Look What I Found: Big Leaguer by William Heyliger and One Minute to Play by Harold M. Sherman

I was never what you'd called sportific.  Artistic, yes; but not sportific.  Save for the occasional Winter Olympics and a two-year fondness for the Braves when I lived in Atlanta, I couldn't care less.  To me, the wide world of sports was loud, boisterous, and boring.   If there is such a thing as a "typical male" (which I doubt very much), I never fit that mold.  I've always preferred an evening with Kurosawa or a combo of Vivaldi (ears) and Austen (eyes) over a two-hour couch-slump with Wade Boggs.

So why was I standing in a Couer d'Alene, Idaho antique shop, excited at the prospect of buying the two books--Big Leaguer by William Heyliger and One Minute to Play by Harold M. Sherman--I held in my hands?  For one thing, the books (published in 1936 and 1926, respectively) were dust-jacketed beauties exquisitely preserved in a mylar wrapper with tight bindings and no loose pages.  I'm a sucker for a tight binding.

More than pristine condition, though, the two novels drew me in with their nostalgic charm.  Geared toward teenage boys, Big Leaguer (baseball) and One Minute to Play (football) describe a sports world relatively free of overpaid athletes, steroid junkies or merchandise blitzkriegs.  From what I can tell by reading the flap copy and the first chapter of each book, these are simple stories about young men trying to better themselves through physical exertion and learning some Serious Life Lessons via the scoreboard.  In this case, I think sentiment trumped my sports-aversion.

Big Leaguer is about Marty Gage, catcher for Arrowhead Prep School and son of "Silent Bill" Gage, the manager of a big league ball team.  Marty spends his summer on the road with the pro players, then takes his "big league ideas" back to his classmates at the prep school.  The book crackles with slang like this patch of dialogue:

"I felt the hits in my bones. Like as not I could have poled out another solid poke if your old man had let me take a cut at the ball in the fourth instead of laying one down. I had that pitcher measured like I was a tailor with a tape."

That's as far as I got in the book before I set it aside, but the flap copy promises it's "one of the most fascinating baseball stories ever written for boys."  The book I found in the Idaho antique store is inscribed to "Lawrence, from Mother & Dad."  Judging by the tight-binding, intact-pages condition of the 78-year-old book, I doubt Lawrence ever read Mr. Heyliger's school-athletics adventure story.  Maybe he was off listening to Antonio Vivaldi and reading Jane Austen.

One Minute to Play, the novelization of a 1926 movie (in which, apparently, Clark Gable was one of the extras), is geared for older boys.  For one thing, there's a love interest: high school half-back Red Wade has a meet-cute moment with "pretty fair-haired" Sally Rogers aboard a Pullman railcar carrying him to college.  The book also sets up a highly-charged showdown between Red and his father, as seen in this synopsis for the movie:

"Red" Wade, a star high-school football player, has intentions of going to Claxton College, which has a powerhouse football team, but changes his mind when he meets the sister of the pitiful Paramlee team and goes to college there, just as his father, an alum of the school, had wished. But his father has ordered him not to play football. "Dad" Wade, has offered a $100,000 endowment to his old school, not knowing his son has joined the football team, but is going to withdraw it if his son plays in the Big Game against Claxton. This puts "Red" between a rock and a hard place.

Like I said, Scoreboard Life Lessons.

*     *     *

The gym was filled with the humidity of boysweat and the chirp of two dozen sneakers squeaking on the polished maple floor.  From the bleachers, I could hear a mid-level murmur, not a decibel-breaking roar, from the parents and half-bored students who just wanted this game to end so they could go home and start dinner.  They had nothing to worry about.  That end was coming soon.

There were 30 seconds left on the clock.  The scoreboard read 38 (Visitor) to 16 (Home).  My freshman basketball team was getting creamed.

I, on the other hand, was doing pretty good at my assigned job: warming the bench.

Like I said, I am not now, nor ever was, athletic material.  As a teenager, my chest was concave and my arms were matchsticks.  If it was possible for a body to have a negative amount of muscle, then I qualified.

Looking back, I can't remember why I joined the freshman basketball team at Jackson Hole High School.  I think maybe I was prompted/encouraged/ forced by my father who thought high school sports would break me out of the shy, socially-awkward rut in which I was traveling.  Perhaps the phrase "meet other boys your own age" was thrown into the conversation--the one-sided conversation--between my father and I.  There might have been some arm-twisting involved, along with a brokered deal ("If you go out for the team, I'll let you stay up an extra hour on school nights so you can read your books").

Whatever the circumstances, I found myself dressing out for the team in the locker room--moist and overheated--as the other boys banged and clamored and jeered.  I was scared to death and knew I was just one wrong word away from having my jockstrap yanked up my ass-crack in a "hilarious" wedgie.  I stayed quiet and tried to melt into the background, while at the same time inhaling as deeply as I could so my chest might flip out to more of a convex shape.

Practice sessions were just shy of Spanish-Inquisition levels of muscle failure.  Because the JV and Varsity players had more privilege and prestige, the freshman team was forced to meet before school, starting at 6:30 a.m.  The older b-ballers enjoyed the luxury of after-school practice when they could show off their moves and muscles for all the pert-breasted girls sitting in the bleachers pretending to do their homework while they ogled Steve and Jim and Bob.  My 1978 Rustler yearbook says "the boys had a really great season."  With a 12-6 record, the Broncs went to the state championships for the first time in seven years.

We lowly freshmen arrived in the early-morning dark to a soundless, cavernous gym still cold from the bitter Wyoming winter winds.  Coach Hoagland, a doughy-faced man who wore V-necked sweaters with the sleeves pushed above his elbows, was there greet us in a voice heavy with coffee and sleep cobwebs.  "Get dressed, boys.  We've got a lot of work to do."  A silver whistle gleamed like jewelry in the V of his sweater.

We ran, we hustled, we took jump shots.  We sprinted to the free-throw line and back, then to the half-court line and back, then all the way to the other side of the court and back.  This was the "fun" part of the practices, competitive races to see who could be the first to come back across the painted lines.  I was always the last one; I didn't even have the luxury of having a fat kid on my team.  All the sports movies I'd ever seen had a token fat kid, so I felt a little robbed.  No one cheered encouragement to me as I puffed and lagged, my lungs screaming, my muscles burning--the solitary runner left on the court.  No one clapped for me because they were all too busy plotting future locker-room wedgies.

I knew I was a disappointment (and a mystery) to Coach Hoagland.  I could see it in the flat dough of his face every time my jump shot bounced off the backboard.  There was no question about it: I would never play a game with his team.  And Coach kept that promise to himself, leaving me to rot on the end of the bench, completely forgotten and ignored.

Until the day came when we were down 22 points in that game against Pinedale and there were only 30 seconds left to be thrown away in sorrow.  Heads hung low on the bench and some bad words were said about the Pinedale players' mothers.  Our ball boy was already gathering up the loose basketballs and stuffing them into a canvas sack.  It was over.  We were defeated.

At my end of the bench, I'd stopped calling out encouragement--"Come on, guys!" and "You can do it, Gene!" and "Let's go, Broncs, let's go!"--and I was already thinking about all the homework I had to do, mentally working out some algebra problems (at which I would also suffer ignominious defeat).  I watched the scoreboard seconds tick down and started gathering my things for the shameful walk to the locker room.

"Abrams, c'mere."  It was Coach Hoagland and he was looking at me.

"Me, Coach?" I squeaked.  I was surprised he even knew my name.

"Yes, you.  Get out there and replace Erbe."  His voice held no enthusiasm or hope; it was completely Last Resort at this point.

As I walked the length of the bench to where Coach Hoagland stood, one of the other boys stuck out a foot and I nearly tripped, but I caught myself in time to stumble up and ask, "What do you want me to do, Coach?"

He winced like I was asking the stupidest question in the world (which I was).  "Go over to the scorekeeper's bench, tell them you're subbing for Erbe, then get out there and play defense."

"Okay, Coach.  I'm ready!" I panted.

I was not ready.

As Kevin Erbe came in off the court, breathing hard from playing nearly the whole game, I didn't even have the chance to ask him who I was supposed to be guarding.  So I took a vague position around a couple of the Pinedale players.  The ref blew his whistle and suddenly we were rushing en masse from one side of the court to the other.  It was the Spanish Inquisition Sprints all over again.

The clock ticked down.  22....21....20....

Then, with 16 seconds left, it happened.

The Pinedale center took a shot and it bounced off the rim.  Like a million-dollar, once-in-a-lifetime sweepstakes win, the ball came through the air straight for my face.  I flinched, reached out my hands, and caught the rebound.

There was a stunned silence from the Bronc bench and then, with one breath, everyone was yelling at me at the same time: "Pass it!"  "Give it to Caresia!"  "Abrams, pass the ball!  Pass the freakin' ball, Abrams!"

I looked down at the orange globe in my hands.  Where did this come from?  Why was I holding the ball?  Oh God oh God oh God!  What'll I do?  What'll I do?

My teammates on the court were whistling and clapping their hands to get my attention.  They wanted me to pass them the ball, but the Pinedale players were moving in on me like wolves suddenly scenting a crippled elk.  My mouth went dry.  I looked down at the ball again.  The shadow of a Pinedale player fell across the pebbled orange surface.  I had to do something.

I broke to the left, and started dribbling down the court toward our basket.  The Pinedale wolves gave chase, nipping at my heels.  I stopped at the free-throw line.  I eyed the basket, then I crouched and leapt, my arms bursting like released springs above my head.  The ball shot off my fingertips into the breath-held air of the gymnasium.

*     *     *

If I'd been Marty Gage or Red Wade, this story might have a different ending.  If I was a character in a school-athletics boys' book, I would have sunk the shot.  I would have been fouled by a Pinedale player in the process.  I would have stepped to the free-throw line and earned us another three points with a couple of nothing-but-nets.  The stands would have come alive with a roar, parents roused from their bored torpor, my classmates putting two fingers to their mouths and whistling, the pretty little brunettes leaping up and bouncing, bouncing, bouncing.  Coach would have put Kevin Erbe back in the game and I would have returned to the bench to a series of blackslaps and cries of "I can't believe you just did that!"  Our freshman team would have rallied and incredibly, miraculously tied the score in the remaining 12 seconds.  They might have made a movie about us.

None of that happened.

The ball left my hands too hard, too fast, too full of bundle-of-nerves pressure.  It descended from a high arc and smacked the metal rim of the basket then, with a mocking ping, shot sharply to the East (bound, perhaps, for Pinedale itself).  Someone from the opposing team grabbed the rebound and took it back down the court and that was that.

My 30-second basketball career was over.  All that remained was the inevitable locker-room wedgie.

Look What I Found: Arthur Hailey in Alberton, Montana

Look What I Found is an occasional series on books I've hunted-and-gathered at garage sales, used bookstores, estate sales, and the occasional pilfering from a friend's bookshelf when his back is turned.  I have a particular fondness for U.S. novels written between 1896 and 1931.  If I sniff a book and it makes me sneeze, I'm bound to fall in love.

You are driving west on I-90, the ribbon of road that unrolls the landscape for you between Missoula and Spokane.  It is mid-morning and you are pressed for time, hurrying to arrive in Spokane for that city's annual book festival.  You can't wait to Get Lit!  That night, there will be an event you are certain to love: Pie & Whiskey, featuring a dozen writers (including Anthony Doerr, Sharma Shields and Sam Ligon) who will read flash fiction about, yes, pie and whiskey.  The audience, meanwhile, will be enjoying a slice and two fingers of the same.  You hurry along I-90 because you can already taste the sweet sting of bourbon and blueberry pie on your tongue.

You are not so rushed, however, that you don't have time for a detour.

The billboard calls your name.  Every time you drive this stretch of interstate--which is often--you are summoned.  About 25 miles outside of Missoula, the billboard pops up on the right:

100,000 Used Books

Montana Valley Book Store

Next Exit Then Right

You are helpless, powerless.  You are the metal shaving and the bookstore is the magnet.  You are Han Solo piloting the Millennium Falcon caught in the tractor beam.  You are the puff of lint facing the vacuum.

You put on your turn signal for the next exit.

*     *     *

When Kenneth Wales was murdered by his son-in-law in 1981, he may not have had 100,000 books in his stores in Pennsylvania and Montana, but the total number was likely far north of what the average used bookstore has on its shelves--certainly a lot more than most readers who came through the front door of his bookshops had in their home libraries.  That is why Kenneth Wales was there at that place and that time: to give shelter to homeless books as they waited--sometimes years--for the right owner to come along at the right time.  Like most owners of used bookstores, Wales ran the literary equivalent of an orphanage: lives once loved, then abandoned, then living each day waiting for the right someone to come along, with equal measures of hope and crushing disappointment.

Wales opened his first bookstore in 1966: Gwynedd Valley Bookstore outside Philadelphia in an eight-bedroom Victorian house that held both his books and his family (wife and nine children, including Keren, the current owner of Montana Valley Book Store).  But how did Kenneth come to own 100,000 books weighing roughly 84,000 pounds?  It began with boxes of God, as this 2003 Missoulian story notes:

      Kenneth worked as a land surveyor and settled his family in Missoula in 1952 after a hunting trip to Montana. They built a house in Pattee Canyon and bought land in Sawmill Gulch in the Rattlesnake Valley. The first three of the nine Wales kids were born in Missoula.
      Kenneth's discovery and embrace of Christianity landed the family in Elkins Park, Penn., where he went to Faith Seminary. Combing garage and estate sales for theology books, he brought home boxes full.
      "Pretty soon, we had 15,000 books in the garage," Keren Wales said. "We couldn't park in the garage anymore."

As he and the rest of his family put their time into making the Gwynedd Valley Bookstore a success, Kenneth made frequent trips around the country and over to Europe, gathering books like a squirrel harvesting nuts before winter.  In 1973, on a trip back to Montana, Wales discovered Alberton--then a busy railroad town--and bought a building located on the main street.  The 1910 structure, listed on the National Register of Historical Places, was a meat market until the late 1950s.  The twenty-six rooms, Wales decided, would be a perfect home for his extra boxes of books.  "For five years," the Missoulian article reports, "(the family) traveled back and forth, bringing out books, building shelves, organizing.  They opened in March 1978, becoming a two-store operation with several thousand miles between the enterprises....When Kenneth Wales was murdered in Pennsylvania in January 1981, Keren was the logical one to take over the store."

Each year, Keren goes through about 100 boxes of her father's books, sorting and pricing and keeping the shelves populated with fresh arrivals.

According to an American Profile story, six to eight million people drive by Alberton on the interstate each year, and the billboard Kenneth Wales placed there thirty-odd years ago keeps bringing them in.

*     *     *

Your turn signal is still clicking as you approach the main street of Alberton (pop. 420) and you flick it off with the embarrassed realization that the exit off the interstate hadn't been sharp enough to deactivate the blinker.  Someone driving behind you was probably thinking, "Turn already!"  But when you glance to the rear view mirror, no one is there.  The road behind and ahead is empty.  Few people are being lured off I-90 into the tiny town this morning.

You pull up onto the shoulder of the street and park opposite the late Ken Wales' shrine to used books.  "One hundred thousand," you whisper in the stillness of your car.  You can practically taste the dust motes of literature on your tongue.  You are ready to start sneezing in happy little fits, as long as you are surrounded by old books--both good and bad (because, yes, there's some pretty awful writing residing in this old folks' home for wayward and forgotten books--yellowing Dan Browns are there right alongside the equally-faded Sisters Bronte).

You walk across the street without looking in either direction (no need), step across the bookstore's cat mascot, and enter the store.  It's a relatively small space--no bigger than, say, the shoe department at your local Wal-Mart--but every inch of retail real estate is taken up with a beautiful jumble of spines, dustjackets, and rain-swollen pages.  Shelves and shelves and shelves of books--maybe not 100,000, but enough to keep an earnest browser busy for hours.  Shelves to the left, shelves to the right, shelves towering fifteen feet in the air--so high that each nook has its own stepladder to assist the adventurous in search of the Flaubert perched at the summit of the F-G section.  A friend of yours once said of the store: "I swear the load-bearing walls in that place are made of books."

Even the promise of pie and whiskey and the Get Lit! literary fellowship waiting for you in Spokane can't make you hurry at this point.  You are here to get lost.

The store is empty and you are alone with the cat which, after rubbing once or twice along your ankles, decides you are not the petting kind and trots to the rear of the store and disappears, squeezing past a half-cracked door marked "Private."  The cat has it wrong, however: you are normally a petter of fur; it's just that you're a little distracted this morning.  I mean...BOOKS!

You dive in.

*     *     *

Does anyone these days remember Arthur Hailey?

Wikipedia stakes the claim the author sold more than 170 million copies of his novels in 40 different languages: "Four of his books reached No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list (Airport, Overload, The Moneychangers and Wheels), with Airport alone spending thirty weeks in the top spot."

Ah, perhaps now his name rings a bell.  Airport, Wheels, Hotel, The Evening News--those are familiar titles (at least for Readers of a Certain Age).  Hailey wrote big, multi-character novels full of plots and sub-plots that wrapped around each other like threads of a rope.  Each book was set in a particular industry (auto factories, airlines, hospitals, hotels, banks) with the aim of being a forensic analysis of the various occupations which made up that corporation.  He was a darling of the Reader's Digest Condensed Books series.  Critics may have dismissed his novels as "potboilers," but Hailey laughed all the way to the bank.  He was so successful, even his wife wrote a book called I Married a Best-Seller (1978), which included this description of the titular writer: "temperamental, ruthless, sensitive, impatient, emotional, unreasonable, demanding, self-centered, excessively hard-working, precise, pig-headed, fastidious, fanatically clean, maniacally tidy."

The stiff, cardboard construction of Hailey's characters and plots was so notorious, part of his obituary was devoted to the subject:

Reviewing The Evening News (1990) for The Daily Telegraph, Martha Gellhorn, under the headline "Wooden Prose" complained: "it tells us everything at least three times. Solid-wood dialogue is tailor-made for the mechanical characters who, in turn, tell each other what they are doing at least three times…This is not a book you cannot put down; it is a book you can hardly hold up. It will sell in millions and be translated into 34 languages. Possibly it is more readable in Icelandic or Urdu."

Ouch.

No matter the quality of writing, Hailey's novels were engrossing, methodical dissections of big corporations, meticulously picking out the cogs and springs and levers--laying them all out on the table for his readers to examine.  He was the James Michener of the industrial world.  "Research is like a woman's slip," he explained to one interviewer. "It's necessary, but it should never show.  I realize I get a bit carried away, and mine sometimes does show."  His obituary writer, getting into the spirit of things, returned the favor: "A trim, lean figure, with a natty line in clothes and an enthusiasm for expensive cars and yachts, Hailey flossed his teeth three times a day, and brushed them for 2½ minutes after every meal."

*     *     *

You roll the stepladder into position and climb to the heights of the H section.  The cat watches from below, rubbing its cheek against a leg of the ladder.

You have seen something: a title, a memory, an obsession.  You reach overhead for the book--white dust jacket, bold black letters--and pull it down to eye level.  On the cover designed by Paul Bacon, the "O" of "Moneychangers" is a bank vault door.  It looks like a gold coin.  It is your prize this afternoon in a small Montana bookstore.

Its neighbor on the shelf is the chromatic opposite: the black-jacketed Wheels.  Before you step down the ladder, you grab it and add it to your Hailey haul.

The books are a time capsule and you are hurtled back through wars and presidencies and recessions, to a year before the internet, before phones were smart and books ran on batteries, before the wrinkles on your face, the flab around your belt, and the grey salting your hair.

1976.

You are 13 years old and you are at your first paying "adult" job: assistant librarian at the Teton County Library in Jackson, Wyoming.  Your official duties include going through the stacks, volume by volume, ensuring books are in order (alphabetically by author's last name in the fiction section, numerically by Dewey decimal in the non-fiction section); picking up the debris from toddler-tornadoes in the children's section, reshelving stray books and collecting non-book items (sticky lollipops, forgotten stuffed animals, the occasional swollen diaper hidden behind a line of Berenstain Bears books); dusting shelves (especially thick in the Medieval Philosophy section, but particularly light in the Human Sexuality section); checking in books and checking out books at the front checkout desk; and carrying so many armloads back and forth from the front desk that you wonder why your chest and arms aren't the size of Charles Atlas', but remain the frail, concave frame of the perpetually-teased skinny kid.

Your unofficial duties: sneaking off to quiet, hidden nooks within the stacks to read books: Nancy Drew, biographies of movie stars, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (*But Were Afraid to Ask).

Teton County Library

Holding these two Arthur Hailey books in your hands while standing in the narrow canyons of the Montana Valley Book Store, you are taken back to that log-cabin library with its shag carpeting, plastic plants, orange-leather chairs, and hidden-treasure diapers.  Your nose fills with the smell of book glue, dust, burnt coffee and the ghost of wood smoke which always rises from the books of one regular patron--a heavily-bearded man who wears lumberjack shirts and appears to have broken off his relationship with a comb years ago--when he brings them back to the library.

You remember the day you borrowed The Moneychangers from the library, checking yourself out at the front desk with that little rubber stamp with the wheel that turned the due-date numbers (two weeks from today).  You remember thinking two weeks was not enough time, but somehow you'd rise to the challenge.  You remember taking the book home, the 436 pages weighing heavy with promise the entire three blocks from the library to your house on the corner of Glenwood and Kelly streets.  You remember opening the novel, eager to enter the world of "Money.  People.  Banking."  Then, as now, you read the first paragraph:

      Long afterward, many would remember those two days in the first week of October with vividness and anguish.
      It was on a Tuesday of that week that old Ben Rosselli, president of First Mercantile American Bank and grandson of the bank's founder, made an announcement--startling and somber--which reverberated through every segment of the bank and far beyond. And the next day, Wednesday, the bank's "flagship" downtown branch discovered the presence of a thief--beginning a series of events which few could have foreseen, and ending in financial wreckage, human tragedy, and death.

Apart from a scene near the end of the book where a bank teller, kidnapped and blindfolded in the trunk of a car, memorizes all the turns and distances so she can later tell the cops where the bad guys are hiding, you don't remember much about the actual plot or characters (who, your older, cynical self whispers, remembers the qualities of cardboard?).  What you do remember is how the book made you feel.  Immersed, transported, hooked.

At 436 pages, The Moneychangers was a long book--perhaps the longest you'd read in your 13 years--but you stuck with it to the end, feeling like a marathon runner when you crossed over the last page.  Maybe you even did a little fist pump of triumph.

Looking back, you think about how this was probably your personal Ground Zero, the moment this lifelong obsession with reading and, ultimately, writing truly began.  With The Moneychangers, you turned into a professional reader.  It wasn't just a hobby anymore, it was a job--the happiest of jobs you could ever have in the whole wide world.

You hold the books, one in each hand like two paper bricks, and you silently thank the ghost of Arthur Hailey for the gifts he gave you 38 years ago.  Then you walk to the back of the store where you find an unattended cash register perched on a small counter crowded with books waiting to be inventoried and shelved.  You ring the small silver bell and standing there smiling as you wait for someone to come out of the back room to take your money for The Moneychangers.

"I am not a book!" (Six Crises by Richard M. Nixon)

Look What I Found is an occasional series on books I've hunted-and-gathered at garage sales, used bookstores, estate sales, and the occasional pilfering from a friend's bookshelf when his back is turned.  I have a particular fondness for U.S. novels written between 1896 and 1931.  If I sniff a book and it makes me sneeze, I'm bound to fall in love.

First of all, hat tip to my friend and Spokane freelance writer Kevin Taylor for the title of this blog post after seeing a picture I posted on Facebook.  Kevin's wit was rapier-sharp this morning, whereas mine was butter-knife dull.

Perhaps I was flatlining this A.M. because after setting off on our Garage Sale Expedition, and plugging the address into our (Not-So-)Smartphone's GPS for 1139 W. Steel in Butte, this is where Jean and I ended up:

Crickets.  Sagebrush.  A wrong left turn.

There were certainly no lawyer's bookcases, stamp collections, or books (the magnets which drew my attention to the classified ad) at this location.  Stupid Smartphone.

We turned around and headed back toward Butte--Oh, did I mention we'd driven three miles out of town to the Rocker exit, took Brown's Gulch Road up past the landfill, sailed blithely and ignorantly past the posted NO TRESPASSING signs, and turned down a two-track road with storm-scoured ruts which looked like they wanted to murder our tires?  I didn't?  Well, that's exactly where the non-garage sale was located.

After much stabbing at the Smartphone with screen-cracking fury and internal kicking-of-self for not remembering that Steel Street--like most streets in Butte--followed a logical pattern, I realized it was located near Aluminum, Platinum, and Iron.  Well, duh.

As we walked up to the garage sale (the actual one, with milling early-birders, sad-looking Christmas decorations and a solitary--not plural--lawyer's bookcase with an overinflated pricetag), I passed three large bedsheets spread across the lawn.  And on those bedsheets were....boxes of books.  Radar Ping!

Most of the books were of 1970s vintage and I bypassed them (I mean, how many copies of Roots could I possibly own?).  But then I saw what I'll call the Nixon box.  Or, more precisely the Nixon-Kennedy box.  Packed tight and spine-up I saw several political books authored by dudes with names like Schlesinger, Manchester and Halberstam.  And then I zoomed in on one olive-drab spine of a Cardinal paperback with the words "Six Crises  *  Richard M. Nixon."

Who better to write about crises than Tricky Dick? I thought.  I paid 25 cents to rescue Mr. Nixon from his bedsheet-on-a-lawn embarrassment and brought him home with me.

Six Crises was written in 1962, quite possibly as a kick-in-the-nuts response to JFK's bestselling, Pulitzer-Prize-winning Profiles in Courage.  Six-Second History Lesson: In 1960, while finishing his second term as vice president, Nixon ran against Senator John F. Kennedy as the Republican nominee for President.  Nixon forgot to shave before going on one of his televised debates with Kennedy and he lost by a thin margin.  Better luck next time, Dick.  Oh, and by the way, Gillette would like you to appear in their next ad.

So, what are Nixon's six crises? Here are the thumbnails, courtesy of Wikipedia:

The Alger Hiss case: In which Nixon used the 1948 House Un-American Activities Committee hearings to boost his career by lambasting Alger Hiss, a high-ranking United States Department of State official, as a communist spy for the Soviet Union.

The Fund Crisis: In 1952, as a member of the United States Senate, Nixon was the vice-presidential running mate of Republican presidential nominee Dwight Eisenhower.  After he was accused during the campaign of having an improper political fund, Nixon saved his political career and his spot on Eisenhower's ticket by making a nationally televised speech, commonly known as the "Checkers speech," in which he denied the charges and famously stated he would not be giving back one gift his family had received: a little dog named Checkers.

Eisenhower's heart attack: In 1955, while Nixon was vice president, Eisenhower suffered a serious heart attack.  Nixon then briefly slid into the driver's seat and took the steering wheel of the nation.

Venezuela attack: In 1958, while on a tour of Venezuela, Nixon and his wife Pat were attacked by a rock-throwing mob.

The "Kitchen Debate": In 1959, while still vice president, Nixon traveled to Moscow to engage in a debate with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.  The debate took place in a mock kitchen that was intended to show Soviet citizens how ordinary American families lived.

The 1960 Presidential campaign: The aforementioned defeat.  Could we say Kennedy won by a close shave?

In his introduction to Six Crises, Nixon writes: "The last thing I ever intended or expected to do after the 1960 election was to write a book."  And yet, BOOM!, there it is less than two years later.  Out of habit, Nixon prevaricates from the very first sentence.  He claims to have taken pen to paper only at the urging of three people: Mamie Eisenhower, Adela Rogers St. Johns, and Kennedy, with whom Nixon shares this touching Oval Office scene:

In April, I visited President Kennedy for the first time since he had taken office.  When I told him I was considering the possibility of joining the "literary" ranks, of which he himself is so distinguished a member, he expressed the thought that every public man should write a book at some time in his life, both for the mental discipline and because it tends to elevate him in popular esteem to the respected status of an "intellectual."

I imagine it would be almost impossible to read Six Crises without the filter of Watergate and, in my case, the mental casting of Anthony Hopkins as the jowly liar.  Irony abounds, even in passages like this, which Nixon no doubt thought he was writing with sincerity and for-the-ages fervor:

      We are all tempted to stay on the sidelines, to live like vegetables, to concentrate all our efforts on living at greater leisure, living longer, and leaving behind a bigger estate.  But meeting crises involves creativity.  It engages all a man's talents.  When he looks back on life, he has to answer the question: did he live up to his capabilities as fully as he could?  Or were only part of his abilities ever called into action?
      One man may have opportunities that others do not.  But what counts is whether the individual used what chances he had.  Did he risk all when the stakes were such that he might win or lose all?

See what I mean?  Irony.  The same kind of irony that leaves a man who once held the highest office in the land sitting in a cardboard box protected from a dewy lawn by a bedsheet and whose "literary" words were bought for a quarter by a grouchy man who'd started off the morning by taking so many wrong turns.

Look What I Found: Charles Dickens Globe editions ("won't injure the eyesight")

Look What I Found is an occasional series on books I've hunted-and-gathered at garage sales, used bookstores, estate sales, and the occasional pilfering from a friend's bookshelf when his back is turned. I have a particular fondness for U.S. novels written between 1896 and 1931. If I sniff a book and it makes me sneeze, I'm bound to fall in love.

It's not like I lack for any volumes of Charles Dickens' novels in my library.  I have Penguin, Modern Library and Signet paperbacks; a set of Nonesuch facsimiles I coveted three years ago; and at least three different versions of A Tale of Two Cities on my Kindle.  Why on earth would I want to add more book-poundage to my shelves already groaning under the weight of so many (too many!) dead-tree books?

Because I am a sick man (who's not in search of a cure).

When I saw these "Globe editions" of Dickens' works in an antique shop in Boise, Idaho two weeks ago, I knew I would walk out the store with them in the clutch of my covetous collector's hands.

Published by Houghton, Mifflin and Company in 1881, these squat, dark-green books immediately caught my attention with the illustrations (about four per volume) by F. O. C. Darley and John Gilbert:

Via Google, I found an ad in a 19th-century edition of Literary World which noted these books were "the best cheap edition on the globe....The paper is good, the print is clear, and the type of a size that won't injure the eyesight."  They sold for $1.50 a volume--which, as another ad in The American Naturalist declares, shall "be within the reach of all classes."

Though time has bent the books' spines to a slouch so that the pages have a charming C-shaped edge, the set is overall in very good condition.  In fact, I'd hazard to say that, with the exception of Our Mutual Friend, they are unread by any of the owners.  Each book has a nameplate inside the front cover: "Library of Minnie Washburne" and are numbered sequentially.  I'm missing a few of the numbers (between 102 and 114), so I'm wondering if there are other Globe editions, or if Miss Washburne was cataloging several new acquisitions that day and got some other books interspersed with her set of Dickens.  And did Minnie read Our Mutual Friend, then find Dickens wasn't to her taste and left the other volumes unread?  Or was she stricken by influenza and on her deathbed called for a book, any book, by that fellow she'd never read (but always meant to)?  Call me odd, but I fantasize about previous readers' lives like this.

In Googling "Minnie Washburne," I found several mentions of a woman by that name who was prominent in social activism--primarily the suffrage cause--around the turn of the 20th century.  What's more, she lived in Eugene, Oregon.  This is an especially sharp freak of coincidence because on the day I stopped in the Boise antique mall, I was en route to Oregon (which you might have read about in yesterday's blog post).  Was it the same Minnie Washburne?  I'd like to think it was.

Look What I Found: Heaven Can Wait by Leonore Fleischer

Look What I Found is an occasional series on books I've hunted-and-gathered at garage sales, used bookstores, estate sales, and the occasional pilfering from a friend's bookshelf when his back is turned.  I have a particular fondness for U.S. novels written between 1896 and 1931.  If I sniff a book and it makes me sneeze, I'm bound to fall in love.

To this day, if you say the words "liver-and-whey shake," I'm bound to get a little choked up.  Or if I hear plaintive notes coming from a soprano sax, my eyes get a misty drizzle.  And if someone were to tell me that a Concorde supersonic jet transports us to heaven when we die, I'd believe 'em.

Such is the impact Heaven Can Wait made on me when I was a sophomore in high school.  I was a skinny, stuttering, shy teenager--especially when I was around girls who, it seemed, exuded some sort of chemical that clouded my confidence and made me fumble words like they were slicked with butter.  When Warren Beatty and Julie Christie finally got together up on the screen at the Jackson Hole Cinema, it was like Love Potion No. 9 had just been unbottled and spilled in the aisles of the dark theater.  I swooned, I clutched my chest, I palpitated.  I looked around to make sure no one had seen me.

For those who have never had the pleasure of seeing the 1978 movie (I pity you!), here's a brief recap: Beatty plays a quarterback for the L.A. Rams named Joe Pendleton who's killed when he enters a dark highway tunnel on his bike and meets head-on with a van coming in the opposite direction.  Unfortunately, it wasn't his time to die--he was snatched from this life 50 years too soon by an over-zealous angel.  Oops!  When Joe arrives in heaven and sees all the passengers boarding the Concorde for their "final flight," he protests to head angel Mr. Jordan (James Mason) and, heaven being the forgiving place it is (along with being quite embarrassed about the angelic error), he decides to give Joe a new body back on earth.  And so, he's reincarnated into the just-about-to-be-murdered millionaire Leo Farnsworth.  While dodging his "personal private executive" (played by Charles Grodin) and his wife (Dyan Cannon), scheming lovers who can't figure out why Leo didn't stay dead after they killed him, Beatty falls in love with an environmental activist named Betty (Julie Christie) who's upset that Farnsworth's corporation is polluting the world's oceans--especially the waters near her small English town of Paglesham.

Heaven Can Wait had everything my love-yearning heart was waiting for: eyes sparkling in the moonlight, last-second touchdowns, a butler named Sisk, and liver-and-whey shakes.  On that day in 1978, I put the film in my then-fledgling Lifelong Top 10 Movies List.  Since then, it may have slipped down to Number 14 or 15, but it still ranks among the sweetest, funniest movies I've ever seen.

And so, imagine my surprise and delight when I was browsing the shelves of books in a thrift store here in Butte, Montana yesterday and I came across this paperback, the official movie-novelization by Leonore Fleischer:

Faster than you could say "James Mason," I'd plunked my 49 cents down on the thrift store counter and went home with my own little slice of movie nostalgia heaven.

I've written before about "movie novels" and how I agree with Joe Queenan who once said "Authors of film novelisations, not unlike pornographers, rarely get the respect they deserve."  I haven't read enough of Fleischer's treatment of the screenplay by Beatty, Elaine May and Buck Henry to pass full judgement, but at first glance it does seem like some fairly ordinary movie tie-in porn.  For instance, take a look at the opening lines:

This was the time of the day that Joe loved best, the hours before the morning had been burnished to a gleam.  When he rolled out of bed at first light, there was still a chill in the canyon air, and the moon was only just disappearing reluctantly from the pink sky.  The day smelled fresh and newborn and ready for anything; Joe could sense it.

Or consider these pages in which Leonore Fleischer allows herself some flights of literary fancy as she describes the accident that kills Joe just when he's getting ready for a big game against the Dallas Cowboys:


The Pulitzer Prize committee probably won't be ringing Ms. Fleischer's doorbell any time soon.  But maybe she doesn't care.  Maybe she just wants to collect her paycheck.  Maybe she just wants to recreate the movie experience on the page, something for film fans like me to take down off the shelf and relive at any time of day or night (this was even more significant back in 1978 before instant Netflix streaming* and the omnipresence of VCRs).  A quick Google search of "Leonore Fleischer" tells me that, for a brief period in the 1970s and 1980s, she was the queen of movie novelizations, transmogrifying scripts into books for movies like Fame, Rain Man, Ice Castles, The Rose, Flatliners, The Fisher King, and several others.  I suppose it was good work if you could get it, and I'm actually glad she took these writing gigs because 34 years later here I am, replaying one of my favorite movies in my head courtesy of some words on an age-yellowed page--no matter how flowery the prose (as purple as a Maxfield Parrish sky!).

I'm still not quite ready to drink a liver-and-whey shake, though.


*I just checked Netflix and Heaven Can Wait is not available--streaming or on DVD.  How can this be?  We must correct this crime!

The Spongy Wall of Death: "Moriturus" by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Now comes the season of death: winter, with its stripped trees, long darkness, blankets of snow quiet as the grave.  This is the symbolism of nature that reminds us our time is short, our personal winter is coming.

In "Moriturus," the opening poem of her 1928 collection The Buck In The Snow, Edna St. Vincent Millay fought against her approaching death (which wouldn't come until 1950, when she fell down the stairs in her home).  Millay dismisses death with a flick of her hand, calling it nothing--in fact, "less/Than Echo answering/'Nothingness!'"  Death is smaller than the hinge of a spider's eyelid.  And yet, it comes for us all.  Millay vows to resist the Grim Reaper by barring her door and then shoving a heavy piece of furniture in front of that door: "I shall put up a fight,/I shall take it hard."  And then in those final, perfect lines of "Moriturus," she writes:

With his hand on my mouth
    He shall drag me forth,
Shrieking to the south
    And clutching at the north.

Fight, Edna, fight!  Kick against the dying light.

I'm a fresh convert to Millay's poetry after discovering a beautiful little hardback edition of The Buck in the Snow in a Montana antique mall this past weekend.  Jean and I were on a holiday shopping trip, courtesy of our friends Barb and Tom from b.e. At Home, riding on a bus throughout the Flathead Valley, sipping mimosas and stopping every hour to cash-mob an antique store.  (If you think this wasn't the perfect romantic weekend, then you just don't know us very well.)  It was on the next-to-last stop of our tour when I found my Millay tucked away on a dusty shelf in the Kalispell Antique Market.  For some reason, I'd always thought ESVM was a bard of Hallmark greeting card quality, someone who wrote beautifully though shallowly about trees and leaves and wind.

I opened The Buck in the Snow, turned the yellowing pages to "Moriturus" and found, to my delight, that I was wrong.  Dead wrong.


Moriturus

If I could have
   Two things in one:
The peace of the grave,
   And the light of the sun;

My hands across
   My thin breast-bone,
But aware of the moss
   Invading the stone,

Aware of the flight
   Of the golden flicker
With his wing to the light;
   To hear him nicker

And drum with his bill
   On the rotted willow;
Snug and still
   On a gray pillow

Deep in the clay
   Where digging is hard,
Out of the way,–
   The blue shard

Of a broken platter–
   If I might be
Insensate matter
   With sensate me

Sitting within,
   Harking and prying,
I might begin
   To dicker with dying.

For the body at best
   Is a bundle of aches,
Longing for rest;
   It cries when it wakes

"Alas, 'tis light!"
   At set of sun
"Alas, 'tis night,
   And nothing done!"

Death, however,
   Is a spongy wall,
Is a sticky river,
   Is nothing at all.

Summon the weeper,
   Wail and sing;
Call him Reaper,
   Angel, King;

Call him Evil
   Drunk to the lees,
Monster, Devil–
   He is less than these.

Call him Thief,
   The Maggot in the Cheese,
The Canker in the Leaf–
   He is less than these.

Dusk without sound,
   Where the spirit by pain
Uncoiled, is wound
   To spring again;

The mind enmeshed
   Laid straight in repose,
And the body refreshed
   By feeding the rose–

These are but visions;
   These would be
The grave's derisions,
   Could the grave see.

Here is the wish
   Of one that died
Like a beached fish
   On the ebb of the tide:

That he might wait
   Till the tide came back,
To see if a crate,
   Or a bottle, or a black

Boot, or an oar,
   Or an orange peel
Be washed ashore . . . .
   About his heel

The sand slips;
   The last he hears
From the world's lips
   Is the sand in his ears.

What thing is little?–
   The aphis hid
In a house of spittle?
   The hinge of the lid

Of the spider's eye
   At the spider's birth?
"Greater am I
   By the earth's girth

"Than Mighty Death!"
   All creatures cry
That can summon breath–
   And speak no lie.

For he is nothing;
   He is less
Than Echo answering
   "Nothingness!"–

Less than the heat
   Of the furthest star
To the ripening wheat;
   Less by far,

When all the lipping
   Is said and sung,
Than the sweat dripping
   From a dog's tongue.

This being so,
   And I being such,
I would liever go
   On a cripple's crutch,

Lopped and felled;
   Liever be dependent
On a chair propelled
   By a surly attendant

With a foul breath,
   And be spooned my food,
Than go with Death
   Where nothing good,

Not even the thrust
   Of the summer gnat,
Consoles the dust
   For being that.

Needy, lonely,
   Stitched by pain,
Left with only
   The drip of the rain

Out of all I had;
   The books of the wise,
Badly read
   By other eyes,

Lewdly bawled
   At my closing ear;
Hated, called
   A lingerer here–

Withstanding Death
   Till Life be gone,
I shall treasure my breath,
   I shall linger on.

I shall bolt my door
   With a bolt and a cable;
I shall block my door
   With a bureau and table;

With all my might
   My door shall be barred.
I shall put up a fight,
   I shall take it hard.

With his hand on my mouth
   He shall drag me forth,
Shrieking to the south
   And clutching at the north.

Look What I Found: The Deerslayer by James Fenimore Cooper

Look What I Found is an occasional series on books I've hunted-and-gathered at garage sales, used bookstores, estate sales, and the occasional pilfering from a friend's bookshelf when his back is turned. I have a particular fondness for U.S. novels written between 1896 and 1931. If I sniff a book and it makes me sneeze, I'm bound to fall in love.

True confession: as an undergrad at the University of Oregon, I had a mad crush on James Fenimore Cooper.  For at least two semesters, I ate, breathed, and bathed Leatherstocking.  Somewhere in a trunk full of mildewing college papers, I have one or two starry-eyed treatises on Cooper's tales of old New England--man vs. wilderness, the savage breast, overripe romance, all that kind of stuff undergrads think is So Important.

I haven't been back to Cooperland in well over a decade and I have no idea if he'll hold up as well as he did when I would curl up with Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook on drizzly Oregon afternoons in our cramped married-student housing apartment.  Maybe I'd find him dull or maybe I'd find him still delightful.  Whatever the case, I can tell you I just found a near-pristine copy of The Deerslayer in an antique store here in Montana.  But not just any Deerslayer.  Nosireebob.  This was a special Boy Scouts of America edition of the book.  The endpapers are what first alerted me to the book's unique character as I stood in that antique shop: full, two-page photospreads of Boy Scouts sitting around a campfire.  There's no date inside, but the book is illustrated with stills from a 1920 German silent film version of Cooper's novel (starring Bela Lugosi as Chingachgook).  Thanks to the heavenly glories of Google, I was able to find that movie on-line, which you can watch here.  The silent film opens with the Scouts sitting around the campfire.  Their leader brings in a book, gives them a Cliffs Notes version of the plot, then says, "The story of The Deerslayer is too long to read in an hour, so I am going to tell parts of it in my own words."  And then we're off on a truncated version of the 1841 novel.

Come to think of it, maybe that's the best way to appreciate James Fenimore Cooper: speed-reading and picking out all "the best parts."

By the way, yesterday marked the 223rd occasion of Mr. Cooper's birth, so happy belated birthday to you, sir!  Here are some Boy Scouts to help you blow out all those candles....

Look What I Found: Hardcore Librarians

Look What I Found is an occasional series on books I've hunted-and-gathered at garage sales, used bookstores, estate sales, and the occasional pilfering from a friend's bookshelf when his back is turned.  I have a particular fondness for U.S. novels written between 1896 and 1931.  If I sniff a book and it makes me sneeze, I'm bound to fall in love.

This has little to do with the copy of Peter B. Kyne's 1927 novel They Also Serve I found at an estate sale in Silver Star, Montana, but everything to do with iron-fisted librarians circa 1942.  I have several Kyne novels in my collection--all unread--and this one appears to be about a couple of cowboys who enlist in World War I and use terms like "blatherskite" and "salt-sack."  Furthermore, it appears to be narrated by a horse.  Opening lines:

The never-ending talk about the Great War that goes on between the Skipper and the Top is what got me started on this story. Were I a man instead of a horse I would write it and call it my autobiography, because in my story I am going to include everything of any importance that has ever happened to me up to the present-when nothing happens any more. For I consider I have lived my life, and hereafter about all I shall do will be to stand around, switch files and talk about the portion of my life wherein I truly lived.

Black Beauty meets War Horse?  Whatever.  The point here is not the book, it's the sticker I found pasted inside the front cover:

The Rules:

1.  Books can be kept out two weeks only, except by those living two or more miles away, who are allowed three weeks, except 7 day books.
2.  New Books can be kept out one week only, and renewed once and one only in each family.
3.  The number of books taken by a family must not exceed one for each reading member thereof.
4.  Any person who shall lose or injure a book shall be required to account for the same as provided by the laws of the City.
5.  Any person keeping a book out longer than the limit, shall pay a fine of ten cents per week or fraction thereof, for the time so retained.

It's a wonder that Twin Bridges, Montana isn't known today as The Town Afraid to Read.  Don't get me wrong--I love librarians, my first job* was in a library, and mylar-covered library books are at the foundation of my early reading history.  But, wow, these are some draconian rules, aren't they?  Notice the underlying threat of resorting to "the laws of the City."  Was Twin Bridges experiencing some sort of library crime spree during World War II?  Were times so hard, the town budget so tight that they had to knuckle down on habitually-overdue readers?  Did a be-badged Library Cop go around to local ranches, ordering them to surrender their delinquent/injured books or face time in the stocks, perhaps a little whipping and pillorying?  By God, those librarians would get their 10 cents one way or another!

I'm sure the present-day Twin Bridges Library is a sane and reasonable place.  According to this website, "The collection of the library contains 8,000 volumes.  The library circulates 6,682 items per year.  The library serves a population of 689 residents."  Here's a picture of what it looks like today:

Here's a close-up of that cool mural, which was painted by Jim Shirk:

I don't know for sure, but I'd like to think that's the same location where the library was housed in 1942.  I also like to imagine there was a motto engraved in stone above the doorway: "Abandon Books All Ye Who Enter Here."

Speaking of Twin Bridges, here's one of my favorite photos from the past three years, taken while I was standing outside the Old Hotel before I went in for a meal (one which rates high in the Top 10 Meals of My Life):

Speaking of the Old Hotel, if you go there this week, here are just a few of the items you'll find on the menu (which changes each week): for an appetizer, try Jarlsberg Cheese Stuffed Mushrooms with White Wine Butter Sauce; for the main course, you can have Bacon Wrapped Diver Scallops with Hoisin Mahogany Glaze; and for dessert, why not indulge in Bittersweet Chocolate Torte with Turkish Coffee Caramel.  I told you they were good, didn't I?  In fact, they're so good, my only birthday-gift** request to my wife was, "I'd like to have dinner at the Old Hotel in Twin Bridges."  If we go, I just hope I'm able to finish everything on my plate and I don't dawdled too long over coffee.  Otherwise, I'm afraid the Library Ghosts will slap an overdue fine on me, according to the laws of the City.


*Teton County Library in Jackson, Wyoming, circa 1977-1979: Shelver, card cataloguer, duster of books.
**May 27, for anyone who cares.

Look What I Found: Paul Gallico's Mrs. 'Arris

Look What I Found is an occasional series on books I've hunted-and-gathered at garage sales, used bookstores, estate sales, and the occasional pilfering from a friend's bookshelf when his back is turned.  I have a particular fondness for U.S. novels written between 1896 and 1931.  If I sniff a book and it makes me sneeze, I'm bound to fall in love.

Does anyone remember Paul Gallico these days?  Have his charms evaporated and his novels been banished to the neglected kingdoms of the attic, the thrift store, the 89-year-old widow's nightstand (where Gallico slumbers with co-residents Arthur Hailey, Ernest K. Gann and Frank G. Slaughter)?

If Paul Gallico does get any attention from our nation of readers distracted by the new and shiny, I'd wager that attention is focused on his two major works, the mega-disaster The Poseidon Adventure and the all-ages fable The Snow Goose.  This week, sadly, Gallico's 1969 bestseller came back to mind as we watched the Costa Concordia cruise ship capsizing Poseidon-like off the coast of Italy.  Of course, if you're of a certain age (like me), Paul Gallico is not the first thing that comes to mind when you hear "Poseidon Adventure."  It's Shelley Winters and her brave, tragic breaststroke.

I have a fondness for Paul Gallico because the very mention of his name takes me back to my first paying job shelving books at the Teton County Library.  Gallico was pretty hot on the bestseller list around that time and I remember checking out, reading, and thoroughly enjoying one of his nearly-forgotten books, 1974's The Boy Who Invented the Bubble Gun.  After nearly 40 years, I don't remember plot specifics, but this site has a brief summary:

A young boy has a brilliant idea for a toy--a toy gun which shoots bubbles. He builds a working model of it, and shows it to his father. Unfortunately, his father shows no interest in the toy. So, to demonstrate to his father that it is worth doing, he gets on a bus and takes it to Washington to patent it. This is his story, and the story of the people he meets along the way.

I found it thoroughly charming and suspenseful--I seem to remember there's a gun battle near the end and the bubble-gun boy caught in the crossfire.  And that's the forte of Gallico's writing: it's simple, straightforward, and possesses an unadorned charm (some might call it treacle and sentiment, but my mileage varies).

In recent years, I've been trying to stock my personal library with Mr. Gallico's works whenever I can find them at garage sales, estate sales and, in one instance, eBay (where I scored a nice copy of Scruffy, a novel about an ape named Harold living on Gibraltar).  Last week, my wife gently twisted my arm to pay a visit to the thrift store on Cobban Street here in Butte.  Once inside the doors, I'm glad my arm was wrenched behind my back.  When we entered the store, she took a right-hand turn to the used furniture (which she'll eventually turn into beautifully-repurposed furniture like this); me, I beelined straight for the bookshelves, which were laced with catnip: signs advertising BOOK SALE 6 for $1.  I was sniffing like a hound on the musk-trail of a coon.

I picked up a couple of Mary Higgins Clark Christmas novels (that's right, you heard me--I'm not ashamed to admit my guilty pleasures in this public forum), and then I spotted this musty, dull-colored paperback from Pocket Books, circa 1962:

Click to enlarge

Two Gallico novels for just under 17 cents?  Score!

I haven't met Mrs. Harris, the London charwoman, but the back cover of the Cardinal paperback that was now in my hands offered introductions all around:

Click to enlarge

Opening the paperback (which was in remarkably good shape), I turned to the first chapter of Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Paris (Flowers for Mrs. Harris in the UK):

      The small, slender woman with apple-red cheeks, greying hair, and shrewd, almost naughty little eyes sat with her face pressed against the cabin window of the BEA Viscount on the morning flight from London to Paris. As, with a rush and a roar, it lifted itself from the runway, her spirits soared aloft with it. She was nervous, but not at all frightened, for she was convinced that nothing could happen to her now. Hers was the bliss of one who knew that at last she was off upon the adventure at the end of which lay her heart’s desire.

The New York novel begins thusly:

      Mrs. Ada Harris and Mrs. Violet Butterfield, of numbers 5 and 7 Willis Gardens, Battersea, London, respectively, were having their nightly cup of tea in Mrs. Harris' neat and flower-decorated little flat in the basement of No. 5.
      Mrs. Harris was a charwoman of that sturdy London breed that fares forth daily to tidy up the largest city in the world, and her lifelong friend and bosom companion, Mrs. Butterfield, was a part-time cook and char as well. Both looked after a fashionable clientele in Belgravia, where they met varying adventures during the day, picking up stray and interesting pieces of gossip from the odd bods for whom they worked. At night they visited one another for a final cup of tea to exchange these tidbits.

I hope to sit down with Mrs. 'Arris sometime in the near future, mug of tea and scones at my elbow, and get to know her better.  No, this isn't deep, world-rumbling literature.  But then again, sometimes I need a break from Franzen, DFW, and Denis Johnson.  Mrs. 'Arris'll do just fine, thankyouverymuch.

Look What I Found: Beverly Gray and Connie Blair

Look What I Found is an occasional series on books I've hunted-and-gathered at garage sales, used bookstores, estate sales, and the occasional pilfering from a friend's bookshelf when his back is turned.  I have a particular fondness for U.S. novels written between 1896 and 1931. If I sniff a book and it makes me sneeze, I'm bound to fall in love.

Combing through the back room of the old lady’s house, picking through cardboard boxes of books that sighed puffs of dust, I felt like Nancy Drew.  Except that I was 48 years old, had a penis, and lacked a boyfriend named Ned waiting for me at the curb in his jalopy.  Other than that, I was 100 percent amateur detective, on the hunt for orphaned, abandoned, no-longer-loved books.  I would get to the bottom of this mystery—why nobody wanted these books on their shelves anymore—and, what’s more, I would rescue the victims of neglect.  I had philanthropic ideals.  I was like Nancy Drew out to save the whales.

I’d been to this house on Granite Street before.  It was like any number of perpetual “garage sales” that make monthly appearances in the Butte classified ads.  Folks in this town are so thrifty, they even recycle their garage sales.  Why buy a new sheet of price-tag stickers every four weeks when you can just keep the tables in place and pull the tarps off the caved-in boxes of cake decorating kits, Kenny Rogers cassette tapes and sad, ratty baby clothes which didn’t sell in June and probably won’t sell in July?  It’s all about garage-sale economics, buster.

The mistress of this house on Granite Street didn’t even live here.  Eleanor owned the early-20th-century house and used its rooms as a quasi-organized storage area for what had once been somebody’s family heirlooms. Every Saturday, she sold off pieces of past material lives for $1.25.  The tables laden with Christmas ornaments (angels missing a wing), ceramic poodle lamps, and stacks of LPs (Jim Reeves, anyone?) were laden with the litter from 1960s culture every month.  Same junk, different calendar page. 

I had been here several times before, helping my wife load our car with coffee tables, glass lamps (non-poodle), and ottomans leaking horsehair stuffing.  Each time we sneezed our way through the house, I inevitably made my way down the hall to a back room which was once a pantry or a small sitting room or perhaps some little boy’s bedroom.  It’s painted a yellow which once might have been named “Sunrise Ocher,” but which has since muddied to what could only be called “Baby Poop.”  Still, it’s the room which gets the best light and I’m always there at the time of day when the sunbeams are slanting through the windows, stirring the dust motes into full-on sparkle.

The room is dominated by a tower of cardboard boxes in the center of the room, ringed by an equally imposing fortress of boxes along the walls.  Inside those boxes are books, magazines and more than a few pellets of cockroach shit.  It’s hazardous to breathe in that room, but on this particular day, like a valiant Nancy Drew, I shrugged off the threat of lung-dust cancer and kept up the quest for new additions to my library.  I fanned through reams of TIME and Newsweek—the faces of Grace Kelly and Dwight D. Eisenhower flashing from the covers—and rifled through the stacks of mildewed Good Housekeeping and Western Horseman until I found what I was looking for: two vintage teenage mysteries, both with intact, barely-torn dustjackets.  Of course, I didn’t know I wanted them until I saw them, but that’s how this kind of treasure hunt plays out.  The books call to you from the fog of page-dust and you have no choice but to answer.

On this day, I heard Beverly Gray and Connie Blair calling my name.

If it’s not already obvious, I’ve always been a Nancy Drew kind of guy.  I knew of Cherry Ames by reputation (and, in my adult years, as the star of my R-rated nurse fantasies), but I never flirted with her or her friends Trixie Belden, Judy Bolton, and the Dana Girls.  I was singularly obsessed with Nancy (with occasional library check-outs of The Hardy Boys for sexual balance).

That’s why I was surprised and delighted to find two books featuring other girl detectives* in the back room of Eleanor’s house.  According to Wikipedia, the Beverly Gray books published between 1934 and 1955 "began as a series of school stories, and followed Beverly's progress through college, her various romances, and a career as a reporter before becoming strictly a mystery series."  The volume I found, Beverly Gray’s Island Mystery, was a later addition to the canon, published in 1952 shortly before Grosset and Dunlap canceled the series.  This site will give you more information on B.G., including the fact that the author, Clair Blank, wrote the first four books while she was still in high school (they were published one year after she graduated).  The plot, from what I could tell as I stood there sneezing sparkle-motes, concerned the mysterious** disappearance of Beverly’s friends from onboard a “graceful white yacht” in the South Pacific.  Another exotic locale!  Beverly’s bags are already packed and waiting by the front door.

Connie Blair seems to share Beverly’s taste in fashion and dependable men, not to mention her habit of always tripping into “puzzling circumstances.”  Written by Betsy Allen (the pen name of Betty Cavanna) and published by Grosset and Dunlap between 1948 and 1958, the Connie Blair books featured a heroine who, as a teenager, wins a position modeling clothes at an exclusive department store in Philadelphia.  In time, she gets a job as a secretary at an advertising firm and then works her way up to a more important position.  The mystery series was noted for its titles which always featured a color (sort of like John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee books, but without the bikinis….At least, I don’t think Connie ever wore a bikini).  So, we get The Clue in Blue, The Riddle in Red, Puzzle in Purple, and so on.  Ms. Cavanna also apparently liked alliteration.

The volume I picked up, The Green Island Mystery, is fifth in the series of twelve books.  Unfortunately, it features one of the more lackluster covers.  That blouse she's wearing is definitely "Baby Poop."

The story opens with Connie sailing for Bermuda on an all-expenses-paid trip by her new employer.  It is, we learn on page 1, “miraculous, incredible, breathtaking.”  Of course it is.  That’s why it’s so appealing to the land-locked 12-year-old girl reading the book while sitting in her musty parlor in Kansas City as her father slowly reads the latest issue of TIME, Dwight D. giving a serious Cold War stare from the front cover.  Juvenile detectives were just like us….only prettier, richer, and luckier.  We longed to ride in their jalopies, our skis piled in the backseat, as the highway wind whipped through our hair all the way to Sun Valley.

....Oh, sorry.  Maybe that was just my fantasy.

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Deerstalkers aren’t without their critics.  In The Girl Sleuth, the Connie Blair books in particular come under fire from Bobbie Ann Mason for their sexism.  Mason writes: “The series stresses appearance, popularity, and femininity as an I.D. card for entry into the business world.”  She cites a couple of examples from The Yellow Warning and The Silver Secret:

She put a hand on his arm and looked at him in a way that would have melted a stronger man.

She tried to look especially appealing and demure, because she wanted to get her information in a hurry.

Okay, fine.  But in Connie’s defense, she’s only mirroring the domestic stereotypes Hollywood was dishing out during those post-war years.  Can you blame her if she tightened her sweaters or melted men with her eyes in order to help Jeff, an enthusiastic young archaeologist, find a mysterious little man with a limp and a missing finger and who may hold the key to untold historical treasure***?

I say let Connie, Beverly, Nancy, Cherry, and Trixie go about getting their men (and villains) in their own way in the context of their own times.  Who’s to say sixty years from now we won’t be criticized for the outlandish detective methods of a cowdog named Hank or a rabbit named Bunnicula?  I just hope the as-yet-unborn book collector standing in the dust motes of my house in 2071 will appreciate the junky lit for the treasure that it is.  Maybe he'll even stumble across my Nancy Drews and say to himself, "What the hell's a jalopy?"


*Of course, there are many other junior-detective series from the 1930s and 40s, as this wonderful site will tell you.
**What disappearance isn’t mysterious?
***The Secret of Black Cat Gulch