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Is
there any perfection other than what we strive for? Or the
words we seek, or ideas from seedlings taking over our whole
lives, our very breathing, the way writing does on its way
into a book.
Tackling a project
on writing runs a wide gamut. It starts with my father's
reading Peter B. Kine's "Cappy Ricks and the Green
Pea Pirates" to me when I was a little over two years
old, on a porch looking over Oxford Street in Somerville,
Massachusetts, then watching two older cousins push our
Model T Ford to get it started, those young giants. Shortly
later it seems, there’s my grandfather Johnny Igoe
reading "this young upstart Yeats" to me on the
porch at night, the unshaded bulb yellow, his tobacco fingers
yellow, his voice hanging with the fireflies out in our
field. It is there yet.
A few years later I
watched my father, the avaricious reader, go off to work
in a WW II GE guard tower with a pocketbook in each back
pocket. His lunch he might forget but never his books, though
I do remember once when I had to thumb down there to the
GE plant in Lynn to bring him his next book. When he started
to lose his eyesight in earnest around age sixty, from insulin
retinitis, I scratched all over hell to find Cappy Ricks,
to read it to him, but couldn't find it. Settling for my
reading as much Horatio Alger Jr.'s stuff that I could find,
and which he had read as a boy, we slipped into the light
of many dawns. Those were marvelous exercises, those journeys
back over once-covered ground.
All of this formed
my own voice, the inner ear I’ll keep forever, the
writing voice. And, of course, it is all part of the framing
of this house we call Thomas, and the stones of the cellar,
and the rooftop and how I go from one room to another, transitioning
from essay to poetry to short stories to the novels that
have held me in place in one room for long days at a time,
and loving every breath taken no matter the room I'm in.
Yet this project has grown on me with the same taste and
declaration that a current novel in the works has: Four
veteran comrades from the Korean Campaign, now accomplished
writers or poets, in their own way have tried to memorialize
all their comrades. Beat at that task they do as
they beat at the enemy. The odds were at times horrendous.
In one sudden flare of realization, they know they can’t
memorialize all of them. What are they to do? In that moment
of clarity, they go the other way: find one, one lost or
gone comrade, make him the universal, bring him back, make
his life sing once again. That novel is underway.
This project, then,
might suggest the universal, might demand the universal
sweep or an approach to the intangible. For me, in another
moment of clarity, it comes down to a specific exercise.
So this essay on writing,
the art of writing, the breathing that beats down in me
and up out of me, that demands energy and time, that comes
in all hours of sleep and wakefulness, has to come from
another posture, another stance. It can’t be the universal
reach, the dream, all writing being memorialized; it has
to cast itself upon one specific piece, “making a life
sing once again.”
Which is here.
In time much of what
we know fades away, moves away, continually moves around
us, blinking and scattering, but with a waft of air touches
back. It’s a face, a name, a childhood haunt in momentary
dispose, each waiting to be identified or merely given the
solace of place. Though we cannot name it at first, cannot
frame it visually clean or bring it to contoured image,
we yet strike out for it. Our hometown of Saugus kept touching
back at friend John Burns and me like this. We wanted to
hold tight to all that came our way, had come our way. It
had already found breath in one of my poems… because
we have all been where we are going, into selves, shadows,
odd shining, all those places the mind occupies, or the
heart…
A
book was in the offing.
The word then had gone
out nationwide: we were looking for articles, vignettes,
pictures, graphics, anything that would lend both resonance
and nostalgia to a book we had dreamed up, a book on Things
Saugus in the 20th Century. Out of nowhere
Adrienne Linstrom-Young came suddenly into being again.
I had not seen her in thirty years or more. Yet John Burns,
my co-editor and co-dreamer for this book, a fixture in
the Saugus High School scheme of things for more than seventy
years, who commands wide respect, had spoken. That word,
as much a dictate as could be, was out. Adrienne, like so
many others, had heard of John Burns’ needs for the
book that was to be titled, at his suggestion, A Gathering
of Memories, Saugus 1900-2000.
She responded quickly,
repeatedly, with an affluence of memorable pictures of her
father, studies of a man and his time. He was a man obviously
revered by his daughter, and remembered in a special collection
of photos she said had come from different caches within
the family, four places in four states.
Leon Young, her father,
had been the sub-master at SHS during all my school years,
and was now a beloved specter of the past, a man of many
faces, many uniforms, as if he were on stage all the time,
playing out again his own life’s drama. The pictures,
all black and white, are of great contrast, some of them
almost revealing the inner man and his wide interests. No
longer is he a stern figure decidedly bent on detention,
social improvements, and behavioral rudiments.
I remembered him in
detention rooms as well as in and about the high school
hallways in the bustling and relentless ‘40s, a time
for all times, our football teams doing well, but the world
itself going badly even from a poor start. Joe Pace, we
were told, was the first of ours to fall in the madness
of the early part of the decade; at Pearl Harbor, the Japanese
planes from Yamamoto’s aircraft carriers dipping in
over the fleet that quiet and peaceful Sunday morning none
of us should ever forget.
From her innumerable
sources she brought forth an exquisite selection of pictures:
her father in seafarer’s garb; on a fishing trip (inland)
with Buzz Harvey, then our high school football coach; in
his Arthur Treacher get-up, complete with vest (and spats,
we were willing to bet). In cadet uniform he stood on the
deck of an unnamed ship, his arms folded in a pose, the
world out there beyond his gaze, the horizon promising and
open. Fifty years later he has another look and is on another
plane. Now he graces the pages of our book.
Adrienne Linstrom-Young’s
infusion into our book was but one of the many pleasantries
and minor excitements which had come our way in the two
years doggedly spent on this project, from the day in October,
1998 when the idea first burst forth.
That day, coming off
a six-mile walk around our town, I paid one of my numerous
late-day social calls on an old friend at his school office.
It was here where we had generally discussed our past in
this town we so dearly love, which has been so good to us.
But for that matter, names of people and places often eluded
our memories, slipping into some unconfined space of the
mind where retrieval was hesitant, unsure. John once mentioned
Charlie’s Pond. To me it had been “lost”
for more than fifty years. In turn I cited Cinder Path
as a place of endless winter excitement where we steered
our old Flexible Flyer sleds down the long and twisting
run from the site of the old Stand Pipe on top of Baker
Hill. That ride, so clearly impressed on my mind to this
day, the wind wild and cold on my face, the careening like
electricity running the whole gamut of my body, went clear
down to Cliftondale Square. It was an exhilarating and headless
ride, now and then under a splash of weekend moonlight or
brittle starlight.
He had forgotten the
place, it seems, or had not been there. Perhaps those years
so memorable to me he had spent in the South Pacific immersed
in different memories.
Other names and places
came and then went flitting away in a number of our meetings,
like meager and endangered moths caught up in late October.
They were like air around us, barely touching, but being
known, having names, a place to hold onto, a corner of the
mind.
The past we wanted
to respect, to remember, was surely slipping away from us.
Pieces came and went in the relentless tumble, some of them
crying for recognition. Muckles Brown, at length and only
after some eventful prodding, came back to life as he was,
enormous across the chest, shoulders like Atlas, but faint
Anna Parker was just about gone forever, her and the first
electric car in town. And The Pigeon Plucker
and Hoag’s Castle had also done their dance.
The names and faces of memorialized heroes were more surely
cemented in place. The Kasabuski brothers (killed within
two weeks of each other in the Italian Campaign), for whom
our hockey rink is named and where I had spent more than
ten years with my sons, are linked forever in my mind. The
VFW Post bears the name of a Baker Hill boy, Arthur DeFranzo,
who was decorated posthumously with the Medal of Honor for
his heroics not long after D-Day. Arthur, of course, is
not forgotten. But other names too quickly failed at the
tip of the tongue, a host of them from all corners of our
town (Lick, Skink, Doggie, Big Syd, Paints Brown, MaryB,
Simple Ellie, Ollie and Dolly, Sinagna, Tarzan Doyle, Crazy
Albert, Leonard the Blind Man, The Indian). A face would
come back mysteriously in a fleck of light and leap away,
on a silent ride into complete darkness. Sometimes a place
that was, a favorite place of youthful years ...
disrupted, dug out, filled in, carried off … no longer
existed. It wasn’t a pleasant experience. Doubts, we
knew, did exist. About ourselves. About our memories. About
our ability to muster a true respect for the past. About
duty and what it calls for.
That giant of a day
finally came. I walked into John’s office, my six mile
trek behind me, a few faces and a few names remembered in
my course about town, down the Turnpike, easterly on Essex
Street, through Cliftondale Square, down Central Street
past the new Senior Center, to Saugus Center. My quick searches
down side streets collected a few names and faces, lost
others. I did not find a host of that which was once known.
John, his face as red
as mine, his eyes like relays, looked up at me as I walked
into his office. He has a way of smiling an announcement,
perhaps the teacher pleasantly at his work, the corners
of his mouth like punctuation. For a moment I saw it, then
heard it. On the edge of his chair, as if he had been the
long day waiting for me, he said, “Let’s write
a book.” The blue eyes zapped electric again. They
went into a further spectrum; his usual excitement and keenness
for every day was hyper, and then some.
I nodded.
“Before it’s
all gone,” he added. “Before we forget what we’re
supposed to remember.” He was doing what I had so often
done, measuring time. It had crept quite often into my poetry,
like a Jersey barrier on the loose in my stream of thought.
John, it was easy to
see, was there. And if there’s anything in this world
that he can lay claim to, it’s a sense of justice,
a sense of honesty, a sense of duty. And his spirit and
energy are compelling. In mere moments, after a minor and
unspoken assessment of where such a decision might take
us, a kind of nostalgic Limbo possibly being our destination
or assignment, we were off and running.
Of course, we knew
we could not do it by ourselves. That would have been fatal,
would have been incomplete, would have been parochial to
our mind-set.
Slowly a committee
came into being. And another eventful day came into focus.
Early on, a hesitant member of our committee asked, “Where
are we going to get the pros to write this book?”
He seemed serious about it. So were we. Both published and
unpublished writers and poets quickly came into the fold.
Teachers and historians and artists and cartoonists and
illustrators came along with them. Neil Howland, a classmate
and teammate of mine, and a lawyer with offices in the town,
became our legal man and a valuable contributor. We had
also attracted some young blood, to go along with our old
blood; we crossed the century in our make-up. Clayton Trefry,
who had been through a hundred town campaigns, brought with
him his long love for the town, and his memories. A recent
SHS graduate, now at Yale, made a contribution. Vicariously
we were underway.
The pros, as it turned
out, were gracious and many and varied. A former SHS football
player and teammate, Donald Junkins, with sixteen books
to his credit as well as the UMASS career interception record
still in his back pocket, came from the western part of
the state with his offerings. An SHS Sports Hall of Famer,
Tim Churchard, currently coaching in Division 1 hockey and
recently in the NCAA Finals, who writes poetry and his own
music, made a number of contributions.
We found, in our musings
and wanderings, that Elizabeth Bishop, Pulitzer Prize poet,
(called by some the best American poet in the last half
of the last century) had spent her freshman year at SHS,
had lived on Sunnyside Avenue in our town. Up from the deep
files came old paperwork; we saw her report card, a signal
of things to come, and found in her poems places that surely
must have been parts of Saugus urging her roots at poetry.
A local and active
historian, loving Saugus and trains, brought from his files
a host of excellent transportation photos. A cartoonist
and an illustrator contributed an exceptional array of material
to grace our pages, to line our inner covers. Renowned artist
Bill Maloney, once of our Hull Drive, revisited Saugus Center,
the Town Hall and the Soldiers Monument with a most nostalgic
oil painting, becoming the cover of our book. We found that
Saugonians had graced the fields with the likes of Bob Waterfield,
Johnny Unitas, and Doug Flutie; that friends had found each
other on the sands of South Pacific islands in moments of
abject silence, on Kwajalein and Iwo Jima and Okinawa, before
they were parted forever. We kept seeing that happiness
and loneliness and pain had not left our town untouched,
not by a long shot. But it was still Saugus.
We had, it proved,
marshaled the pros from our community … no matter where
they were, no matter where this life had taken them, Saugonians
moved on: Wilsonville, Oregon; Berwick, Maine; Orlando,
Florida; small rural corners of New Hampshire and Vermont,
we found them, or they found us. And the material came on.
Anthony Scire, who
for years has been studying various parts of Saugus history,
who years earlier had already done a major paper on the
Saugus Marshes, tipped open his treasure house of collectible
histories, spilled his memories, and wet his pen again.
We found out he could crank things wide open with his energy.
Bob Wentworth, SHS
’48, retired, an old friend, was a volunteer. He was
welcomed to the committee with open arms. Then a few days
later, his mind playing with ideas, thinking himself short
of writing talent, he asked to be relieved of any promise
to contribute. John positioned him quickly, and from a minute
suggestion Bob Wentworth had found his niche, critical to
the success of the book. He spent hundreds of hours in the
library looking at microfilm. His contribution became a
major part of the book as he culled history and politics
and town data from the microfilms of old newspapers. And
when there appeared to be a breach in the committee structure,
Bob volunteered to head the fundraising drive to get the
money to print the book. His approach to John Dean, president
of the Saugus Co-operative Bank, assured us of the necessary
start-up and printing funds. $60,000 is not peanuts, not
on the premise of selling an unwritten book.
On June 12th of
the year 2000, somewhat spent from arduous and long hours,
our eyes bleary from life in front of new-age screens, poring
over photos and names we once thought might have been lost
forever to a lot of people (oh where was Piggery Road and
Little Sandy and Pick Hawkins’ Swamp and Poo Chak Road
and The Old Rezzie and Shipwreck Eddie?), we delivered our
rough proposal manuscript to the printer’s representative.
Tom Keeley of Josten’s Company had guided us on our
way, after being one of our original contacts. In that one
moment of deliverance a weight had shifted, ballast moved,
other obligations coming back into rightful play.
If we were to forget,
we’d make sure others would remember.
Day of days this was,
looking forward to Founders’ Day, the second Saturday
in September when thousands gather in Saugus Center to celebrate
who and what we are, as our target date for publication.
That is a raucous, joyous day in town. Tables and booths
are spread throughout the Center, odors rise rich and pungent
from innumerable grills, runners flash by in the annual
road race. Old friends are met, relocated Saugonians coming
back for the whole day; and lots of handshaking and backslapping
welcomes are made, smiles going electric across the crowd
as old classmates or teammates are spotted.
There was a major hole,
though, in finalizing the book. Final presentation to the
printer had to be electronic, in the genre of the new order
of things rising about us. Neither John nor I had the computer
knowledge or expertise to undertake that massive task. Mine
was recently meager with a system gift from my children,
John’s just coming aboard with a most recent purchase
of a computer, as a need for final details of the book,
perhaps at insistence from others and myself that he write
his memoirs.
But, as always, in
some corner of Saugus, there is an energy waiting to be
tapped. Eric Brown was that energy. And he had the expertise,
the knowledge, to be the final hand in the formation of
our book. Eric runs Saugus.net, his local entity. That is
his baby. And it is Eric who laid out the book, scanned
the hundreds of photographs, rejected some, found second
sources with better density or clarity, spent hundreds of
hours himself hunched over the machines of the new generation.
Like John Burns, he is a man of detail, of uniformity, of
clarity. Their imprint sweeps through our pages, letting
others’ personal traits be known where they count,
demanding some traits be corrected or brought into uniformity.
We know there are holes
and vacuums in our thoughts, in our pages. That is what
brought us to the book in the first place. It is most difficult
to let go what is precious, even when it threatens to slide
off by itself into a gray and uneventful place, as if something
concrete can suddenly dissipate like a summer cloud at a
fresh breeze. But everything mentioned, every single person
named for one bright moment, becomes representative of each
and every part of Saugus, all that which has had its way
in helping to form our memories, letting us become what
we have become.
On the 6th
day of September, the Year of our Lord 2000, skids of book
boxes came off the rear end of an 18-wheeler that had crossed
half the country from Kansas… and right into my driveway.
In print we were, glorious print, 452 fabulous pages, and
setting about in our warehousing and packaging and mailing
processes. For the shortest time we reveled in he-man Muckles
Brown, poet Elizabeth Bishop, warrior Frank Parkinson, the
tanker and tiger of Tobruk, footballer Art Spinney out in
front of Johnny Unitas in that 1958 game of the century,
Sgt. Al de Steuben catching a round in the hedgerows of
Europe, old storekeeper Jack Winters alone with his man-killer
kerosene stove, unforgettable teacher Marleigh Graves, Honest
Lawyer Belden Bly. Pictures leaped off our pages, poems
gave rhythm, drawn lines etched a history, scored words
moved the blood of a whole community.
The work of writing
had beckoned.
We had delivered. 
Postscript to publication:
On September 6, 2000, we
got our 2,000 copies from the printer. On Founders Day in
Saugus Center, on the ninth day of the month, we sold 400
copies. Four weeks later, doing our own warehousing, packaging,
mailing by diverse methods, we paid the loan back to the
Saugus Bank. The book went like hot cakes. In four months
every copy was sold, including the last five copies that
had been damaged in transport. An article made the back
inside cover of The Boston College Magazine, John
and me being old-time Eagles off the Chestnut Hill campus,
John in ’38 and me in ‘56.
So now we are into
our second printing, John having great difficulty in saying
“sorry” to people or “there are no more left.”
And the accolades keep coming, a glimpse of them attached
here, a reflection on writing as it came to me and my friends:
I love America. I love Saugus.
I love what you have done for our town.
—B. Merrithew, Saugus
On advice,
my wife and I purchased two copies, to prevent bloodshed
at reading time. To date, our favorite line is, “I
had a bad posture, a bad perm, and a soft-spoken voice.”
It was great over our morning coffee and the book. The book
is marvelous. Carol and I have enjoyed it tremendously.
It makes you feel as though you know the characters as you
are reading. It also prompts a recall of our own personal
experiences and aside of making us aware how long ago some
of these things occurred, it generates a lot of memorable
joy.
—Bill Jenkins, Orlando, FL (never been to Saugus)
The copy, the
Book, arrived yesterday and I have been turning pages
in wonderment ever since. Fantastic!! The work that went
into it!! Kudos all around especially to you and John Burns
and most flattered by your signing same. Much more to say
later, but for now, Congratulations! Big Time ... Like the
Bible—can open the book at random and start a chain
reaction of memories with almost any page or occasional
photo. So it goes—on and on—one memory after another,
“Not docile, helpless objects, for indeed, they respond
as they are being gathered and leave their marks on those
who choose to gather them.”
—James Smith, Waldwick, NJ
A masterpiece. A classic. Must
reading even for our carpetbaggers.
—Belden Bly, Honest Lawyer
I received my
copy yesterday. It is a masterpiece. I sat to spend a few
minutes thumbing through it and was entranced hours later.
I love the way it’s organized and each vignette reaches
out and touches the reader personally. I can hardly wait
to spend a little time each day reading it and want the
pleasure to last as long as possible. I think it is a magnificent
job. It stands as tribute not only to Saugus but to all
the hard work of John, Tom and the others.
—Bart Brady Ciampa, Vancouver, WA
My eagerly awaited
book-of-the-year came on Friday at 9 p.m. and kept me up
until the wee hours reading bits of memories of
the various contributors. We are mighty proud of you two
and your committee.
—Bill Bright, Wilsonville, OR
I sit here,
late into the night, cradling the book in my arms like a
baby. It is riveting.
-Tim Churchard, West Lebanon, ME
What a piece
of work you (John) and Tom and your gifted staff of historians
and writers have wrought. What a monumental piece of work!
I was first taken aback by the weight of the package that
arrived at my door. Then I opened the box and found a beautifully
jacketed tome, very much unlike the usual town histories
I have seen in austere brown and green covers, housing pages
of statistics and wax-museum people. It all started with
“Saugus.” I love the sound of that word. It has
a magnetic field around it. It draws in the jesters, the
curious, the puzzled.
This is a book of people first,
living, breathing, flesh and bone people—with all their
distinctions and disparities, each with a story, each with
a place—a few rogues among the many angels. The names
are legion. They crowd the pages in unbelievable numbers,
but they retain their faces. This book supports my belief.
How can such a small town house so many different places
– so much beauty – so many landscapes. I feel
as though I have been on a long trip to every neighborhood
in town and have met nearly every person in town. As impressed
as I find the magnitude and scope of this book, I find it
even more impressive that you and Tom were able to attract
so many writers with talent and memory to this project.
How did one small town produce this abundance of literary
talent?
Finally, thank you for dedicating
this book “To all who were ever here in Saugus and
to all who ever will be.” Those words give me boldness
to say at last, “My Saugus too! Thank you for letting
me in.”
—Miriam Kochakian, Methuen
I can’t wait to read cover
to cover and reflect on the memories contained this winter
in my easy chair with a warm fire in the fireplace.
—Unsigned
It was as if I were reliving
my childhood and my early adult years.
—Jessie Halpin, NH
The whole book shouts “quality.”
—Paul Heffernan, Ipswich
Tom, now I know what you were
talking about, fifty years ago in Korea.
—Frank Mitman, Bethlehem |
