First Draft

This week I finished a first draft of “The Pastor’s Kids”. It feels rather pedestrian at the moment, quite far from what I hope it will be. But I will wait until September to read it and see what it looks like as a whole. I do feel I have gotten into it most of what I hoped. The editing process will involve paring away the inessential, making it more “visible” to others and sharpening the characters and events.

This means that my musings here will be less about the times and places of the novel, perhaps, and more about narrative prose and writing. I picked up my old friend Hemingway this week, a book which came out recently, his “Africa book” which was cut in half, edited and published by his son Patrick as True at First Light. I loved it! I’m not sure he was always so funny, but reading this book I often found myself laughing!

Hemingway chose a two month period, November and December 1953, a time when his wife Mary was hunting a particular black-maned lion in Kenya. The ceremony of the safari had changed a great deal from his experience of twenty years before in 1933. Much of his amusement comes from looking at these changes in both Africa and himself. Hemingway relished his relationships to the Wakamba, who worked on this safari, and felt as though he were becoming one of them. Though some of them kept up the forms and ceremonies established earlier, when the term “Bwana” was used in 1953, he realized it was sarcastic, a form of abuse! Another source of comedy was his banter with the Brit in charge of Game Control (otherwise known as G.C., or Gin Crazed), who came out from Nairobi to help.

The relationship of fiction to non-fiction in Hemingway’s memoirs was always complex. I’ve heard he regarded A Moveable Feast, which many people take as gospel truth about his years in Paris, as fiction! Neither A Moveable Feast nor True at First Light had been published when he died. But, as he says, “there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.” In both of these books, Hemingway’s narrative precision is inspiring, as is his reproduction of dialogue with all of the flavor and spice of life.

The Life magazines I pored over in the late 1950’s were full of stories of Hemingway’s life and his writing. I doubt if I read the full text of his essay “The Dangerous Summer” about bull fighting, but his powerful persona as a living writer certainly influenced me.

Civil Rights 1960

In the long fight for civil rights, two events in the spring of 1960 led to a turning of the tide of world opinion against the segregation of black and white people where it was still occurring. On February 1, four black students sat down at a segregated lunch counter at Woolworths in Greensboro, North Carolina. According to Connie Curry, “The sit-in movement spread like wildfire during the spring of 1960. … By Easter, more than 70,000 mostly black southern college students were involved in demonstrations.”

March 21 in Sharpeville, a South African township, police opened fire on peaceful demonstrators against the hated passbooks which were used to enforce segregation, killing 69. Life magazine for April 11, 1960 reported on “South Africa Torn by Fury”, and noted that “The United Nations took a hand and white South Africans began to realize how isolated they are at the bar of world opinion.”

In the corner of northeast Iowa where Line, Marty and Paul live, these events didn’t make much of an impact. At that point, they had only met one black person, a black pastor from Madagascar who spoke at their church. But these events did foreshadow the social change that would affect the years in which the kids came of age. The last two chapters of “The Pastor’s Kids” are set in 1960.

Ella Baker

For years now, I’ve been reading memoirs by young people who helped effect this social change. I keep coming across the name of a woman whom everyone speaks of with love and respect, and whom I didn’t even know about. Her name was Ella Baker. She was a bit older than most of the young people she influenced. She had begun her work in New York in the Harlem Renaissance, and worked with the NAACP and the SCLC. But she resisted the messianic leadership which she saw in the black churches, where the pastors were men and the members women. She thought that “strong people don’t need strong leaders” and developed an idea about participatory democracy. Tom Hayden says, in his book Rebel, “Such decentralized and essentially voluntary forms are inevitable whenever movements erupt with the seemingly endless energy as they did during that decade.”

The early workers in what everyone called “the Beloved Community” formed by civil rights workers, all knew Ella Baker. Connie Curry recalls her “deep friendship with Ella Baker” and Casey Hayden writes, “Whether Ella Baker was shaping the direction of the civil rights movement by advising the southern student movement to remain independent of adult organizations or listening to the dream of one child, her whole being was concentrated on and dedicated to the struggle of eliminating the barriers and injustice of racism. Being around someone like Ella Baker put me in contact with focused purpose and true greatness.”

The Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, also begun in 1960, was the result of Ella Baker trying to get various students she knew who were working on civil rights all over the country together. She thought they should have their own organization. A wonderful article which traces the legacy of this group fifty years later can be found at http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/4/25/860631/-Never-Turn-BackReport-on-SNCCs-50th-Anniversary. "For all of the youthful energy and commitment to challenge and change that erupted in 1960," said Charlie Cobb, a SNCC Field Secretary, "the reason for SNCC's existence comes down to one person - a then-57-year-old woman, Ella Baker, one of the great figures of 20th-century struggle. In a deep political sense, we are her children and our 50th anniversary conference is dedicated to her."

Space Race

In October, 1957, the U.S.S.R. embarrassed the United States by being the first to put an unmanned satellite into orbit around the earth, the Sputnik 1. Although the United States had announced its intention to do the same, they were inhibited by Eisenhower’s fear of being thought a warmonger in the tricky post-war atmosphere, as an orbiting satellite might be considered a violation of another nation’s airspace. During the International Geophysical Year of 1957-58 several launches established the principal that a nation’s airspace did not extend past the Karman line, the boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and outer space.

Eisenhower had also prevented the satellite teams from using military missiles as launchers. After World War II, the U.S., Britain and the U.S.S.R. competed to recruit the German engineers who had developed the V2 rocket. Werner von Braun and his team, recruited by the United States, had sent up rockets capable of launching a satellite. Sergei Korolev, the Soviet’s chief engineer who had been brought back from imprisonment in Siberia, was competing with von Braun. For its civilian satellite programs, however, the U.S. was using Vanguard research-only rockets.

After the success of Sputnik, Eisenhower pushed the Vanguard project to an earlier launch. The spectacular failure of this launch on December 6, 1957 in front of a broadcast television audience, was what finally transferred command of the U.S. launching program to von Braun’s Redstone rocket team. Explorer 1 was successfully launched on January 31, 1958.

Explorer 1

The space race precipitated unprecedented spending on education, which we noticed in our science and math classes and our high school library. We followed all of the space missions avidly. I remember the euphoria of Alan Shepard’s manned space flight in May, 1961, even though it was a month later than the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s flight. I wrote a letter to Alan Shepard and received a handwritten note in response.

John F. Kennedy proposed, in a speech to the United Nations in September 1963, that the United States and the U.S.S.R. cooperate in an effort to put a man on the moon. Khrushchev and Kennedy had achieved a kind of rapport over the years of working together, and it was thought Khrushchev would accept the proposal. When Kennedy was assassinated in November, however, Khrushchev’s trust did not extend to the Johnson administration and the idea was dropped.

The space race is considered to have ended with the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project in July 1975, a cooperative human space flight mission which came to symbolize détente. In studying the space race years later, when the participants have no need to keep secrets, the human faces and decisions emerge.

Freedom and Intimacy

Talking to a friend who is thinking of starting a blog, I thought about what I like about blogging. It goes back to what Dr. Charles Harris used to say we all want from relationship: freedom and intimacy.

You there, sitting in an armchair, or even in bed, with your iPad2, I believe you have a feeling of great intimacy with the mind of the person you are reading. If you didn’t, you would be on some other page of the world wide web, reading some other columnist or blogger. Hopefully you don’t read only those you agree with, but nevertheless, you are meeting the writer on some level, finding your way to his inmost, essential thoughts, what he has in mind at a particular moment, usually quite recently in time.

That writer gets to write what is in his mind freely and with great honesty, exactly because you have the freedom to move to another page if you like. The writer writes, knowing that someone, perhaps you, is meeting him in language you both understand in some fundamental way.

Most blogs have a subject around which they turn. I realized you could have a project blog after seeing the artist Leigh Toldi’s [www.toldileigh.blogspot.com]. She writes about her work. In some respects the blog becomes her work, but really it’s like a “making of” documentary, the story of how her drawings and paintings get made. Knowing a little about the artist’s thoughts helps people to understand it. You know the artist intimately, not in a personal way, but because of what she tells you about her work.

This is a “making of” blog. It is a description of some of what I am thinking about as I work on “The Pastor’s Kids”. When you are writing from the inside of a character, you cannot put all the background information in. The narrative flows around what the character is experiencing. Especially for kids, it may be only later that they realize what was going on. But the background is there, nevertheless.

Perhaps you are not interested in the minute particulars of what I am thinking about at this moment. I am free to write them, but you are free to turn to another page!

Baseball and Guns

In looking up what baseball games the kids would have been listening to on the radio in 1959, I came across amazing connections between Minnesota and Cuba in that year. Although the Cuban revolution was successful in January, 1959, with Fidel Castro driving out Batista and setting up a revolutionary government, at that time he said he was an anti-imperialist, not a communist. Until the embargo against Cuba enacted in October, 1960, there seems to have been quite a lot of coming and going.

At a baseball game in July between the Rochester Red Wings and the Havana Sugar Kings played in Havana, gunfire celebrating the beginnings of the Cuban revolution got into the stadium, wounding two! This could have ended Cuba’s minor league involvement, but Castro loved baseball. He intervened, assuring everyone that teams that came to Havana would be safe.

The Minneapolis Millers were their league champions that year and in the Little World Series played the Havana Sugar Kings. After a couple of frigid games at the end of September in Minneapolis, the series moved to Havana, playing five games. Castro attended every game along with 3,000 soldiers with guns and bayonets. The Minneapolis players were somewhat unnerved by this, but they still tried their hardest. Nevertheless, they weren’t too sorry that in the end they lost! You can read the whole wild story, including Castro’s threats, told here by a historian of the Millers, Stew Thornley: http://stewthornley.net/millers_havana.html. I found it fascinating!

Polio

Though polio had been around for thousands of years, a combination of factors gave it a significant impact on the early 1950’s. Paradoxically, better sanitation and water supplies had resulted in the fact that many kids hadn’t developed an immunity to it. Although 90% of infectious viral attacks of polio act like some version of the flu, in acute cases nerves are affected, causing paralysis, with the greatest risk of this in children from 5 to 9 years. If there is respiratory paralysis, the victim may die. The polio epidemics of the early 1950’s were the worst seen in the United States. In 1952, 58,000 cases were reported, and in 1953, 35,000 cases.

Intensive care and rehabilitation therapy as we now know them, had their origins in the years of these great polio epidemics. The widespread funding of campaigns to find vaccines and cures also began with the race to find a polio vaccine. Jonas Salk developed an injected vaccine, which required years of testing, but began to be widely administered in 1955. By 1957 the number of polio cases was down to 5,600 and in 1961, only 161 cases were reported in the U.S. Based on testing, oral vaccines developed by Albert Sabin were chosen for worldwide distribution. According to the Global Eradication Initiative, 1,349 cases world-wide were reported in 2010.

The story of the campaign against polio has been widely told. Paul, one of the characters in “The Pastor’s Kids”, contracts polio in 1952 when he is about four years old. The story of how his illness affects the family, including years of rehabilitation and painful reconstructive surgeries are part of the book. In my research, one of the things I have been struck by is the stoicism induced in the kids who had it. One woman who had polio said she still has difficulty crying. It was a powerful message to be told at age four, “Don’t cry. It will make your parents feel bad.”

Kids taking oral vaccine, about 1960

Rehabilitation was long, slow, hard work. But victims of polio were encouraged to overcome disability, “triumph over adversity”, and become independent and productive people. An important part of rehabilitation was learning to accept gracefully the successes achieved, and to compensate for the disabilities that remained. Some people who had polio, after years of working parts of their bodies harder than other parts, are now faced with post-polio syndrome. As a part of coming to terms with this, they are re-visiting their childhood memories of being little kids, isolated from their families and confused about why they were ill.

Once polio vaccines were in place, the disease receded in the collective imagination. This is probably a good thing, but for people of my age, polio was a real part of childhood.

Amana Freezer

In the late 1950’s, Dad and Mother accepted their fate (seven kids and another to follow) and bought a giant freezer made by craftsmen at the Amana Colonies in Iowa. The Amana Colonies [www.amanacolonies.com]  were established by a group of German Pietists who came to America seeking religious freedom, arriving in Iowa in 1855. Until about the 1930’s they lived a truly communal life, but then had to adapt to more family-driven work with profit-sharing for their farmland and larger businesses. They have always been known for their craftsmanship, and are still known for the refrigeration appliances they manufacture.

Several towns in east central Iowa near Cedar Rapids are part of the Amana group. In the early 1960’s they already understood that tourists might be interested in their way of life and crafts. We visited the communal kitchen, a general store stocked with old-fashioned items, the meetinghouse and the blacksmith shop. And for almost the only time I can remember, Mother and Dad bought a restaurant meal for all ten of us. It was served family style at a long table, with many dishes of wonderful home-grown meats and vegetables, great bread and salad. I no longer remember exactly what we ate, but I have a mental picture of my proud father at the end of the long table, treating his kids to an experience he probably could ill afford.

The freezer was at least six feet long, three and a half feet high and opened from the top. It could hold a great deal! I remember it stocked in the fall with sweet corn after we had spent an entire day in our big farmhouse kitchen, parboiling cobs of corn and then cutting the kernels off them and putting them in freezer bags. We did the same with some of the other produce from our half acre garden. Dad sometimes bought part of a cow or a pig and had it butchered and frozen, available for future meals. Occasionally Dad's congregations would give us a “pounding”, i.e. contribute pounds of food which we gratefully stored away for use by our big family. This would often include frozen meat.

During hunting season, I remember gifts of whole pheasants and wild ducks in the freezer, something Mother wasn’t too happy about! Us kids weren’t very used to gamey-tasting meat either. But when Dad shot a deer with a bow and arrow, the venison that resulted filled the freezer for some time.

Rather than canning, in the late 1950’s and 1960’s, people believed in frozen food. And we certainly ate plenty of it. At Christmas, each of us girls chose a favorite cookie recipe and baked up huge batches of them, to be frozen for unexpected guests. The essence of hospitality at the time was Norwegian gasoline (weak coffee) and cookies, and it might be needed at almost any time of day. The freezer was a great help in living up to this social norm! At this very moment I am recalling how delicious a chocolate chip cookie just pulled from the freezer was, though none of my chocolate chip cookies are around long enough to need freezing these days!