After hundreds of editorials and
columns, is there still a book in me?
By Gordon Garnos
IN
RETROSPECT: Have you ever been asked to write a book, a book
especially about your background, your youth, or the experiences
you've had that have made you what you are today? A funny thing
happened to me the other day while on my daily jaunt to one of my
coffee clutches with the guys. My cell phone rang. At the other end
was a woman from one of the communities where my columns appear on a
weekly basis. She had just read my column (week of July 16) about
the cars that were in my youth. "Why don't you write a book?" she
queried. After hundreds, perhaps thousands, of editorials and
columns, the question emerged, do I still have a book in me?
EVERY
JOURNALIST, and even those of us who think we are, have had a
desire more often than not to write a book. I'm sure journalist
Terry Woster in Pierre has often thought of it. I'm certain Noel
Hamiel, formerly with Mitchell's Daily Republic, has thought of it.
Many a good book came from journalists, although following that
profession certainly isn't a prerequisite for a good story.
When that
caller asked, "Why don't you write a book?" I recalled years ago
when I asked myself that same question. Yep! It was going to be a
real show and tell--warts and all. And I can just hear my mother
saying, "I don't believe I would say all of that." Since then, I'm
sure the idea obviously has remained hidden somewhere in the folds
of my psyche.
Once I even
did an outline of what that book was going to be about. Then, all I
had to do was fill in the details. Since then the outline and any
details I may have filled in have been lost to time, as are so many
potentially good books.
I VIVIDLY
RECALL that outline. It started out all right. But after a few
chapters, it was starting to read like the 1939 James Thurber book,
"The Secret Life of Walter Mitty." That book was later made into a
movie starring Danny Kaye. According to Google, "Mitty was a weak,
mild man with a vivid fantasy life: in a few paragraphs he imagines
himself as a wartime pilot, an emergency room surgeon and a
devil-may-care killer." In other words, Mitty was an ineffectual
dreamer.
Yep! That is
what my book was starting to look like. I thought, was I headed down
that same path? It might have been at that time the details of that
book that were never to be, ended up on the shelf, never to be
thought of again--until that woman called the other day on my cell
phone.
The
experiences of any kid could be a book. For example, Mark Twain's
"The Adventures of Tom Sawyer," could be one of those. Pathetically,
that book today is banned in several schools across America. They
say it's racist. That's unadulterated crap! What it is, is pure
Americana.
IF I TOOK
THE "Mitty" route for this book, in the forefront would have to
be my experiences in a secret branch of the U.S. Air Force. My five
years in Uncle Sam's Air Force could write a lot of books. Many of
them would be about that secret section. First, we learned how to
jump out of an airplane. Next came valuable lessons we needed when
we took on the underworld of the KBG and how we would sneak behind
the Iron Curtain and steal away mostly physicians and other
professional people and their families and bring them back across
Allied lines. Yes, that does sound a little like Mitty, doesn't it?
Why this is
all coming back to me for just one simple, little question, "Why
don't you write a book?" Why is all of this surfacing in a rather
South Dakota slow season? Admittedly, other than the tourists and
those on motorcycles headed for Sturgis, there really isn't a lot
happening at the time of this writing in this great state of ours.
IF AND WHEN
I WRITE that book it would have to be a true story. One chapter
would have to be the "playground" we had while growing up in Presho.
First was the fire and then how we built a monkey bridge across the
Medicine Creek with ³"orrowed" materials.
That
playground didn't even have a swing. What it did have was a very
large pile of bailed hay, the smaller square ones. Only being a
short distance from the lumber yard, one dark dreary night we, other
guys and myself, (And you know who you were) would "borrow" a few
boards and use them for support beams as we burrowed into those
bails. From that we had the neatest tunnels and rooms under all that
hay.
Everything was
fine for a while. No one could find us, that is no one in authority.
But two of the gentler gender did. And one of them had a pack of
cigarettes and some matches. Those gals weren't in those tunnels
very long before they started smoking. Then the hay was ablaze, and,
puff, borrowed support boards and all went up in smoke. Almost
instantly, you couldn't find a kid within a country mile of what had
been our "playground."
THE SAGA OF
the monkey bridge will have to wait a while as I'm not sure what the
statute of limitations on that incident might be!....
Gordon Garnos was long-time editor of the Watertown Public Opinion and
recently retired after 39 years with that newspaper. Garnos, a
lifelong resident of South Dakota except for his military service in the
U.S. Air Force, was born and raised in Presho.
