His Elderly Father as a Young Man
by Leo Dangel

This happened before I met your mother:
I took Jennie Johanson to a summer dance,
and she sent me a letter, a love letter,
I guess, even if the word love wasn't in it.
She wrote that she had a good time
and didn't want the night to end.
At home, she lay down on her bed
but stayed awake, listening to the songs
of morning birds outside her window.
I read that letter a hundred times
and kept it in a cigar box
with useless things I had saved:
a pocket knife with an imitation pearl handle
and a broken blade,
a harmonica I never learned to play,
one cuff link, an empty rifle shell.

When your mother and I got married,
I threw the letter away -
if I had kept it, she might wonder.
But I wanted to keep it
and even thought about hiding places,
maybe in the barn or the tool shed,
but what if it were ever found?
I knew of no way to explain why
I would keep such a letter, much less
why I would take the trouble to hide it.


Leo Dangel, "His Elderly Father as a Young Man" from Home from the Field. ©1997 Leo Dangel published by Spoon River Poetry Press. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

It’s the birthday of lawyer and writer Clarence (Seward) Darrow (books by this author), born in Kinsman, Ohio (1857). His father was a Unitarian minister until he lost his faith, when he became a furniture maker and undertaker. But his passion was for books, not business. Darrow wrote, “In all the country round, no man knew so much of books as he and no man knew less of life.” Darrow became a famous lawyer, and he filled his courtroom speeches with literary allusions.

Darrow fought for unions, racial equality, and the poor, and he became famous for defending some of the most unpopular people of his time. In the 1925 Monkey Trial he defended high school teacher John Scopes for teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution in a Tennessee school. In “The Crime of the Century,” in 1924, he successfully defended two confessed teenage murderers, Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold, from receiving the death penalty. In defending them he said, “You may stand them on the trap door of the scaffold, and choke them to death, but that act will be infinitely more cold-blooded, whether justified or not, than any act that these boys have committed or can commit.”

He wrote the novel An Eye for an Eye (1905) and the nonfiction books Crime: Its Cause and Treatment (1922), The Prohibition Mania (1927), and The Story of My Life (1932).

He once said, “I never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with a lot of pleasure.”

A major earthquake struck San Francisco 116 years ago today, in 1906. The first foreshocks were felt at 5:12 in the morning and the main quake struck four minutes later. It was caused by a rupture of 300 miles of the San Andreas Fault and it lasted for about a minute. It was felt from southern Oregon to south of Los Angeles and as far east as Nevada; even though it’s known as the “San Francisco earthquake” because of the damage it caused there, that was by no means the only place where strong shocks were felt. As devastating as the quake was, the fires were worse. The rupture of gas lines caused the first of them. The water mains also ruptured so there was no water to fight the fires. In desperation fire fighters blew up buildings with gunpowder in the hope that they would serve as firebreaks. Unfortunately it didn’t work and the gunpowder they used just added to the inferno.

Members of the American armed forces were first on the scene; many didn’t even wait for government orders. They guarded buildings, discouraged looting, distributed supplies, and pulled people out of the burning wreckage. Despite their best efforts, at least 3,000 people died and more than half of San Francisco’s 400,000 residents were left homeless. Survivors dragged trunks full of their worldly belongings up the steep hills of the city and camped out at the Presidio. Officials hurried to rebuild in time for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition which the city was to host in 1915. They created an elegant new city but in their haste built some buildings that were less sound than the ones that had been destroyed by the quake.

Opera superstar Enrico Caruso was in San Francisco the morning of the quake; he had performed Carmen at the Mission Opera House the night before. A couple of months later he published his eyewitness account:

“But what an awakening! You must know that I am not a very heavy sleeper — I always wake early, and when I feel restless I get up and go for a walk. So on the Wednesday morning early I wake up about 5 o’clock, feeling my bed rocking as though I am in a ship on the ocean, and for a moment I think I am dreaming that I am crossing the water on my way to my beautiful country. And so I take no notice for the moment, and then, as the rocking continues, I get up and go to the window, raise the shade and look out. And what I see makes me tremble with fear. I see the buildings toppling over, big pieces of masonry falling, and from the street below I hear the cries and screams of men and women and children.”

Novelist and journalist Jack London was also in San Francisco when the quake struck. He wrote an essay about the disaster:

“Not in history has a modern imperial city been so completely destroyed. San Francisco is gone. Nothing remains of it but memories and a fringe of dwelling houses on its outskirts. Its industrial section is wiped out. Its business section is wiped out. Its social and residential section is wiped out. The factories and warehouses, the great stores and newspaper buildings, the hotels and the palaces of the nabobs, are all gone. Remains only the fringe of dwelling houses on the outskirts of what was once San Francisco. [...] All the cunning adjustments of a twentieth century city had been smashed by the earthquake. The streets were humped into ridges and depressions, and piled with the debris of fallen walls. The steel rails were twisted into perpendicular and horizontal angles. The telephone and telegraph systems were disrupted. And the great water-mains had burst. All the shrewd contrivances and safeguards of man had been thrown out of gear by thirty seconds’ twitching of the earth-crust.”

On this day, in 1924, the first crossword puzzle book was published. Simon and Schuster commissioned the book to meet growing demand for these engaging puzzles, originally dubbed “word-crosses,” that first appeared in US newspapers a little over a decade earlier. Both the first and second printings of The Cross Word Puzzle Book sold out in weeks, so the publishers commissioned two more collections and rushed them to print. By the end of 1924 the books ranked No. 1, 2, and 3 on the national nonfiction best-seller list.

Today is the birthday of Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist Susan Faludi (1959) (books by this author), born in Queens. She won the Pulitzer Prize in explanatory journalism (1991) for a report in The Wall Street Journal (1990) detailing the leveraged buyout of Safeway Stores, but she’s best known for a series of nonfiction books that examine the role of women in today’s society.

Faludi’s mother was a homemaker and a journalist. Her father was a photographer who immigrated to America after surviving the Holocaust. Faludi wrote for The Daily Crimson at Harvard, and after graduating, she wrote regularly for The New York Times, The Miami Herald, and The Wall Street Journal.

In the 1980s Faludi read a cover story in Newsweek (1986) that alleged that the marital prospects of single, career-educated women were bleak. She found the statistics faulty so she began investigating other female-centered stories that were being sensationally promoted by the media. She proposed a book based on her research and was met with silence from the publishing industry, except for one publishing house. Even so, on the eve of publication a marketing executive for Faludi’s publisher told her the book was going to tank because “1992 is going to be the year of the man.”

The publishing executive was wrong. When Backlash: The War Against Women (1992) was published it spent nine months on the New York Times best-seller list. The book came out during the Anita Hill hearings, and the largest pro-choice rally ever held was happening in Washington. Women were eager for her book. Faludi shared the cover of Time magazine with feminist icon Gloria Steinem and received a windfall of letters. Most of them began, “I thought I was the only one who felt this way.” The book became required reading in college and is considered a seminal feminist text.

Faludi went on to write Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man (1999) which is about the culture of masculinity in American society. For research, Faludi hung out in locker rooms, job clubs, Promise Keeper rallies, and Marine recruiting stations. She received criticism from the feminist movement for focusing on men but she shrugged it off, saying, “I don’t see how you can be a feminist and not think about men. In order for women to live freely, men have to live freely, too. Being a feminist opens your eyes to the ways men, like women, are imprisoned in cultural stereotypes.”

Her latest work is a memoir, “In the Darkroom.” (2016)

It’s the birthday of publisher Clifton Keith Hillegass, born in Rising City, Nebraska (1918), the man behind CliffsNotes, the black- and yellow-striped pamphlets that students have used for literary study guides or substitutes for the real thing since 1958. He started the company in his basement with a $4,000 loan and used advertising slogans like “Juliet, Baby, it’s easier with Cliff’s Notes,” and “Shafted by Shaw? Mangled by Melville?” Cliffs Notes has printed more than 50 million guides.

Hillegass didn’t write the summaries himself but he loved literature, from classics to science fiction to mysteries. He wanted his books to make literature more accessible to students. He did not intend for CliffsNotes to replace reading the book in the first place and was upset that they had gained a reputation as cheat sheets. He put a signed note in each pamphlet that read: “A thorough appreciation of literature allows no shortcuts.” When the company was bought for $14 million in 1998 the new owners kept the bumblebee-striped design but dropped the note.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

^