: “D-e-r-e daddy,
don't leave us.” Someone at the table spoke up and said, “I recognize that from
one of your stories.” Cheever said, “Probably so. Everything I write is
autobiographical.” Now of course that's not literally true. But everything we
write is, in some way, autobiographical. I'm not in the least bothered by
“autobiographical” fiction. To the contrary. On the Road. Céline. Roth.
Lawrence Durrell in The Alexandria Quartet. So much of Hemingway in the Nick
Adams stories. Updike, too, you bet. Jim McConkey. Clark Blaise is a
contemporary writer whose fiction is out-and-out autobiography. Of course, you
have to know what you're doing when you turn your life's stories into fiction.
You have to be immensely daring, very skilled and imaginative and willing to
tell everything on yourself. You're told time and again when you're young to
write about what you know, and what do you know better than your own secrets?
But unless you're a special kind of writer, and a very talented one, it's
dangerous to try and write volume after volume on The Story of My Life. A great
danger, or at least a great temptation, for many writers is to become too
autobiographical in their approach to their fiction. A little autobiography and
a lot of imagination are best.
INTERVIEWER
Are your characters trying to do
what matters?
CARVER
I think they are trying. But
trying and succeeding are two different matters. In some lives, people always
succeed; and I think it's grand when that happens. In other lives, people don't
succeed at what they try to do, at the things they want most to do, the large
or small things that support the life. These lives are, of course, valid to
write about, the lives of the people who don't succeed. Most of my own
experience, direct or indirect, has to do with the latter situation. I think
most of my characters would like their actions to count for something. But at
the same time they've reached the point—as so many people do—that they know it
isn't so. It doesn't add up any longer. The things you once thought important
or even worth dying for aren't worth a nickel now. It's their lives they've
become uncomfortable with, lives they see breaking down. They'd like to set
things right, but they can't. And usually they do know it, I think, and after
that they just do the best they can.
INTERVIEWER
Could you say something about one
of my favorite stories in your most recent collection? Where did the idea for
“Why Don't You Dance?” originate?
CARVER
I was visiting some writer
friends in Missoula back in the mid-1970s. We were all sitting around drinking
and someone told a story about a barmaid named Linda who got drunk with her
boyfriend one night and decided to move all of her bedroom furnishings into the
backyard. They did it, too, right down to the carpet and the bedroom lamp, the
bed, the nightstand, everything. There were about four or five writers in the
room, and after the guy finished telling the story, someone said, “Well, who's
going to write it?” I don't know who else might have written it, but I wrote
it. Not then, but later. About four or five years later, I think. I changed and
added things to it, of course. Actually, it was the first story I wrote after I
finally stopped drinking.
INTERVIEWER
What are your writing habits
like? Are you always working on a story?
CARVER
When I'm writing, I write every
day. It's lovely when that's happening. One day dovetailing into the next.
Sometimes I don't even know what day of the week it is. The “paddle-wheel of
days,” John Ashbery has called it. When I'm not writing, like now, when I'm
tied up with teaching duties as I have been the last while, it's as if I've
never written a word or had any desire to write. I fall into bad habits. I stay
up too late and sleep in too long. But it's okay. I've learned to be patient
and to bide my time. I had to learn that a long time ago. Patience. If I
believed in signs, I suppose my sign would be the sign of the turtle. I write
in fits and starts. But when I'm writing, I put in a lot of hours at the desk,
ten or twelve or fifteen hours at a stretch, day after day. I love that, when
that's happening. Much of this work time, understand, is given over to revising
and rewriting. There's not much that I like better than to take a story that
I've had around the house for a while and work it over again. It's the same
with the poems I write. I'm in no hurry to send something off just after I
write it, and I sometimes keep it around the house for months doing this or
that to it, taking this out and putting that in. It doesn't take that long to
do the first draft of the story, that usually happens in one sitting, but it
does take a while to do the various versions of the story. I've done as many as
twenty or thirty drafts of a story. Never less than ten or twelve drafts. It's
instructive, and heartening both, to look at the early drafts of great writers.
I'm thinking of the photographs of galleys belonging to Tolstoy, to name one
writer who loved to revise. I mean, I don't know if he loved it or not, but he
did a great deal of it. He was always revising, right down to the time of page
proofs. He went through and rewrote War and Peace eight times and was still
making corrections in the galleys. Things like this should hearten every writer
whose first drafts are dreadful, like mine are.
INTERVIEWER
Describe what happens when you
write a story.
CARVER
I write the first draft quickly,
as I said. This is most often done in longhand. I simply fill up the pages as
rapidly as I can. In some cases, there's a kind of personal shorthand, notes to
myself for what I will do later when I come back to it. Some scenes I have to
leave unfinished, unwritten in some cases; the scenes that will require
meticulous care later. I mean all of it requires meticulous care—but some
scenes I save until the second or third draft, because to do them and do them
right would take too much time on the first draft. With the first draft it's a
question of getting down the outline, the scaffolding of the story. Then on subsequent
revisions I'll see to the rest of it. When I've finished the longhand draft
I'll type a version of the story and go from there. It always looks different
to me, better, of course, after it's typed up. When I'm typing the first draft,
I'll begin to rewrite and add and delete a little then. The real work comes
later, after I've done three or four drafts of the story. It's the same with
the poems, only the poems may go through forty or fifty drafts. Donald Hall
told me he sometimes writes a hundred or so drafts of his poems. Can you
imagine?
INTERVIEWER
Has your way of working changed?
CARVER
The stories in What We Talk About
are different to an extent. For one thing, it's a much more self-conscious book
in the sense of how intentional every move was, how calculated. I pushed and
pulled and worked with those stories before they went into the book to an
extent I'd never done with any other stories. When the book was put together
and in the hands of my publisher, I didn't write anything at all for six months.
And then the first story I wrote was “Cathedral,” which I feel is totally
different in conception and execution from any stories that have come before. I
suppose it reflects a change in my life as much as it does in my way of
writing. When I wrote “Cathedral” I experienced this rush and I felt, “This is
what it's all about, this is the reason we do this.” It was different than the
stories that had come before. There was an opening up when I wrote the story. I
knew I'd gone as far the other way as I could or wanted to go, cutting
everything down to the marrow, not just to the bone. Any farther in that
direction and I'd be at a dead end—writing stuff and publishing stuff I
wouldn't want to read myself, and that's the truth. In a review of the last
book, somebody called me a “minimalist” writer. The reviewer meant it as a
compliment. But I didn't like it. There's something about “minimalist” that
smacks of smallness of vision and execution that I don't like. But all of the
stories in the new book, the one called Cathedral, were written within an
eighteen-month period; and in every one of them I feel this difference.
INTERVIEWER
Do you have any sense of an
audience? Updike described his ideal reader as a young boy in a small
Midwestern town finding one of his books on a library shelf.
CARVER
It's nice to think of Updike's
idealized reader. But except for the early stories, I don't think it's a young
boy in a small Midwestern town who's reading Updike. What would this young boy
make of The Centaur or Couples or Rabbit Redux orThe Coup? I think Updike is
writing for the audience that John Cheever said he was writing for,
“intelligent, adult men and women,” wherever they live. Any writer worth his
salt writes as well and as truly as he can and hopes for as large and
perceptive a readership as possible. So you write as well as you can and hope
for good readers. But I think you're also writing for other writers to an
extent—the dead writers whose work you admire, as well as the living writers
you like to read. If they like it, the other writers, there's a good chance
other “intelligent, adult men and women” may like it, too. But I don't have
that boy you mentioned in mind, or anyone else for that matter, when I'm doing
the writing itself.
INTERVIEWER
How much of what you write do you
finally throw away?
CARVER
Lots. If the first draft of the
story is forty pages long, it'll usually be half that by the time I'm finished
with it. And it's not just a question of taking out or bringing it down. I take
out a lot, but I also add things and then add some more and take out some more.
It's something I love to do, putting words in and taking words out.
INTERVIEWER
Has the process of revision
changed now that the stories seem to be longer and more generous?
CARVER
Generous, yes, that's a good word
for them. Yes, and I'll tell you why. Up at school there's a typist who has one
of those space-age typewriters, a word processor, and I can give her a story to
type and once she has it typed and I get back the fair copy, I can mark it up to
my heart's content and give it back to her; and the next day I can have my
story back, all fair copy once more. Then I can mark it up again as much as I
want, and the next day I'll have back a fair copy once more. I love it. It may
seem like a small thing, really, but it's changed my life, that woman and her
word processor.
INTERVIEWER
Did you ever have any time off
from not having to earn a living?
CARVER
I had a year once. It was a very
important year for me, too. I wrote most of the stories in Will You Please Be
Quiet, Please? in that year. It was back in 1970 or 1971. I was working for
this textbook publishing firm in Palo Alto. It was my first white-collar job,
right after the period when I'd been a janitor at the hospital in Sacramento.
I'd been working away there quietly as an editor when the company, it was
called SRA, decided to do a major reorganization. I planned to quit, I was
writing my letter of resignation, but then suddenly—I was fired. It was just
wonderful the way it turned out. We invited all of our friends that weekend and
had a firing party! For a year I didn't have to work. I drew unemployment and
had my severance pay to live on. And that's the period when my wife finished
her college degree. That was a turning point, that time. It was a good period.
INTERVIEWER
Are you religious?
CARVER
No, but I have to believe in
miracles and the possibility of resurrection. No question about that. Every day
that I wake up, I'm glad to wake up. That's why I like to wake up early. In my
drinking days I would sleep until noon or whatever and I would usually wake up
with the shakes.
INTERVIEWER
Do you regret a lot of things
that happened back then when things were so bad?
CARVER
I can't change anything now. I
can't afford to regret. That life is simply gone now, and I can't regret its
passing. I have to live in the present. The life back then is gone just as
surely—it's as remote to me as if it had happened to somebody I read about in a
nineteenth-century novel. I don't spend more than five minutes a month in the
past. The past really is a foreign country, and they do do things differently
there. Things happen. I really do feel I've had two different lives.
INTERVIEWER
Can you talk a little about
literary influences, or at least name some writers whose work you greatly
admire?
CARVER
Ernest Hemingway is one. The
early stories. “Big Two-Hearted River,” “Cat in the Rain,” “The Three-Day
Blow,” “Soldier's Home,” lots more. Chekhov. I suppose he's the writer whose
work I most admire. But who doesn't like Chekhov? I'm talking about his stories
now, not the plays. His plays move too slowly for me. Tolstoy. Any of his short
stories, novellas, and Anna Karenina. Not War and Peace. Too slow. But The
Death of Ivan Ilyich, Master and Man, “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” Tolstoy
is the best there is. Isaac Babel, Flannery O'Connor, Frank O'Connor. James
Joyce's Dubliners. John Cheever. Madame Bovary. Last year I reread that book,
along with a new translation of Flaubert's letters written while he was
composing—no other word for it—Madame Bovary. Conrad. Updike's Too Far to Go.
And there are wonderful writers I've come across in the last year or two like
Tobias Wolff. His book of stories In the Garden of the North American Martyrs
is just wonderful. Max Schott. Bobbie Ann Mason. Did I mention her? Well, she's
good and worth mentioning twice. Harold Pinter. V. S. Pritchett. Years ago I
read something in a letter by Chekhov that impressed me. It was a piece of
advice to one of his many correspondents, and it went something like this:
Friend, you don't have to write about extraordinary people who accomplish
extraordinary and memorable deeds. (Understand I was in college at the time and
reading plays about princes and dukes and the overthrow of kingdoms. Quests and
the like, large undertakings to establish heroes in their rightful places.
Novels with larger-than-life heroes.) But reading what Chekhov had to say in
that letter, and in other letters of his as well, and reading his stories, made
me see things differently than I had before. Not long afterwards I read a play
and a number of stories by Maxim Gorky, and he simply reinforced in his work
what Chekhov had to say. Richard Ford is another fine writer. He's primarily a
novelist, but he's also written stories and essays. He's a friend. I have a lot
of friends who are good friends, and some of them are good writers. Some not so
good.
INTERVIEWER
What do you do in that case? I
mean, how do you handle that—if one of your friends
publishes something you
don't like?
CARVER
I don't say anything unless the
friend asks me, and I hope he doesn't. But if you're asked you have to say it
in a way that it doesn't wreck the friendship. You want your friends to do well
and write the best they can. But sometimes their work is a disappointment. You
want everything to go well for them, but you have this dread that maybe it
won't and there's not much you can do.
INTERVIEWER
What do you think of moral fiction?
I guess this has to lead into talk about John Gardner and his influence on you.
I know you were his student many years ago at Humboldt State College.
CARVER
That's true. I've written about
our relationship in the Antaeus piece and elaborated on it more in my
introduction to a posthumous book of his called On Becoming a Novelist. I think
On Moral Fiction is a wonderfully smart book. I don't agree with all of it, by
any means, but generally he's right. Not so much in his assessments of living
writers as in the aims, the aspirations of the book. It's a book that wants to
affirm life rather than trash it. Gardner's definition of morality is life
affirming. And in that regard he believes good fiction is moral fiction. It's a
book to argue with, if you like to argue. It's brilliant, in any case. I think
he may argue his case even better in On Becoming a Novelist. And he doesn't go
after other writers as he did in On Moral Fiction. We had been out of touch
with each other for years when he published On Moral Fiction, but his
influence, the things he stood for in my life when I was his student, were
still so strong that for a long while I didn't want to read the book. I was
afraid to find out that what I'd been writing all these years was immoral! You
understand that we'd not seen each other for nearly twenty years and had only
renewed our friendship after I'd moved to Syracuse and he was down there at
Binghamton, seventy miles away. There was a lot of anger directed toward
Gardner and the book when it was published. He touched nerves. I happen to
think it's a remarkable piece of work.
INTERVIEWER
But after you read the book, what
did you think then about your own work? Were you writing “moral” or “immoral”
stories?
CARVER
I'm still not sure! But I heard
from other people, and then he told me himself, that he liked my work.
Especially the new work. That pleases me a great deal. ReadOn Becoming a
Novelist.
INTERVIEWER
Do you still write poetry?
CARVER
Some, but not enough. I want to
write more. If too long a period of time goes by, six months or so, I get
nervous if I haven't written any poems. I find myself wondering if I've stopped
being a poet or stopped being able to write poetry. It's usually then that I
sit down and try to write some poems. This book of mine that's coming in the
spring, Fires—that's got all of the poems of mine I want to keep.
INTERVIEWER
How do they influence each other?
The writing of fiction and the writing of poetry?
CARVER
They don't any longer. For a long
time I was equally interested in the writing of poetry and the writing of
fiction. In magazines I always turned to the poems first before I read the
stories. Finally, I had to make a choice, and I came down on the side of the
fiction. It was the right choice for me. I'm not a “born” poet. I don't know if
I'm a “born” anything except a white American male. Maybe I'll become an
occasional poet. But I'll settle for that. That's better than not being any
kind of poet at all.
INTERVIEWER
How has fame changed you?
CARVER
I feel uncomfortable with that
word. You see, I started out with such low expectations in the first place—I
mean, how far are you going to get in this life writing short stories? And I
didn't have much self-esteem as a result of this drinking thing. So it's a
continual amazement to me, this attention that's come along. But I can tell you
that after the reception for What We Talk About, I felt a confidence that I've
never felt before. Every good thing that's happened since has conjoined to make
me want to do even more and better work. It's been a good spur. And all this is
coming at a time in my life when I have more strength than I've ever had
before. Do you know what I'm saying? I feel stronger and more certain of my direction
now than ever before. So “fame”—or let's say this newfound attention and
interest—has been a good thing. It bolstered my confidence, when my confidence
needed bolstering.
INTERVIEWER
Who reads your writing first?
CARVER
Tess Gallagher. As you know,
she's a poet and short-story writer herself. I show her everything I write
except for letters, and I've even shown her a few of those. But she has a
wonderful eye and a way of feeling herself into what I write. I don't show her
anything until I've marked it up and taken it as far as I can. That's usually
the fourth or fifth draft, and then she reads every subsequent draft
thereafter. So far I've dedicated three books to her and those dedications are
not just a token of love and affection; they also indicate the high esteem in
which I hold her and an acknowledgment of the help and inspiration she's given
me.
INTERVIEWER
Where does Gordon Lish enter into
this? I know he's your editor at Knopf.
CARVER
Just as he was the editor who
began publishing my stories at Esquire back in the early 1970s. But we had a
friendship that went back before that time, back to 1967 or 1968, in Palo Alto.
He was working for a textbook publishing firm right across the street from the
firm where I worked. The one that fired me. He didn't keep any regular office
hours. He did most of his work for the company at home. At least once a week
he'd ask me over to his place for lunch. He wouldn't eat anything himself, he'd
just cook something for me and then hover around the table watching me eat. It
made me nervous, as you might imagine. I'd always wind up leaving something on
my plate, and he'd always wind up eating it. Said it had to do with the way he
was brought up. This is not an isolated example. He still does things like
that. He'll take me to lunch now and won't order anything for himself except a
drink and then he'll eat up whatever I leave in my plate! I saw him do it once
in the Russian Tea Room. There were four of us for dinner, and after the food
came he watched us eat. When he saw we were going to leave food on our plates,
he cleaned it right up. Aside from this craziness, which is more funny than
anything, he's remarkably smart and sensitive to the needs of a manuscript.
He's a good editor. Maybe he's a great editor. All I know for sure is that he's
my editor and my friend, and I'm glad on both counts.
INTERVIEWER
Would you consider doing more
movie script work?
CARVER
If the subject could be as
interesting as this one I just finished with Michael Cimino on the life of
Dostoyevsky, yes, of course. Otherwise, no. But Dostoyevsky! You bet I would.
INTERVIEWER
And there was real money
involved.
CARVER
Yes.
INTERVIEWER
That accounts for the Mercedes.
CARVER
That's it.
INTERVIEWER
What about The New Yorker? Did
you ever send your stories to The New Yorkerwhen you were first starting out?
CARVER
No, I didn't. I didn't read The
New Yorker. I sent my stories and poems to the little magazines and once in a
while something was accepted, and I was made happy by the acceptance. I had
some kind of audience, you see, even though I never met any of my audience.
INTERVIEWER
Do you get letters from people
who've read your work?
CARVER
Letters, tapes, sometimes
photographs. Somebody just sent me a cassette—songs that had been made out of
some of the stories.
INTERVIEWER
Do you write better on the West
Coast—out in Washington—or here in the East? I guess I'm asking how important a
sense of place is to your work.
CARVER
Once, it was important to see
myself as a writer from a particular place. It was important for me to be a
writer from the West. But that's not true any longer, for better or worse. I
think I've moved around too much, lived in too many places, felt dislocated and
displaced, to now have any firmly rooted sense of “place.” If I've ever gone
about consciously locating a story in a particular place and period, and I
guess I have, especially in the first book, I suppose that place would be the
Pacific Northwest. I admire the sense of place in such writers as Jim Welch,
Wallace Stegner, John Keeble, William Eastlake, and William Kittredge. There
are plenty of good writers with this sense of place you're talking about. But
the majority of my stories are not set in any specific locale. I mean, they
could take place in just about any city or urban area; here in Syracuse, but
also Tucson, Sacramento, San Jose, San Francisco, Seattle, or Port Angeles,
Washington. In any case, most of my stories are set indoors!
INTERVIEWER
Do you work in a particular place
in your house?
CARVER
Yes, upstairs in my study. It's
important to me to have my own place. Lots of days go by when we just unplug
the telephone and put out our “No Visitors.” sign. For many years I worked at
the kitchen table, or in a library carrel, or else out in my car. This room of
my own is a luxury and a necessity now.
INTERVIEWER
Do you still hunt and fish?
CARVER
Not so much anymore. I still fish
a little, fish for salmon in the summer, if I'm out in Washington. But I don't
hunt, I'm sorry to say. I don't know where to go! I guess I could find someone
who'd take me, but I just haven't gotten around to it. But my friend Richard
Ford is a hunter. When he was up here in the spring of 1981 to give a reading
from his work, he took the proceeds from his reading and bought me a shotgun.
Imagine that! And he had it inscribed, For Raymond from Richard, April 1981.
Richard is a hunter, you see, and I think he was trying to encourage me.
INTERVIEWER
How do you hope your stories will
affect people? Do you think your writing will change anybody?
CARVER
I really don't know. I doubt it.
Not change in any profound sense. Maybe not any change at all. After all, art
is a form of entertainment, yes? For both the maker and the consumer. I mean in
a way it's like shooting billiards or playing cards, or bowling—it's just a
different, and I would say higher, form of amusement. I'm not saying there
isn't spiritual nourishment involved, too. There is, of course. Listening to a
Beethoven concerto or spending time in front of a van Gogh painting or reading
a poem by Blake can be a profound experience on a scale that playing bridge or
bowling a 220 game can never be. Art is all the things art is supposed to be.
But art is also a superior amusement. Am I wrong in thinking this? I don't
know. But I remember in my twenties reading plays by Strindberg, a novel by Max
Frisch, Rilke's poetry, listening all night to music by Bartók, watching a tv
special on the Sistine Chapel and Michelangelo and feeling in each case that my
life had to change after these experiences, it couldn't help but be affected by
these experiences and changed. There was simply no way I would not become a
different person. But then I found out soon enough my life was not going to
change after all. Not in any way that I could see, perceptible or otherwise. I
understood then that art was something I could pursue when I had the time for
it, when I could afford to do so, and that's all. Art was a luxury and it
wasn't going to change me or my life. I guess I came to the hard realization
that art doesn't make anything happen. No. I don't believe for a minute in that
absurd Shelleyan nonsense having to do with poets as the “unacknowledged
legislators” of this world. What an idea! Isak Dinesen said that she wrote a little
every day, without hope and without despair. I like that. The days are gone, if
they were ever with us, when a novel or a play or a book of poems could change
people's ideas about the world they live in or even about themselves. Maybe
writing fiction about particular kinds of people living particular kinds of
lives will allow certain areas of life to be understood a little better than
they were understood before. But I'm afraid that's it, at least as far as I'm
concerned. Perhaps it's different in poetry. Tess has had letters from people
who have read her poems and say the poems saved them from jumping off a cliff
or drowning themselves, et cetera. But that's something else. Good fiction is
partly a bringing of the news from one world to another. That end is good in
and of itself, I think. But changing things through fiction, changing
somebody's political affiliation or the political system itself, or saving the
whales or the redwood trees, no. Not if these are the kinds of changes you
mean. And I don't think it should have to do any of these things, either. It
doesn'thave to do anything. It just has to be there for the fierce pleasure we
take in doing it, and the different kind of pleasure that's taken in reading
something that's durable and made to last, as well as beautiful in and of
itself. Something that throws off these sparks—a persistent and steady glow,
however dim.
HERE'S SOME NICE ART FOR YOU TO LOOK AT....ENJOY!
Janette Kerr (British, Bath, Somerset, UK) - Letting Go, 2014 Oil on Canvas
Jervis McEntee - Misty Morning
Jean-Pierre Cassigneu
I LOVE BLACK AND WHITE
PHOTOS
WHY THE WORLD NEEDS EDITORS.....................
THE ART OF PULP
THE ART OF WAR...............................
Photographs I’ve taken
Washington DC
Eastern Shore of Maryland
Georgetown
Coronado Island
Fairfax Virginia
West Virginia
Sleeping Giant, Connecticut
Watkins Glen Festival, New York, July 28 of 1973, I was there!
IF INDUSTRY WON’T ACT RESPONSIBLE, THEN IMPOSE A
SUGAR TAX
How
Coca-Cola and Pepsi achieved global domination
Updated by Julia Belluz
For years, we've known that soda
is a major contributor to the obesity epidemic. But lately, major soda
companies have gotten a lot of really bad press for trying to obscure that
fact.
There was last month's New York
Times revelation that Coca-Cola had been quietly funding researchers and
organizations that diverted the conversation about obesity away from too many
calories and toward the notion that people simply aren't exercising enough.
This week, the company published
on its website a list of all the external organizations it has funded over the
past five years, to the tune of nearly $120 million. (We searched and sorted
the data here. It's an astonishing list that includes the American Diabetic
Association, the American Academy of Family Physicians, and the American
Academy of Pediatrics.)
This didn't come as a surprise to
Marion Nestle, a New York University professor who wrote the seminal tome on
the politics of food (appropriately named Food Politics). For years, she's been
tracking how American eating practices are shaped by the invisible forces of
industry and powerful lobbying groups.
In Soda Politics, she
investigates how PepsiCo and Coca-Cola — which sell nothing more than sweet tap
water — managed global domination and how that has had a terrible impact on
public health.
But the tale isn't a sad one.
Sales of soft drinks in the US have been declining for more than a decade.
Health advocates are, in Nestle's words, winning.
Julia Belluz: How exactly did
soda companies become some of the most powerful corporations in the world?
Marion Nestle: They have a
product people like that’s cheap and easy to make. And they set up a business
model in which everybody makes money. Within very short order, they had worked
out a model in which the bottlers, transporters, servers, soda fountains —
everyone was making money hand over fist. Sales grew and grew within the first
half of the 20th century.
There was also a big push during
World War II. Coke made a deal with the Army to provide a Coke to any soldier
anywhere in the world at a nickel a piece, and they got the Army to support
that. This means the Army did all the transportation and helped build bottling
plants. At the end of the war — this infrastructure in place in practically any
country in the world — they had a whole generation of GIs and their families
totally devoted to Coke.
Afterward, it was all marketing
to increasing numbers of groups, increasingly sophisticated marketing, and
making sure governments allowed them to do whatever they needed to do to keep
the sugar water plants up running.
All soda is tap water, with a
secret formula that isn't so secret — and an enormous amount of marketing
behind it, not only in ways people are aware of, like the TV or print ads, but
also all the behind-the-scenes ways these companies operate.
JB: You describe in the book how
these companies used science to expand their empires and divert messaging
around obesity, which only now seems to be a more widely appreciated Big Soda
tactic.
MN: Soda companies — and I'm
talking about Coke and Pepsi — completely dominate the industry and the
American Beverage Association, which is a trade association for the makers and
producers of these drinks. Coke and the American Beverage Association fund a
lot of research. That research — over the last 10 years or so at least — almost
invariably come out with results that favor the interests of the soda
companies.
There's so much research now that
shows people who drink soda have more obesity, Type 2 diabetes, tooth decay,
and other health problems compared with people who don't.
Companies have gone to a great
deal of effort to get research that will counter that. They've been successful
at partnering with scientists at universities willing to do studies for them.
In August, there was a huge
revelation in the New York Times about Coke sponsorship of something called the
Global Energy Balance Network. The network's purpose was to say that you didn't
have to worry about what you ate or drank if you were more active. That would
take care of your obesity problem.
Unfortunately, that’s not true.
There was some lack of transparency on the website for the network that didn't
expose Coke had paid for it — and investigators who were involved had disclosed
that Coke had given them the grant funding.
There was an enormous public
reaction. The president of Coke wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in
which he said they were suitably chastised and that he would start a
transparency initiative and list all the [organizations] he funded. Now,
everybody is looking to see who's been funded by Coke.
JB: In response to the New York
Times investigation, Coke just published a list of all the groups it's funded
over the past five years on its site. On there is everyone from medical
associations to sports teams and community groups. What did you make of that?
Does it go far enough?
MN: It’s astonishing. Who could
possibly believe that one company would fund so many organizations, every one
of them strategically identified? It would be helpful to have similar
information about scientists on the company’s committees and boards.
Their funding of these groups
makes a lot of sense. The funding buys brand loyalty, silences critics, heads
off efforts to advise drinking less soda, and gains support for the companies
when they need it.
The only company I can think of
[that's done something like this] is Philip Morris, which generously funded
arts organizations all over the US, putting every one of them in an awkward
position. But it’s much worse for all the health organizations funded by
Coca-Cola.
JB: Michelle Obama made fighting
childhood obesity a priority. Do you think the White House has done enough to
curb the influence of sugar-sweetened beverages on the American diet?
MN: The fact that the first lady
took on childhood obesity took my breath away. I couldn't believe it. What I
didn't know and still don't know is — did she know at the time she took this on
how controversial it would be? Or did she think, in a naive way, that everybody
would be against childhood obesity and want to fix the problem and it would be
a terrific bipartisan issue?
Childhood obesity seems like it’s
this lovely bipartisan issue, like planting flowers on a highway. Who could be
against doing something about childhood obesity? But I knew from the get-go
that it’d be hugely controversial. You would have to get kids to eat less of
some products, and makers of those products would be very upset.
What the first lady tried to do
was partner with food companies to get them to voluntarily make changes. She
has no regulatory authority, no statutory authority. She had to do it with
persuasion and leadership.
So you’re really questioning her
ability to persuade and lead. I don't think that's the right question. Did she
go about it in a way that seems most politically feasible, and did she make any
gains at all? I'd say yes. She brought the issue to the public attention in a
way it had never been brought to public attention before.
JB: In the book, you chart how
long it took to get soda out of schools — that health advocates started
petitioning in the '60s. Why was this such a difficult battle?
MN: There are a lot of food
companies who sell to kids, who expose their brands to children in schools.
There's a substantial amount of money in that. There's brand loyalty.
Go beyond that, and you get into
the question of nanny state-ism and personal responsibility — the idea that
parents are responsible for what kids eat, not government. There are First
Amendment rights to market our products to schoolkids. There are political ways
in which food companies try to protect their sales.
JB: Today, Big Soda's tactics
aren't as powerful as they once were — sales have been on the decline for about
15 years. What do you think were the key changes?
MN: Advocacy is working. We're
taking on Big Soda and winning. There are so many examples of successes. The
Berkeley soda tax was an enormous success. It passed with a 76 percent
majority. They organized in every community and framed it as Berkeley against
Big Soda. So anytime the soda industry did anything — like raise questions
about the "nanny state" — it backfired, because everybody could see
it was Big Soda exercising its muscle. It wasn't about public health.
The soda tax passed in Mexico because people
are so worried there about what obesity is going to do to their health-care
system and the population as a whole.
JB: Do you think soda has a place
in the American diet?
MN: The story of Big Soda is an
example of the ways food companies operate. These companies are not evil.
They’re not cigarette companies. Nobody is interested in putting them out of
business.
I am interested in getting them
to stop marketing to children, to minorities, and to stop doing everything they
can to undermine public health initiatives. Do I think sodas have a place in
the American diet? Sure — just not a big one.
If I had one thing I could teach
the American people, it would be that larger portions have more calories. In
the case of soda, larger portions have more sugar. The amount of sugars in
sodas are staggering: roughly a teaspoon per ounce. If you have a 12-ounce can,
it's 10 teaspoons. If you sat and put 12 packets of sugar into a 12-ounce glass
of water, you wouldn't want to drink it.
We know most people eat more than
they need. In a diet where you’re eating more than you need, sugar water is not
a good idea. Everybody would be healthier eating less sugar.
HERE IS AN
EXCEPT FROM MY BOOK "THE BOOK OF AMERICAN-JEWISH GANGSTERS"
(Max Zellner is a pen name, it
was my grandfather's born name. During World War 1 he changed it to the less
German sounding Paul Selner)
Corngold,
Joe:
AKA Fifke: Lived at 1828 South 59th Street in Chicago. A one-time body guard of Louis Cowen, a
Cicero newspaper publisher who got on the wrong side of the mob and was shot
dead in October of 1933. Corngold barely escaped the shooting. Some assumed he
had set the publisher up for assassination.
Corngold’s brother law was mob gambler
Kasper Ciapetta. It was Ciapetta (Who used the name John Carr, a one-time
policeman in the Levee district) who set up business for Joe Aiuppa in
Delaware, allowing the hood to take advantage of that states lenient tax
laws. From 1945 until 1950, Corngold was
a partner with gangsters Willie Heeney, a former Capone gunman, Joey Auippa and
Louis Campagna, a former Capone bodyguard, and Claude Moore also a former Capone
gunner, in a series of large and very profitable casinos, including the Turf
Club on Cermak Road, the El Patio and the Austin Club. Pressures brought on
from the Kefauver Committee closed the clubs.
Campagna admitted before the Kefauver
Committee that between 1937 and 1940
that his share of the profits from El
Patio and the Austin Club amounted to
$204,000, which allowed him to purchase an 800 acre estate near Fowler Indiana,
which federal investigators valued at $175,000. A second estate near Berrien
Springs was valued at about $75,000. The Committee also found out that Paul
Ricca owned 2200 acres near Kendall
County Ill. about 25 miles outside Chicago, an estate in River Forrest and another estate in Long Beach Indiana, which
burned down under questionable circumstances shortly after the Kefauver
Committee discovered Ricca’s ownership.
In the 1960s, Corngold and his occasional
business partner Joe Amato AKA Black Joe, had considerable real estate
interests in Arizona and lived several doors done from each other in the same condominium
complex. Corngold was active in the until the 1970s.
Joe-Joe Corngold
Excerpt from my book "When
Capone’s Mob Murdered Touhy.”
“Ten Percent Tony"
"Tony Cermak was an
example of the lowest type of machine politics that the corrupt political life
of Chicago had yet produced. He was uncouth, gruff, insolent and inarticulate ...
he could engage in no more intelligent discussion of the larger political
issues of the day than he could of the Einstein theory of relativity. He
appeared to take pride in his lack of polish."-Judge Lyle
Like Matt Kolb, Roger Touhy was a cautious man.
He was not prone to mistakes or leaps injudgement, especially when it came to
defying a man as dangerous as Al Capone. In fact, the only reason he would have
entered a shooting war against Capone and his massive criminal organization was
based on his absolute certainty that hewould win. That, and his little known
agreement with Chicago's powerful mayor, Anton Cermak, made the bootlegger
positive that he could pull Capone from his throne.
"Ten
Percent" Tony Cermak, the mayor of Chicago, would lead the Touhys into a
war with the Capone syndicate. Tony Cermak was, as Judge Lyle noted, "not
a nice man." Instead he was an intim- idator and a bully with a violent
temper, who would never walk away from a confrontation. He liked very few
people and trusted no one. As his power grew, so did his paranoia. In the state
house, as president of Cook County and later as mayor, Cermak used wiretaps,
stolen mail, secret surveillance and informants to get intelligence on the
weaknesses of his enemies.
Cermak was born on May 7, 1873 in a Bohemian
village about fifty miles from Prague. The family immigrated to America in
1884, settling in a Chicago slum. In 1900, the Cermak family moved to
Braidwood, in southern Illinois, where the elder Cermak worked as a coal miner.
At age sixteen Tony returned to Chicago alone and saw his opportunity in the
rough and tumble world of ethnic politics. He organized the Bohemian community
into a powerful voting machine and before he was old enough to vote himself,
Tony Cermak was a political power in the Windy City.
In addition to his unquenchable thirst for
power, Cermak was also a greedy man who used his power and position to grow
wealthy. While still a ward politician, he formed the United Societies, a high-
sounding name for what was nothing more then a shakedown operation to collect
money from the hundreds of pimps and saloon owners who worked along the
notoriously wicked 22nd Street (which was later, oddly enough, renamed Cermak
Road).
In 1902, at age twenty-six, Cermak went to
the State Capitol as a member of the House of Representatives. He eventually
worked his way up to Speaker of the House. This position allowed him, if he
wished, to block every piece of banking reform legislation before the House. It
was a position for which the state's bankers paid him richly. After three terms
in the capitol, Cermak's net worth was more than one million dollars. By the
time he became mayor of Chicago at age fifty-six, Tony Cermak, the nearly
illiterate immigrant, boasted a net worth of seven million dollars, although he
never had a job that paid him more then $12,000 a year.
In 1931, Cermak was the undisputed boss of
the most powerful political machine in the country, and declared himself a
candidate for Mayor of Chicago. The syndicate, sensing the federal government
might step in to restore order to the streets of Chicago if the hopelessly
corrupt "Big Bill" Thompson was re-elected, stood solidly behind
Cermak's candidacy. Ten Percent Tony Cermak the syndicate figured, was one of
them. They could live and prosper with Cermak at the helm. On election day,
April 7, 1931, Cermak trounced Thompson by the largest margin ever recorded in
a Chicago may- oral election. He promised the people of Chicago that he would
rid their city of gangsters before the Century of Progress Exhibition opened at
the World's Fair in the summer of 1933. But Cermak wouldn't rid Chicago of
organized crime. Instead he would try to corral it, dominate it, and grow rich
from it. All he had to do was give it another face, a plot the federal
government had unknowingly aided by putting Capone in prison on a shaky tax
charge. Capone's imprisonment left a void in Chicago's crime syndicate. Cermak
intended to fill that void with Roger Touhy.
Touhy had told Saul Alinsky, a sociologist,
writer and former member of the Joliet State Prison parole board, that in 1932
he entered a partnership with Cermak to run Chicago's underworld. The middle
man in the deal was Teddy Newberry, a thug who at one time or another had been
associated with every major gang in the city and acted as Cermak's bag man on
the street.
In a meeting at the mayor's office, Cermak
and Newberry urged Touhy to wage a war with Capone's mob. Roger was reluctant.
A defensive position against the mob was one thing, but an all out war was
entirely different. The syndicate could, Touhy pointed out, muster at least 500
gunmen in a few days. Cermak responded, 'You can have the entire police
department."
Eventually, Roger agreed to go along, and
Cermak sent word to his police commanders that the Touhys were to be cooperated
with in the war against the syndicate.
Wars cost money. Before the shooting started
Roger had to be positive that the cash he needed to support a street war was in
place. Anton Cermak could help with that.
At 6:56 A.M., on December 6, 1932, Tommy
Touhy led a gang of five masked men into the United States Post Office in the
heart of Chicago's Loop. They overpowered the guard and stole $500,000 in
securities and cash. The getaway was easy. Two hours earlier, Cermak called the
police shift commander and ordered him to pull all of his men out of the area.
A month later the Touhys, armed with machine guns, robbed a Minneapolis postal
truck of $78,417 in bonds, cash, certificates and jewelry. Several days later
they struck again, robbing a Colorado mail truck of $520,000 in cash.
During that time Cermak increased his raids
on syndicate gambling dens. In one afternoon alone, Chicago police acting on
Cermak's orders impounded 200 syndicate slot machines plus another 300 machines
stored at Gottleib and Company warehouses. This was the same Gottleib that
would later provide slots to mob-owned Las Vegas casinos. As soon as the police
took the syndicate's machines, Touhy's men replaced them with their own one armed
bandits. The moment a Mob handbook was closed Touhy's operators were moved in
to fill the gap. As always, Cermak had an ulterior motive. The raids were a
calculated move to cut the syndicate's cash flow in half so that they wouldn't
have the funding to carry on a drawn out street war.
It didn't take the mob's leadership a long
time to figure out they had been double-crossed by Cermak, who, along with
Touhy, was now putting on the double squeeze. The quick solution for the
syndicate was to kill Roger and Tommy Touhy. However killing them wouldn't
prove easy, especially now that they were surrounded by a small army of
enforcers including George "Baby Face" Nelson, a proven tough guy.
Still, the syndicate's bosses were
determined to stop the flow of union treasuries to Touhy. To do that, they
would have to send out a message; they had to throw a scare into the union
bosses. It had to be loud and violent and it had to be someone close to Touhy.
Bill Rooney was just the right person.
William James Rooney was a labor goon who
had done his first prison time back in 1907. In the years that followed Rooney
would face dozens of arrests including one in 1910 for the suspected murder of
Joseph Patrick Shea. Shea had been the business agent for the Chicago sheet
metal workers' union, a local which Rooney was trying to muscle his way into.
He was acquitted of the murder, even though he had shot Shea dead in the middle
of the union hall in front of at least 150 witnesses. No one testified against
him and Rooney was released to continue his takeover of the union. By 1928, he
not only controlled the sheet metal workers', but the flat janitors' and the
meat cutters' unions as well. Capone sent word that he wanted half of Rooney's
labor empire. Rooney refused and Capone threatened his life. Unfazed, Rooney
made his own threats and then started to move his operation and his family out
to Des Plains to live under Touhy's protection.
On the night they killed him, Rooney was
still moving his belongings from his home in Chicago to a rented house in Des
Plains. His wife and two children had already driven to the country.
Rooney waited outside his home while his
chauffeur sprinted down the street to retrieve his car from a rented garage
about five minutes away. Draped in a heavy grey top coat and dress hat, Rooney
paced back and forth on the lawn as a blue sedan pulled up to the curb. One of
the men in the back seat, believed to be Paul Ricca, rolled down a window and
said, "Hi Billy. "
When Rooney stepped up to the car and bent
down to look inside, a shotgun appeared in the window and three blasts ripped
into Rooney's head, chest and stomach. Remarkably, the blast didn't knock him
down. Instead, Rooney grabbed the car as it sped away, but then slid slowly to
his knees. He was dragged twenty-five feet before releasing his grip.
With Rooney dead, Red Barker and Murray
Humpreys took over the sheet metal and the building service employees' union
and looted its treasury.
Rooney's murder was one of the last bright moments
for the syndicate. For the next two years, the Touhy-Cermak-Newberry
combination pounded the mob mercilessly. In fact, within three days of Rooney's
murder, the Touhys responded by killing Johnny Genaro, Capone's new acting
chief of staff, and his driver, Joey Vince, by pulling up along the side of
Genaro's car and drilling a dozen rounds of machine gun fire into both of them.
Genero died immediately but Vince managed to
live until the cops arrived. A patrolman lifted the hood's head out of a pool
of blood and whispered "Who shot you? Who did this?"
For a man full of bullet holes on the
threshold of death, Vince was remarkably lucid. He sat upright for a second and
said '1 can't describe the men. I was too confused at the moment it
happened...and I would never tell you anyway, you piece of shit. "
Then he fell back into the gutter and died.
Syndicate thug Tony Genero, killed by the Touhy's in the Touhy-Nitti labors wars
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LITERATURE
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In
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NOSTALGIA
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ORGANIZED CRIME
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Whacked:
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PHILOSOPHY
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WASHINGTON DC
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BOOKS
The
Porchless Pumpkin: A Halloween Story for Children
A Halloween play for young children. By consent of the author,
this play may be performed, at no charge, by educational institutions,
neighborhood organizations and other not-for-profit-organizations.
A fun story with a moral
“I believe that Denny O'Day is an American treasure and this
little book proves it. Jack is a pumpkin who happens to be very small, by
pumpkins standards and as a result he goes unbought in the pumpkin patch on
Halloween eve, but at the last moment he is given his chance to prove that just
because you're small doesn't mean you can't be brave. Here is the point that I
found so wonderful, the book stresses that while size doesn't matter when it
comes to courage...ITS OKAY TO BE SCARED....as well. I think children need to
hear that, that's its okay to be unsure because life is a ongoing lesson isn't
it?”
Paperback: 42 pages
http://www.amazon.com/OLANTERN-PORCHLESS-PUMPKIN-Halloween-Children
BOOKS
ON FOSTER CARE
It's Not
All Right to be a Foster Kid....no matter what they tell you: Tweet the books
contents
Paperback 94 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Right-Foster-Kid-no-matter-what
From the Author
I spent my childhood, from age seven through seventeen, in
foster care. Over the course of those
ten years, many decent, well-meaning, and concerned people told me, "It's
okay to be foster kid."
In saying that, those very good people meant to encourage me,
and I appreciated their kindness then, and all these many decades later, I
still appreciate their good intentions. But as I was tossed around the foster
care system, it began to dawn on me that they were wrong. It was not all right to be a foster kid.
During my time in the system, I was bounced every eighteen
months from three foster homes to an orphanage to a boy's school and to a group
home before I left on my own accord at age seventeen.
In the course of my stay in foster care, I was severely beaten
in two homes by my "care givers" and separated from my four siblings
who were also in care, sometimes only blocks away from where I was living.
I left the system rather than to wait to age out, although the
effects of leaving the system without any family, means, or safety net of any
kind, were the same as if I had aged out. I lived in poverty for the first part
of my life, dropped out of high school, and had continuous problems with the
law.
Today, almost nothing
about foster care has changed. Exactly
what happened to me is happening to some other child, somewhere in America,
right now. The system, corrupt, bloated,
and inefficient, goes on, unchanging and secretive.
Something has gone wrong in a system that was originally a
compassionate social policy built to improve lives but is now a definitive
cause in ruining lives. Due to gross
negligence, mismanagement, apathy, and greed, mostly what the foster care
system builds are dangerous consequences. Truly, foster care has become our
epic national disgrace and a nightmare for those of us who have lived through
it.
Yet there is a suspicion among some Americans that foster care
costs too much, undermines the work ethic, and is at odds with a satisfying
life. Others see foster care as a part
of the welfare system, as legal plunder of the public treasuries.
None of that is true;
in fact, all that sort of thinking does is to blame the victims. There is not a single child in the system who
wants to be there or asked to be there.
Foster kids are in foster care because they had nowhere else to go. It's that simple. And believe me, if those kids could get out
of the system and be reunited with their parents and lead normal, healthy
lives, they would. And if foster care is a sort of legal plunder of the public
treasuries, it's not the kids in the system who are doing the plundering.
We need to end this
needless suffering. We need to end it
because it is morally and ethically wrong and because the generations to come
will not judge us on the might of our armed forces or our technological
advancements or on our fabulous wealth.
Rather, they will judge
us, I am certain, on our compassion for those who are friendless, on our
decency to those who have nothing and on our efforts, successful or not, to
make our nation and our world a better place.
And if we cannot accomplish those things in the short time allotted to
us, then let them say of us "at least they tried."
You can change the tragedy of foster care and here's how to do
it. We have created this book so that
almost all of it can be tweeted out by you to the world. You have the power to improve the lives of
those in our society who are least able to defend themselves. All you need is the will to do it.
If the American people,
as good, decent and generous as they are, knew what was going on in foster
care, in their name and with their money, they would stop it. But, generally speaking, although the public
has a vague notion that foster care is a mess, they don't have the complete
picture. They are not aware of the human, economic and social cost that the
mismanagement of the foster care system puts on our nation.
By tweeting the facts laid out in this work, you can help to
change all of that. You can make a
difference. You can change things for
the better.
We can always change the future for a foster kid; to make it
better ...you have the power to do that. Speak up (or tweet out) because it's your
country. Don't depend on the "The
other guy" to speak up for these kids, because you are the other guy.
We cannot build a future for foster children, but we can build
foster children for the future and the time to start that change is today.
No time to
say Goodbye: Memoirs of a life in foster
Paperbook 440 Books
http://www.amazon.com/No-Time-Say-Goodbye-Memoir
BOOKS ABOUT FILM
On the
Waterfront: The Making of a Great American Film
Paperback: 416 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Waterfront-Making-Great-American-Film/
BOOKS ABOUT GHOSTS AND THE SUPERNATUAL
Scotish
Ghost Stories
Paperback 186 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Scottish-Ghost-Stories-Elliott-ODonell
HUMOR BOOKS
The Book
of funny odd and interesting things people say
Paperback: 278 pages
http://www.amazon.com/book-funny-interesting-things-people
The Wee
Book of Irish Jokes
http://www.amazon.com/Book-Series-Irish-Jokes-ebook
Perfect
Behavior: A guide for Ladies and Gentlemen in all Social Crises
http://www.amazon.com/Perfect-Behavior-Ladies-Gentlemen-Social
BOOKS ABOUT THE 1960s
You Don’t
Need a Weatherman. Underground 1969
Paperback 122 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Weatherman-Notes-Weatherman-Underground-1969
Baby
Boomers Guide to the Beatles Songs of the Sixties
Paperback
http://www.amazon.com/Boomers-Guide-Beatles-Songs-Sixties/
Baby
Boomers Guide to Songs of the 1960s
http://www.amazon.com/Baby-Boomers-Guide-Songs-1960s
IRISH- AMERICANA
The
Connecticut Irish
Paper back 140 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Connecticut-Irish-Catherine-F-Connolly
The Wee Book of Irish Jokes
http://www.amazon.com/Book-Series-Irish-Jokes-ebook/
The Wee
Book of Irish Recipes
http://www.amazon.com/The-Wee-Book-Irish-Recipes/
The Wee Book of the American-Irish Gangsters
http://www.amazon.com/The-Wee-Book-Irish-American-Gangsters/
The Wee book of Irish Blessings...
http://www.amazon.com/Series-Blessing-Proverbs-Toasts-ebook/
The Wee
Book of the American Irish in Their Own Words
http://www.amazon.com/Book-American-Irish-Their-Words/
Everything
you need to know about St. Patrick
Paperback 26 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Everything-Need-About-Saint-Patrick
A Reading
Book in Ancient Irish History
Paperback 147pages
http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Book-Ancient-Irish-History
The Book
of Things Irish
http://www.amazon.com/Book-Things-Irish-William-Tuohy/
Poets and
Dreamer; Stories translated from the Irish
Paperback 158 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Poets-Dreamers-Stories-Translated-Irish/
The
History of the Great Irish Famine: Abridged and Illustrated
Paperback 356 pages
http://www.amazon.com/History-Great-Irish-Famine-Illustrated/
BOOKS ABOUT NEW ENGLAND
The New
England Mafia
http://www.amazon.com/The-New-England-Mafia-ebook/
Wicked
Good New England Recipes
http://www.amazon.com/Wicked-Good-New-England-Recipes/
The
Connecticut Irish
Paper back 140 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Connecticut-Irish-Catherine-F-Connolly
The
Twenty-Fifth Regiment Connecticut Volunteers
Paperback 64 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Twenty-Fifth-Regiment-Connecticut-Volunteers-Rebellion
The Life
of James Mars
Paperback 54 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Life-James-Mars-Slave-Connecticut
Stories
of Colonial Connecticut
Paperback 116 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Stories-Colonial-Connnecticut-Caroline-Clifford
What they
Say in Old New England
Paperback 194 pages
http://www.amazon.com/What-they-say-New-England/
BOOK ABOUT ORGANIZED CRIME
Chicago
Organized Crime
Chicago-Mob-Bosses
http://www.amazon.com/Chicagos-Mob-Bosses-Accardo-ebook
The Mob
Files: It Happened Here: Places of Note in Chicago gangland 1900-2000
http://www.amazon.com/The-Mob-Files-1900-2000-ebook
An
Illustrated Chronological History of the Chicago Mob. Time Line 1837-2000
http://www.amazon.com/Illustrated-Chronological-History-Chicago-1837-2000/
Mob
Buster: Report of Special Agent Virgil Peterson to the Kefauver Committee
http://www.amazon.com/Mob-Buster-Peterson-Committee-ebook/
The Mob
Files. Guns and Glamour: The Chicago Mob. A History. 1900-2000
http://www.amazon.com/Mob-Files-Guns-Glamour-ebook/
Shooting
the Mob: Organized crime in photos. Crime Boss Tony Accardo
http://www.amazon.com/Shooting-Mob-Organized-photos-Accardo/
Shooting
the Mob: Organized Crime in Photos: The Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre.
http://www.amazon.com/Shooting-Mob-Organized-Valentines-Massacre
The Life
and World of Al Capone in Photos
http://www.amazon.com/Life-World-Al-Capone
AL
CAPONE: The Biography of a Self-Made Man.: Revised from the 0riginal 1930
edition.Over 200 new photographs
Paperback: 340 pages
http://www.amazon.com/CAPONE-Biography-Self-Made-Over-photographs
Whacked.
One Hundred Years Murder and Mayhem in the Chicago Outfit
Paperback: 172 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Whacked-Hundred-Murder-Mayhem-Chicago/
Las
Vegas Organized Crime
The Mob
in Vegas
http://www.amazon.com/Mob-Files-Vegas-ebook
Bugsy
& His Flamingo: The Testimony of Virginia Hill
http://www.amazon.com/Bugsy-His-Flamingo-Testimony-Virginia/
Testimony
by Mobsters Lewis McWillie, Joseph Campisi and Irwin Weiner (The Mob Files
Series)
http://www.amazon.com/The-Kennedy-Assassination-Ruby-Testimony-ebook
Rattling
the Cup on Chicago Crime.
Paperback 264 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Rattling-Cup-Chicago-Crime-Abridged
The Life
and Times of Terrible Tommy O’Connor.
Paperback 94 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Life-Times-Terrible-Tommy-OConnor
The Mob,
Sam Giancana and the overthrow of the Black Policy Racket in Chicago
Paperback 200 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Giancana-ovethrow-Policy-Rackets-Chicago
When
Capone’s Mob Murdered Roger Touhy. In Photos
Paperback 234 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Capones-Murdered-Roger-Touhy-photos
Organized
Crime in Hollywood
The Mob in Hollywood
http://www.amazon.com/Mob-Files-Hollywood-ebook/
The Bioff
Scandal
Paperback 54 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Bioff-Scandal-Shakedown-Hollywood-Studios
Organized
Crime in New York
Joe Pistone’s war on the mafia
http://www.amazon.com/Joe-Petrosinos-War-Mafia-Files/
Mob
Testimony: Joe Pistone, Michael Scars DiLeonardo, Angelo Lonardo and others
http://www.amazon.com/Mob-Testimony-DiLeonardo-testimony-Undercover/
The New
York Mafia: The Origins of the New York Mob
http://www.amazon.com/The-New-York-Mafia-Origins
The New
York Mob: The Bosses
http://www.amazon.com/The-New-York-Mob-Bosses/
Organized
Crime 25 Years after Valachi. Hearings before the US Senate
http://www.amazon.com/Organized-Crime-Valachi-Hearings-ebook
Shooting
the mob: Dutch Schultz
http://www.amazon.com/Shooting-Mob-Organized-Photographs-Schultz
Gangland
Gaslight: The Killing of Rosy Rosenthal. (Illustrated)
http://www.amazon.com/Gangland-Gaslight-Killing-Rosenthal-Illustrated/
Early
Street Gangs and Gangsters of New York City
Paperback 382 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Early-Street-Gangs-Gangsters-York
THE RUSSIAN MOBS
The
Russian Mafia in America
http://www.amazon.com/The-Russian-Mafia-America-ebook/
The
Threat of Russian Organzied Crime
Paperback 192 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Threat-Russian-Organized-Crime-photographs-ebook
Organized
Crime/General
Best of
Mob Stories
http://www.amazon.com/Files-Series-Illustrated-Articles-Organized-Crime/
Best of
Mob Stories Part 2
http://www.amazon.com/Series-Illustrated-Articles-Organized-ebook/
Illustrated-Book-Prohibition-Gangsters
http://www.amazon.com/Illustrated-Book-Prohibition-Gangsters-ebook
Mob
Recipes to Die For. Meals and Mobsters in Photos
http://www.amazon.com/Recipes-For-Meals-Mobsters-Photos
More Mob
Recipes to Die For. Meals and Mobs
http://www.amazon.com/More-Recipes-Meals-Mobsters-Photos
The New
England Mafia
http://www.amazon.com/The-New-England-Mafia-ebook
Shooting
the mob. Organized crime in photos. Dead Mobsters, Gangsters and Hoods.
http://www.amazon.com/Shooting-mob-Organized-photos-Mobsters-Gangsters/
The
Salerno Report: The Mafia and the Murder of President John F. Kennedy
http://www.amazon.com/The-Salerno-Report-President-ebook/
The
Mob Files: Mob Wars. "We only kill each other"
http://www.amazon.com/The-Mob-Files-Wars-other/
The Mob
across America
http://www.amazon.com/The-Files-Across-America-ebook/
The US
Government’s Time Line of Organzied Crime 1920-1987
http://www.amazon.com/GOVERNMENTS-ORGANIZED-1920-1987-Illustrated-ebook/
Early
Street Gangs and Gangsters of New York City: 1800-1919. Illustrated
http://www.amazon.com/Gangsters-1800-1919-Illustrated-Street-ebook/
The Mob
Files: Mob Cops, Lawyers and Informants and Fronts
http://www.amazon.com/The-Mob-Files-Informants-ebook/
Gangster
Quotes: Mobsters in their own words. Illustrated
Paperback: 128 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Gangsters-Quotes-Mobsters-words-Illustrated/
The Book
of American-Jewish Gangsters: A Pictorial History.
Paperback: 436 pages
http://www.amazon.com/The-Book-American
-Jewish-Gangsters-Pictorial/
The Mob
and the Kennedy Assassination
Paperback 414 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Mob-Kennedy-Assassination-Ruby-Testimony-Mobsters
BOOKS ABOUT THE OLD WEST
The Last
Outlaw: The story of Cole Younger, by Himself
Paperback 152 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Last-Outlaw-Story-Younger-Himself
BOOKS ON PHOTOGRAPHY
Chicago:
A photographic essay.
Paperback: 200 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Chicago-Photographic-Essay-William-Thomas
STAGE PLAYS
Boomers
on a train: A ten minute play
Paperback 22 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Boomers-train-ten-minute-Play-ebook
Four
Short Plays
By John William Tuohy
http://www.amazon.com/Four-Short-Plays-William-Tuohy
Four More
Short Plays
By John William Tuohy
http://www.amazon.com/Four-Short-Plays-William-Tuohy/
High and
Goodbye: Everybody gets the Timothy Leary they deserve. A full length play
By John William Tuohy
http://www.amazon.com/High-Goodbye-Everybody-Timothy-deserve
Cyberdate.
An Everyday Love Story about Everyday People
By John William Tuohy
http://www.amazon.com/Cyberdate-Everyday-Story-People-ebook/
The
Dutchman's Soliloquy: A one Act Play based on the factual last words of
Gangster Dutch Schultz.
By John William Tuohy
http://www.amazon.com/Dutchmans-Soliloquy-factual-Gangster-Schultz/
Fishbowling
on The Last Words of Dutch Schultz: Or William S. Burroughs intersects with
Dutch Schultz
Print Length: 57 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Fishbowling-Last-Words-Dutch-Schultz-ebook/
American
Shakespeare: August Wilson in his own words. A One Act Play
By John William Tuohy
http://www.amazon.com/American-Shakespeare-August-Wilson-ebook
She
Stoops to Conquer
http://www.amazon.com/She-Stoops-Conquer-Oliver-Goldsmith/
The Seven
Deadly Sins of Gilligan’s Island: A ten minute play
Print Length: 14 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Seven-Deadly-Gilligans-Island-minute-ebook/
BOOKS ABOUT VIRGINIA
OUT OF
CONTROL: An Informal History of the Fairfax County Police
http://www.amazon.com/Control-Informal-History-Fairfax-Police/
McLean
Virginia. A short informal history
http://www.amazon.com/McLean-Virginia-Short-Informal-History/
THE QUOTABLE SERIES
The
Quotable Emerson: Life lessons from the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Over 300
quotes
http://www.amazon.com/The-Quotable-Emerson-lessons-quotes
The
Quotable John F. Kennedy
http://www.amazon.com/The-Quotable-John-F-Kennedy/
The
Quotable Oscar Wilde
http://www.amazon.com/The-Quotable-Oscar-Wilde-lessons/
The
Quotable Machiavelli
http://www.amazon.com/The-Quotable-Machiavelli-Richard-Thayer/
The
Quotable Confucius: Life Lesson from the Chinese Master
http://www.amazon.com/The-Quotable-Confucius-Lesson-Chinese/
The
Quotable Henry David Thoreau
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Henry-Thoreau-Quotables-ebook
The
Quotable Robert F. Kennedy
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Robert-F-Kennedy-Illustrated/
The
Quotable Writer: Writers on the Writers Life
http://www.amazon.com/The-Quotable-Writer-Quotables-ebook
The words
of Walt Whitman: An American Poet
Paperback: 162 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Words-Walt-Whitman-American-Poet
Gangster
Quotes: Mobsters in their own words. Illustrated
Paperback: 128 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Gangsters-Quotes-Mobsters-words-Illustrated/
The
Quotable Popes
Paperback 66 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Popes-Maria-Conasenti
The
Quotable Kahlil Gibran with Artwork from Kahlil Gibran
Paperback 52 pages
Kahlil Gibran, an artist, poet, and writer was born on January
6, 1883 n the north of modern-day Lebanon and in what was then part of Ottoman
Empire. He had no formal schooling in Lebanon. In 1895, the family immigrated
to the United States when Kahlil was a young man and settled in South Boston.
Gibran enrolled in an art school and was soon a member of the avant-garde
community and became especially close to Boston artist, photographer, and
publisher Fred Holland Day who encouraged and supported Gibran’s creative
projects. An accomplished artist in drawing and watercolor, Kahlil attended art
school in Paris from 1908 to 1910, pursuing a symbolist and romantic style. He
held his first art exhibition of his drawings in 1904 in Boston, at Day's
studio. It was at this exhibition, that Gibran met Mary Elizabeth Haskell, who
ten years his senior. The two formed an important friendship and love affair
that lasted the rest of Gibran’s short life. Haskell influenced every aspect of
Gibran’s personal life and career. She became his editor when he began to write
and ushered his first book into publication in 1918, The Madman, a slim volume
of aphorisms and parables written in biblical cadence somewhere between poetry
and prose. Gibran died in New York City on April 10, 1931, at the age of 48
from cirrhosis of the liver and tuberculosis.
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Kahlil-Gibran-artwork/
The
Quotable Dorothy Parker
Paperback 86 pages
The
Quotable Machiavelli
Paperback 36 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Machiavelli-Richard-L-Thayer
The
Quotable Greeks
Paperback 230 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Greeks-Richard-W-Willoughby
The
Quotabe Oscar Wilde
Paperback 24 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Oscar-Wilde-lessons-words/
The
Quotable Helen Keller
Paperback 66 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Helen-Keller-Richard-Willoughby
The Art
of War: Sun Tzu
Paperback 60 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Confucius-Lesson-Chinese-Quotables-ebook
The
Quotable Shakespeare
Paperback 54 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Shakespeare-Richard-W-Willoughby
The
Quotable Gorucho Marx
Paperback 46 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Groucho-Marx-Devon-Alexander