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Facing Demons: Claire Applewhite’s ‘Nam Noir

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By Peter H. Green

My intrigue with the writings of Claire Applewhite, whom I’ve gotten to

Claire Applewhite,

Claire Applewhite,

know over the past five years through St. Louis Writers Guild and the local chapter of Sisters in Crime, can hardly be explained away by my weakness for redheads. I refer to my creation of Patrick MacKenna, an architect-sleuth whose willful carrot-topped daughter, Erin, in Crimes of Design is soon to come back even more troublesome as she battles Patrick and hardened criminals in Fatal Designs. By the way, Claire’s a redhead too.

No, I think it’s, Claire’s ability to out-think troublemakers, put Vietnam vets into dangerous situations and remain two steps ahead of the sheriff that keeps me coming back for more. And it’s her unexpected plot twists, deft turns of phrase and a thorough familiarity with the checkered past of our Midwestern cities that sets her apart.

Claire Applewhite is a graduate of St. Louis University, where she earned an A.B. in Communications and an MBA. Currently an adjunct professor at the University of Missouri St. Louis, her published books include The Wrong Side of Memphis, Crazy For You, St. Louis Hustle, Candy Cadillac and Tennessee Plates. She has served as President of the Missouri Writers Guild, Vice-President of Sisters in Crime and as a Board member of the Midwest Chapter, Mystery Writers of America. She is actively involved in other writers’ organizations, including the St. Louis Metropolitan Press Club. For details see: www.Claireapplewhite.com. Here’s what Claire had to say in a recent interview:

Where do you live, and how has your environment affected your writing? I live in St. Louis, Missouri, located in the heart of the country. Founded by French traders, the city possesses a rich history as “the Gateway to the West.” Nevertheless, it has been classified as one of the most dangerous cities in the U.S. Most of my stories are set in St. Louis, and are influenced by economic, racial, gender, education and employment issues.

How many books have you written? I have written seven books. Of those, five are published.

How would you describe your most recently published book, Tennessee Plates, published by L&L Dreamspell, in December, 2012? In ‘68, the hot smoke and cold eyes of ‘Nam stalked ELVIN SUGGS. Now, a blonde in a tight dress and a silver Cadillac has captured his heart, and he doesn’t want to run. Lonely and eager, he trails the temptress with a shady past, rife with corruption and lies—the girl with the Tennessee Plates.

How much of yourself is hidden in the characters in the book? I’ve heard it said that no one can write authentically with their hands tied up behind their back. I think an author must forget oneself and let the characters talk. In other words, I strive to do that.

Do your characters take on a life of their own? I think an author must climb into a characters’ skin and view the world through their eyes. If so, which is your favorite? My favorite is the character who owns the viewpoint in the scene under construction.

What challenges did you face while writing this book? Tennessee Plates concerns reconciliation with past demons. The hero finally confronts the worst times in his life, and exposes them, so that he can find peace. A major challenge existed in the balance between tragedy and humor.

Tennessee Plates, by Claire Applewhtie, L&L Dreamspell, 2012

Tennessee Plates, by Claire Applewhite, L&L Dreamspell, 2012

Do you travel to do research or for inspiration? I love to travel because I am very interested in other people and their traditions. I travel for both research and inspiration. Can you share some special places with us? Memphis, Nashville, New Orleans, Seaside, Florida, Palm Springs, Phoenix, the Badlands are all intriguing places with their own personalities. I love Southern cities, but I am also fascinated by deserts.

What do you think is the greatest lesson you’ve learned about writing so far? Writing is much like acting in that the author must forget him or herself, and assume a new identity in order to express another’s viewpoints.

What advice can you give new writers? Don’t worry about what people will think when they read your writing. If you do, you won’t get your best work.

Where can folks learn more about your books and events? Amazon.com, Goodreads, and my website, www.claireapplewhite.com , My books are available in print and ebook formats at Amazon.com.

Till next time, good words to you,

Peter

Pete

 

 

 

 

Frozen Music: Tributes to Frank Lloyd Wright and Paolo Soleri

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PHGreenBy Peter H. Green

A Chicagoan by birth, I grew up a mile from Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House and made a mission of visiting every Wright building I could, including Taliesin West in the Arizona desert near Phoenix. While there in 1963, I also made a side trip to the Arcosanti community, to see what that visionary architect and artist Paolo Soleri was doing. Although the master was away that day, I had a long conversation with one of his apprentices about his vision for the city of the future and how they lived, selling handmade clay bells for subsistence. I also observed his many volumes of heavy bound blank books,  in which he set forth handwritten and hand-sketched notes on principles of green building, ecologically friendly design, energy-efficient structures and urban agriculture.

I read last week in The Architect’s Newspaper an obituary by  Alan G. Brake reporting Paolo Soleri’s passing at age 93 on April 9th. Since the early 1960s, he enlisted the volunteer aid of some 7,000 apprentices to live and work with him in construction of the new, high density urban settlement.  Today, his ideal community, still emerging from the ground , is visited by over 50,000 people each year. Tomiaki Tamura, an associate, has created an impressive video documenting their progress, with musical accompaniment of the Largo from Dvorak’s Ninth Symphony “From the New World,” which includes an excerpt from the western song, “Going Home.” What a fitting tribute, and not a bad note for this modern genius to go out on.

Intrigued with this site, I landed on another post, this one by Branden Klayko, who discusses the lyrics of Simon and Garfunkel’s, 1969 track, “So Long Frank Lloyd Wright,” on their Bridge Over Troubled Water album.  “While some argue that the song is really a cryptic breakup poem between the two singers on the verge of splitting,” Klayko says, “I’m sticking with architecture going mainstream.” To complete my nostalgic vignette of architecture as frozen music, watch the multimedia presentation  and learn how this song came about, accompanied by vintage photos of Wright’s early work, check out Klayko’s story.

Till next time, good words to you,

Peter

Peter

 

The Care and Feeding of Agents

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By Peter H. GreenPeter Green in book room

I’m concerned there hasn’t been a single manual written in the past seven days on how to write a book—and how not to. This makes me speculate that everyone has already learned how. At least everyone in my acquaintance is writing one, including people who should know better–they have families to support.

Our mail carrier, for example, is writing a novel about how she took her grandchildren on vacation to the Ozarks and overturned her canoe. While they were drying out by the campfire, they were visited by a grizzly bear, who took all their food. So they survived for a week on peanut butter, soggy Ritz crackers and river water purified with Army surplus halogen tablets. The author describes their experience in vivid terms: “We had the time of our lives!”

In view of such widespread talent, however, I wonder: Why aren’t there more successful authors? For one thing, there are dozens of books about character development, dialogue that moves the plot along and the importance of double spacing your manuscript. But where is a new author supposed to learn the real basics–the essentials, after all–like how to have lunch with an editor or an agent?

This is a touchy subject for us Midwesterners, unfortunate enough to live in flyover country. How can you meet those chosen ones, those kingmakers from the Left Coast—and especially the “right” one—without blowing (in advance, mind you) your first advance? Fortunately for those of us as yet uninitiated and unblessed, there is the regional literary conference, where the Great Ones descend to the hinterland to seek, among the unwashed masses, that spark of raw talent, that rude woodsman with native genius, who ends his day of chopping and gathering wood in the primeval forest scribbling deathless prose by lantern light.

One seasoned and pickled literary agent once confided to me, “Let’s face it: the place to make a book deal is in the goddamned bar.” At a tiny cocktail table in the lounge of the conference hotel, six or seven of us crowded around her, hanging on every word, each vying to be the next to pick up the check for her whiskey—she drank it neat. To keep the conversation on a general level, I brought up recent bestsellers. “What about Fifty Shades of Grey?” Bingo. “That E. L. James can’t sustain her pandering,” she expounded. “She’s got only one book in her, period.” “I couldn’t agree more,” I said, “most so-called romance fiction is just mommy porn.” I took a chance that this esteemed arbiter of literary taste, who had too many miles on her to care about romance anyway, favored sterner stuff. “Now what I really think is coming back,” she added, “is hard-boiled mystery.” Bingo, again. But she was too well oiled to remember much a month later, when I submitted my noir detective novel, about our productive conversation.

You’ll have your own chance to drink in this advice and much more, April 26 through the 28th at the Missouri Writers Guild conference, Sheraton Westport Hotel, St. Louis. You can learn more at their website.  I’ll be there with plenty of loose change—at the bar.

Until next time, good words to you,


 

Peter

Peter

 

Helping Heal Wounded Warriors

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By Peter H. Green

Yesterday I had the privilege of making a presentation to a small group of military retirees being treated for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD, who had enrolled in a Warrior Writers workshop at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in St. Louis. As each introduced him- or herself and told one personal fact that wouldn’t be readily apparent to an outsider, I got a sense of what troubles they had seen. A combat nurse whose father had recently died —a veteran himself, exposed to Agent Orange in Vietnam and only after nine years of trying had received government disability benefits; a pilot of B-52 bombers who had flown missions in two Mideast wars; a sergeant who used to drown his military sorrows regularly at the bars and now is clean, and an officer who had the task of debriefing secret operatives, not realizing he had the stress syndrome until the doctors told him.

I had been briefed about keeping the identity of the participants confidential, but was told I could talk about their situations. Part of the introduction to this new workshop group was a discussion of how beneficial the VA had found writing to be in the process of recovering from traumatic stress.  A strikingly high percentage of veterans who had written about their ordeals had been able to overcome their symptoms and begin the long process of recovery. One of the patients in the class had become so interested in the process that he had studied it in depth at the University of Missouri and plans to go on and get a PhD in the beneficial effects of storytelling. As I listened to each participant reveal his or her story, I began to remember the effects that writing my book on my father’s World War II experience had on me–how many times I had broken down in tears at my keyboard as I reread Dad’s World War II letters and realized how much he cared about his family, and me in particular. Suddenly I knew how to begin my talk.

I pointed out that I had military stress very young when my father left home for the Marine Corps. I was barely five years old, and my baby sister had just been born. While my father had doted on me and lived for me, he was gone. My mother not only had to cope with keeping the car repaired, the house warm and the family budget under control, while staving off the unthinkable dread of Dad’s assignment to the next island invasion, now she had an abruptly orphaned new baby and a dispossessed son on her hands.  I realized even better how to relate to the members of this class.

I mentioned how hard it’d been to lose my father at age 68, and said I couldn’t bear to let go of him. I never realized why until I wrote my book, Dad’s War with the United States Marines, when it dawned on me that that it was because of this early deprivation of him as a child. I recounted how my idea for writing the book came about,  on a nostalgic college reunion trip to the East Coast, where we visited Mary Oates Johnson, a school friend of my wife, who was an editor and writer, in Andover, Massachusetts. She suggested that we take a weekend jaunt up to Annisquam to revisit the locale where I had spent my sixth summer at a cottage my aunt and uncle had rented while Dad was off to war. The rest is history; in fact, reading 400 letters Dad sent from the Pacific theater revealed some World War II history that had never been written before. The rest of my presentation was easy. I reminded my class that a disproportionate share of the world’s history has not only been created but written by members of the military. Starting with Homer and Julius Caesar, the list continues with Ernest Hemingway, Ernie Pyle, Winston Churchill and Dwight D. Eisenhower, to name just a very few. I told them, “If you don’t write down your history, much of it known only to you personally, it will die with you, and the world will never know.” I had begun to do it. Now. It was their turn.

That in itself was a very healing thought.

For more on this book, Dad’s War with the United States Marines,  see my website.

Till next time, good words to you,

Peter

Peter

How do you record your work? Today’s many options for writers.

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By Peter H. Green

How do you get words on paper? Today, even that phrase sounds funny when you consider all of the electronic media we use—digital files, audio files, computer hard drives, mobile phones, all of which can record our thoughts and ideas. Like you. I’ve endured the sea change of recent years in the way we create our words, and it has been quite a journey.

When I was a small boy, my family used to visit a friend of my parents, Orin Tovrov, who was the writer of the Ma Perkins radio serial, at his home in the town of Orleans, on Cape Cod. Every weekday morning, like clockwork his secretary would appear at the door and Orin would go off with her to his study, which had a view of the wooded seashore out of one side and his lovely yard and duck pond on the other. He would sit and dictate the next couple of episodes of the Ma Perkins drama, and his secretary would present him with a typed copy of the previous day’s work for final edit. What a life, I thought. All he had to do was sit there for a couple of hours and spin wonderful stories. That’s for me someday.

My father used a yellow legal pad to compose and the hunt and peck method for typing his final work. Even during World War II where he served as the de facto manager of Armed Forces Radio Station WXLI—Guam, the radio studio for the troops on the Marianas Islands, he typed his scripts on whatever machine he could commandeer in their Quonset hut office and studio. In his letters home he once said, “This typewriter is no longer my Public Enemy Number One and I am beginning to master it. Incidentally it’s a Spanish typewriter with a tilde over the Ñ and and an accent mark over the é  and also an upside down question mark (¿) to precede questions. Everything is in the wrong place, especially punctuation, particularly the exclamation point, which is where the comma ought to be.” Although he complained as if he were a top-notch stenographer hampered by poor equipment, as a Chicago reporter Dad had acquired the two finger typing technique, and all he had to do to adapt to the foreign keyboard was to direct his two index fingers to different keys.

Lucky for me, now that I spend so much time at a computer, my college encouraged us to take an elective course in typing. They used to emphasize that, when you stay in a steady rhythm your typing becomes more accurate. Even today I noticed I have less of a tendency to invert letters when I stick with the rhythm. I find that sometimes typing on the keyboard is still preferable to any other method, especially for editing, but also sometimes for composing original scenes in fiction, because my thinking slows down to the pace of  evolving ideas, my characters’ thoughts and my word pictures. And I still like to take longhand notes on a yellow legal pad and write by hand in my journal.

However, in the last five years, I’ve become enamored of speech recognition technology. When I was finishing my first book in 2005 I tried something called “Dragon Naturally Speaking”. The software, offered by a company called Nuance, has continually improved to the point where it delivers letter perfect copy, which can be revised at my whim with a verbal command. It types so much better than I do it’s embarrassing. The latest wrinkle that Nuance added to my repertoire was a Phillips dictating pocket machine called the Voice Tracer whose files can be directly transferred to hard copy on the computer. I find that thoughts sometimes flow more easily, dialogue is more natural and it can capture fleeting ideas, because it’s so much faster.

So my world has become the idyllic one that Orin Tovrov enjoyed. I can sit anywhere with my laptop — in bed, in any chair in the house, on my deck, or wander as I speak with my Bluetooth headset, and talk through my compositions, as I’m doing right now.  And while I haven’t managed to gear up to the comfortable living solely from writing that Orin provided for his family, I can at least bring my office wherever I go and create my stories—online, in manuscript form and struggle as we all do to get them published—as I enjoy the beauties of nature. The house on Cape Cod might have to wait a while.

To return to my original question, what techniques have you found to enhance your writing capabilities? Please post a comment and let me know , or post any questions you have, so we can trade ideas.

Until next time, as John Ciardi used to say,

Good words to you,

Peter

Peter

Can’t Install Windows 7 or Outlook 2010? Call Bill Gates

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By Peter H. Green

As a writer and business consultant, I’ve learned how easily my life can be driven over a cliff by seemingly mundane necessities. I’ve just emerged from a week in computer hell. Please understand, I’m not a computer geek, but an ordinary small business owner trying to upgrade my programs.

My late brother-in-law, a pretty savvy network administrator for a  state finance agency, railed against Microsoft’s impenetrable shield. “They’ll be happy to give you personal attention, for a fee. How can I use this stuff I’ve already paid for? What am I supposed to do, call Bill Gates?”

If you want to upgrade from XP, you have to save your computer’s files to another machine on your network or an external hard drive. To help with this, Microsoft offers Windows-Easy-Step. Right! Microsoft has a long way to go before it will be easy. I wanted to put Win 7 on my older XP machine (2G of RAM, Pentium 4, 1.6 GHz clock speed), which I had been using as my main input point, despite the fact that it just barely passed Microsoft’s downloaded eligibility test. Windows 7 chewed it up that computer and spit it out. What saved me is that it had automatically set a “restore point” before attempting to install. When the installation—which looked like it was going to work except for the fancy new “Aero” graphics—failed after the third startup a day later, my familiar old XP screen smiled back at me, and I sang Hallelujah. I was relieved and happy to have it back, with all its treasures, still usable as a sturdy workstation, server and music player for my local NPR station’s XM Radio classical music channel.

To be fair, on the computers that ran Vista, many programs and files moved over just fine and were ready for use. Easy-Step made sure that all the files I wanted to save were moved from the XP machine and available on the faster computer to which I moved them. On the two former Vista machines, everything came over pretty well. But when I attempted to install Office 2010, all hell broke loose again with Outlook and Outlook Business Manager. I got some help on this from the Microsoft Answers site, where some techies called MVP’s—Microsoft Vice President, Most Valuable Player, what?—will actually answer your questions. However  the poor users had to drag the procedure out of them one step at a time, and ultimately the MVPs punted to a Slipstick web page and admitted that WET doesn’t work for Outlook and that you should just export the .pst files yourself, as if to say, “It should be obvious, you dummy!” Who knew?

Conquering The Beast

The challenge in migrating Outlook is that your profile (i.e.: basic user identification for Outlook) often becomes corrupted when it’s moved from its original computer through Windows-Easy-Transfer (WET, for short, as in “all WET”). To fix this problem, and it took me all day to puzzle it out, here’s what you have to do:

1.    In Outlook 2010, after the attempted migration go to Control Panel/Mail (switch to Small Icons to find the classic, understandable list of options, and select the “Mail” applet). Here you need to set up a new profile with a name different from your current one (the default name is “Outlook,” which lists all your e-mail accounts as its features. Don’t delete your old profile just yet, since it will also delete your e-mail accounts, and you may have to refer to them for settings and export the Outlook.pst file from the Contacts database—if it has successfully created a Contacts list and e-mail accounts.

2.    Click “Next”. Select “Set up e-mail account,” click again and you’ll be asked to enter your e-mail address—this process can be repeated as often as necessary from your profile screen to include all your e-mail accounts. Then enter your password twice, check whether you want to enable text messaging, and here you have an opportunity to check a box that permits you to enter your account details manually. If you’ve got anything other than a simple POP account, such as the more secure Yahoo Bizmail, as I do, and you know or can find your previous settings, you should check this box. You’ll see the familiar brain-damaging screen that asks for all sorts of stuff you may not know and will have to enter about ten times to get it just right. Here’s where it gets interesting.

3.    On this screen, which you have to complete correctly BEFORE you open your Outlook  e-mail account for the first time, it asks for your data base. DO NOT select the one they suggest unless it’s really the one you exported, since it most likely is a new blank file, or if it has your contact records, you probably won’t be able to use them to select addresses from your e-mail screen. It’s vital to select an Outlook.pst file that you have exported yourself from your old computer’ and put on a CD you a or a folder on your new computer. You are allowed to browse at this point to find the file, but if it’s on an external drive or a CD, it will always look for that location when it loads Outlook.

4.    If you don’t know how to enter your settings manually, leave this box unchecked and see if the computer can find your settings by searching online. It’s worth a try, but Outlook 2007 was smarter than the 2010 version: it could find my settings for Yahoo Bizmail. The problem with this approach is that it doesn’t go through all the tabs you’ll see when you click on “More Settings.” These tabs let you specify whether your server requires authentication, which then gives you different numbers for the port settings than the default setting. If the program can’t find them you can use numbers  copied from your old Outlook e-mail account. Don’t worry if the automatic feature doesn’t find your settings. You’ll be given another screen with the checkbox for manual entry.

After several attempts at this, and doing it all over to change to a better export file, I successfully pulled in my old database and was up and running, with Outlook, the Mail and  Contacts folders working together properly.

The Business Contact Manager  Fiasco

Can you believe that Office Home and Business 2010 has quietly dropped one of its most valuable 2007 features for the small business person—Outlook Business Contact Manager? This contact manager, calendar, follow-up reminder, lead preserver and record keeper can potentially help you win business. Microsoft, on their Answers site, has admitted their mistake in targeting it to large enterprises and assuming that small businesses wouldn’t miss it. Now, if you can prove you own Office Home and Business 2010 and claim you had Office 2007, you can download it free. From Microsoft, yet. How about that? In trying to make the program look as simple as a Mac, they have dumbed it down to the point where familiar, often used commands (as in Control Panel’s classic list) are hidden, important features (like Select an Address Database) and Business Contact Manager (almost) have been removed. In my view, this reduces functionality—it does not improve it.

Bottom Line: Lessons Learned

But Microsoft can and should do better. With their billions, they should write a better manual (or better online help screens) to explain to us hapless users what may be obvious to the genius geeks in Redmond. And would it kill the thousands of workers out there to take a phone call or answer an e-mail once in a while from those of us who paid good money to buy their programs? Wouldn’t they write better routines if they could hear what we underlings are going through as we try to use their stuff out here in the hinterland? Programmers par excellence they might be; communicators they’re not. If Windows 7 won’t work on an older machine, they should say so and not waste our precious  time trying to do the impossible.

As the auto companies do in the TV ads with stunt drivers, maybe they should put a warning notice on their ads: Don’t try this at home!

Till next time, cheers,

Peter

Wartime Holiday Thoughts of Distant Loved Ones

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By Peter H. Green

For families separated from their loved ones by military service in faraway places, the holidays are particularly poignant. When Mom would read Dad’s letters sent from Mare Island Naval base, formerly near Vallejo, California, I would look at the sketches Dad drew for me on the pages of his letters, to show me where he was and what he was doing. My dad, Ben Green, had enlisted in December, 1944, as so many men did in those days, to defend our country from foreign aggressors,  leaving Mom,  my baby sister and me–just five years old–to fend for ourselves in a drafty, scary old Victorian house on the South side of Chicago. But he loved us with all his heart. They had a conversational correspondent across the miles–ultimately 8,000, separating Chicago from Guam in the Marianas–writing each other almost every day. He he wrote Mom to tell of his plans to send me Christmas presents and ask what he could send me, such as the scarce corduroy pants I needed–were they size five or six?–or a tricycle, items hard to find at home, that he might be able to buy on base or in San Francisco. “And what about the bike?” he wrote. “I see some advertised secondhand out here – this is a very transient population and people are always getting rid of hard to move things. It’s a world full of electric iceboxes nobody wants.” The following excerpt from my book, Dad’s War with the United States Marines, tells how he was feeling to be so far away from home.

Dad made sketches in his letters for me, since I was only 5.

“Ben clambered downstairs to the first deck of the barracks. There was Goldie with his wife and children – two darling little boys, he thought, one about Pete’s age and the other about two – he was just going to guard mount. As Goldie kissed his wife and headed out the door, Ben held first one and then the other boy up to the window so they could see their father, and that was almost too much. He said. “When the younger put his arms around his neck and asked, “Is that my daddy?” tears came to Ben’s eyes.”  –P. 75

As Christmas approached, Dad coordinated with Mom on presents for the children, including a wagon for me. He spent Christmas eve with friends, Lt. Burns and her fiancé, and arranged for a phone call home. In those days, that took about eighteen hours and involved several conversations to set up. ‘The operator and I started chinning and shooting the breeze in a very friendly fashion, and I think she must have put me in ahead of turn, because it really only took eleven hours, and the day operator acted as if she had known me all my life when the call came through. Pete seemed thrilled to talk and for once had lost his ‘allergy to telephone conversations.’ ”

Dad admitted to singing afterwards. His holiday loneliness was also eased when he dressed and went to dinner. “…it was such an elegant affair,TABLECLOTHS and a printed menu, which I am sending you… free cigarettes, a bag of nuts and an orange and a really marvelous turkey dinner.” Afterwards he went up to his bunk. “Then I had the glow of my wonderful presents all around me. The watch is positively beautiful and keeps second perfect time. It’s one of those good Swedish watches, which in case you didn’t know are the only ones left that still carry Swiss movements, since they alone can get them. The wallet is slick and just right. It fits snugly, either inside my pocket or in my trousers.”

Today’s soldier has a few advantages: occasional cell phone calls back home, e-mail and, if he or she is lucky enough to be in a well provisioned base camp, the opportunity for a video chat with loved ones. But there’s no escape from the tension and boredom of both soldiers and their families–the endless waiting, and loneliness, made only worse by austere conditions and the terror of not knowing if or when the family warrior will be involved in an invasion, a battle or a surprise attack. It’s no wonder that Mom’s favorite song from the Bing Crosby Christmas album was “I’ll be home for Christmas.” It held out hope for the five million families involved in the world’s biggest war that things might return to normal very soon.

I recall during my own Army basic training, even in peacetime,  how welcome a package from home felt when it arrived at my bivouac site. out in the boondocks with K-rations left over from the World War 2,  damp sleeping conditions, sand and mud everywhere. It was such a relief to know that Mom and Dad cared enough to send me dry towels, flannel wiping cloths for cleaning my rifle, candy bars, snacks and homemade cookies. Having these real, tangible things reinforced their cheerful news of  activities back home. At the time I didn’t think about it, but they had been through it all before and knew from hard experience what a soldier in the field missed most.

To read more about our family’s funny, sad , and heartwarming World War II adventure, please visit the website page about my family memoir and biography of my father, Dad’s War with the United States Marines.

Here’s hoping you and yours have a warm and happy holiday season.

Till next time,

Peter

A Tale of Two Artists in a Japanese Prison Camp

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In September1939 Edwin Smyth left his signwriting business in Clacton-on-Sea, a picturesque Essex village on the English Channel, for duty to his country in the Royal Artillery. After serving in England and Sumatra, he was captured by the Japanese in Java on March 4, 1942 and sent back to Japan to Hiroshima #6 Omine-Machi (Sanyo prison camp) to work in a coal mine. When he came down with dysentery, his sign painting talents earned him a special duty job at the prison camp. But after six weeks, presumably because he showed signs of recovery, he was sent back to the mine.

Edwin G. C. Smyth

Edwin G. C. Smyth by L. L. Rogers

At the hospital he encountered another artist, Leonard L.Rogers, a Marine sergeant. After the liberation, when it was time to sail for home, Rogers sketched an elaborate plaque for him as a farewell souvenir, part of which is shown here.

I learned about all of this from Edwin Smyth’s son, Terry, who read my October, 2009, post (below) and recognized the drawing style and the signature as the same as that of his father’s fellow prisoner, L. L. Rogers. In a letter from Guam on September 15, 1945, Dad wrote:

Our party last night was quiet. I felt a strong impulse to drink up everything in sight and couldn’t get enough into me…

Nobody bothered us, we weren’t very noisy and two liberated prisoners of war spent the evening with us…we settled down to some serious drinking and I haven’t any idea what time we actually broke up. Nobody bothered us, we weren’t very noisy and two liberated prisoners of war spent the evening with us…one was a very fascinating guy named Gabby Kohl, who talked and talked and told us all about what had happened, where they’d been, how they had reacted and filled us full of details that were tremendously absorbing. Gabby was back tonight and is coming again tomorrow night.  He was in radio in a mild sort of way before he joined the Marine Corps…and now thinks he may return to Shanghai where he knows lots of people and which he likes very much. They were prisoners of war for four years. Pictures showing him before and after liberation are very sobering evidence.

Because of the September 22nd date on the WXLI sketch, about a week after first series of parties at Armed Forces Radio Station WXLI that my father describes, it’s evident that the other prisoner in the room with Gabby Kohl and Dad was L. L. Rogers. Too bad he didn’t write down those details, but I understand why: that was the type of information he kept out of his upbeat reports to us at home. They would have been too sad. As Terry Smyth told me in his e-mail message:

I have one letter from Leonard to my father dated 7 December 1945. At that time he was living at 3808 Mason Avenue, Tacoma, Washington. Over the years, I have tried to discover whether I could contact any relatives but to no avail. I still hanker after making that connection. In the letter he says that he has a job awaiting him in ‘advertising layout’. While the letter is generally upbeat in tone for me the most poignant passage is this:

‘We shall always have many memories of the past to reflect upon and no one will be able to share them because they will never know how we prisoners spent months rotting in hell’.

In all seriousness, I cannot really follow that.

With best wishes.  Terry Smyth, Leavenheath, Suffolk, England

And I can’t really follow that, either. If you know anything about Leonard L. Rogers, USMC,  or Edwin Smyth, patriots and artists extraordinaire, please let me know.

Regards till next time,

Peter

St. Louis Ragtimers +2 Dazzle a Packed Sheldon

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Trebor Jay Tichenor, Al Stricker, Don Franz and Bill Mason

Trebor Jay Tichenor, Al Stricker, Don Franz and Bill Mason, October 18, 2009

By Peter H. Green, illustrated by the author

Napoleon said, “Always have a plan–leave nothing to chance; always have two plans–leave something to chance.” The St. Louis Ragtimers, in their 48th anniversary celebration and the centenary of the Goldenrod Showboat on Sunday afternoon, demonstrated such superior strategy when Al Stricker popped a string during the third set on his vintage plectrum banjo. Instead of a second instrument, which he said he normally would bring, Stricker had re-strung his just before the concert and brought along two other musicians to keep their marathon jam session moving. So he called on Stephanie Trick—she had already wowed the more than 250 fans that packed St. Louis’s Sheldon ballroom during the second break—to keep the festivities lively while he made the needed repair.

A recent University of Chicago music grad with international touring to her credit, and three-time winner of the St. Louis Ragtime Piano Competition, the lissome and vigorous young musician stepped back up to the concert grand as Trebor Jay “The Professor” Tichenor graciously yielded his seat and stood listening and watching her prodigious talent with an eagle eye and a fine-tuned ear from the sidelines. Her second selection, a rousing stride piano version of the George Gershwin-Earl Wild classic “Liza,” improvising with elaborate riffs on the melody line and concluding with harmonious arpeggios, brought the audience to their feet, cheering to the hall’s intricately illuminated rafters.

As Stricker tuned the new string and gingerly strummed a few chords he said, “Keep your fingers crossed.”

“Maybe that was your problem in the first place,” cracked Don Franz from the tuba section.

With such easy familiarity and a gut sense of what’s right for the moment, the product of  almost a half-century of playing together, Tichenor, Stricker, Franz, and Bill Mason–playing lead on cornet (and occasional harmonica) – revived the songs and legends of the ragtime era. Ever since their first 1961 Pierce City concert, they have regaled audiences on riverboats and in concert halls worldwide with their renditions of Scott Joplin tunes and compositions of a host of other greats. Such favorites as Mississippi  Rag (“M-I-crooked letter-crooked letter-I”), “Peoria,” “Mississippi Mud” and “New Orleans” took them to the first break, when Dave Majchrzak, president of the Friends of Scott Joplin organization, entertained with his own ragtime piano stylings.

In the second set Stricker delighted the crowd with his patter as he introduced the songs with a bad-boy twinkle in his eye and talk of sporting houses. “Contrary to popular belief,” he said, “they didn’t have jazz bands: that hot wind is the last thing you’d need in a sporting house.” He noted that “Everybody’s Doin’ It,” Irving Berlin’s 1911 classic, which brought in the dance craze of that era, has been popular ever since with husbands. Bill Mason displayed his peerless horn virtuosity in this set with solos in  “Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home” (Hughie Cannon, 1902), and Jelly Roll Morton’s “Dead Man Blues,” to which Bud Raeder, a former big band era drummer sitting at my left, certainly equal in age to the banjo player, quipped back at Stricker, “You’re getting close!” Mason capped off his afternoon with a “Dippermouth Blues,” a song King Oliver wrote for Louis Armstrong when a young Satchmo joined the band as second cornet in Chicago, in a rendition worthy of the jazz great himself.

Al Stricker got in a few licks in the third set with a favorite, adopted as a campaign song for a forgotten candidate named “Champ” Clark, an underdog who won 45 convention ballots but lost overnight to Woodrow Wilson: “They’ve Gotta Quit Kickin’ My Dawg Around.” Al then topped it with “When ‘Rastus Plays his Old Kazoo,” somehow juggling the banjo, the vocal and the kazoo. Perhaps inspired by Stephanie Trick’s tour de force, Tichenor rallied with several robust and richly textured solos, including “’Cabarlick Acid Rag,” written in 1901 by Clarence Wiley, a pharmacist, the banjo master explained. Wrapping up with “Ophelia,” a request – the spiritual, “Just a Closer Walk with Thee” – and “King Chanticleer,” Stricker thanked the rapt audience and signed off with, “Let’s hope we make it to our fiftieth.”

We, too, sure hope they do.

Buddy Blattner, Member of the Greatest Generation, Pioneer of the Play-By-Play

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This week the world lost a buddy: my dad’s lifelong friend and Marine Corps pal, a mentor to hundreds of inner-city youths that he helped with sports programs and a once familiar voice to baseball broadcast listeners across the country. His name was Buddy Blattner.

A sports celebrity in his day—famous as a teenager for worldwide championships in table tennis, a stint with the New York Giants, where before the war he rivaled his teammate Johnny Mize in runs batted in, and the Philadelphia Phillies—he became known to radio audiences across the country. Starting in 1950 he called games for the St. Louis Browns, alongside Dizzy Dean, the Hall of Fame pitcher. They developed a style where Dean made the colorful commentary, while Blattner described the action in a form that has come to be known as the play-by-play. He told me, “At the time I was the only major leaguer to do baseball broadcasts.” By 1953 He and Dean were on television, broadcasting ABC’s Game of the Week.

When I interviewed Bud in September 2000 for my 2005 book, Dad’s War with the United States Marines, he explained how he learned the art. “In 1946 in the off-season I begin to practice commenting on games. I would take a recent game, recall about four innings and call the game. I would go over the commentary until I could make it sound better, more exciting or better description of the action. In those days, I did the commercial layouts, filled in my own background on the players and worked with just an engineer. I learned play-by-play and not in New York, but in St. Louis, which had a more forgiving atmosphere.”

From there he went on to broadcast for the St. Louis Hawks and spent two seasons reporting for the St. Louis Cardinals before migrating west to work for the California Angels. A measure of his contribution to his art is the fact that when he left he was replaced by Dick Enberg, who then joined the Angels’ broadcasting team and later became an institution in sports broadcasting as anchor for a new venture called ABC Sports.

I asked about his World War II experience: how he reconciled his fortunate position, coaching recreational activities for the troops on the island of Guam, with the nastier job of the guys in combat. Bud said, “We were where they put us. I didn’t want the war: not one of these kids wanted the war. I never felt self-conscious. You do what you’re told. We toured the forward area in a DC-3—Peleliu, Kwajalein–trying to hit a little spot of sand in an ocean that extended as far as the eye could see. If you chickened out you had a miserable life. Anybody who enlisted and spent a reasonable amount of time in service was a hero. My God, I never could have believed I would live.”

Bud still fondly recalled his days with my dad, Ben Green, at WXLI, the Armed Forces radio station on Guam, as one of the highlights of his tense but humdrum Pacific war experience.  Bud wrote and Dad produced a sports quiz program for the station. “Perhaps we could give away beer,” he said. “Whether the show was any good or not, we would be giving away the nectar of the gods.” With permission from headquarters to give away the beer, they created a show called “Sporting Chance.” Dad arranged for it to be broadcast before live audiences of 2,000 to 3,000 troops at theaters that existed all over the island. “It became the most popular doggone show on the island,” Bud recalled. “It was more difficult to write every week—there wasn’t exactly a research library or panel of experts to ask on these questions.” He noted that the winners and even the losers got cases of beer for their units for being part of the entertainment. The generals, admirals and the troops alike praised the new sound of WXLI, and the radio station’s beer ration increased. “Life on Guam had turned the corner,” Dad said. “This post-surrender duty, if you had to do it, wasn’t so bad.”

Let’s hope that Bud and Dad are now happily reunited. I’m sure they’re already negotiating with The Man Upstairs for an increased supply of beer for the troops.

For more of Dad’s and Bud’s hilarious adventures on Guam, read my World War II memoir and biography, Dad’s War with the United States Marines.

Staff Meeting at WXLI, by L. L. Rogers

More next time,

Peter

Peter

Peter H, Green