Category Archives: A Writing Life

195. Boys at Work: Rick Brant

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By at Wk atwIf you didn’t read Tuesday’s post, you might want to do so before you proceed. This week is on the subject apprenticeship literature.

Grosset and Dunlap was the most important publishing house of the twentieth century, in my opinion, because they provided literature for all the kids who didn’t have access to a library and didn’t have much money to spend. For a dollar or so, depending on the decade, you could buy books from any of a dozen or more series. This was before paperbacks made books affordable. If it weren’t for Grosset and Dunlap, I would not be a reader or writer today.

Grosset and Dunlap was almost synonymous with the Stratemeyer syndicate, which provided them with most of their titles. There were exceptions such as the Ken Holt series and the Rick Brant books. Ken Holt never appealed to me, but the Rick Brant books were the jewels of my childhood.

All of the G & D books carried pseudonyms as author. In books from Stratemeyer, this disguised the fact that they were works for hire, written to outlines which were usually provided by Stratemeyer himself. The Ken Holt books however (pseudonym Bruce Campbell) were all written by Sam and Beryl Epstein. The first three Rick Brant books (pseudonym John Blaine) were written by Peter Harkins and Harold Goodwin. The following twenty-one books were by Goodwin alone. (see also 60. Thank You, Harold Goodwin)

In other words, they had real authors, not poorly paid hacks, and it showed.

Relevant aside: Years ago I was attending a teachers’ conference, against my will. If you’ve never been at one, you don’t know what boredom means. I had settled into my normal conference stance of a calm face covering intense irritation at the endless stream of BS. The only bright spot was the keynote speaker, Steve Wozniak. When he came to the podium, he mentioned Rick Brant as a childhood influence.

I whooped. You could have heard me in the street. Then my face turned red. You see, I had never before heard anyone else mention my childhood favorite. This was before I had access to the internet; now I know that there are enough fans of the series to run a fair number of Rick Brant themed websites.

Rick Brant had the perfect life. His father was a noted scientist who lived and worked at home. Rick, his family, and his best friend Scotty all lived on Spindrift Island, which was the headquarters of a group of scientists and engineers. Zircon, Weiss, Briotti and others formed a cadre of the best uncle figures any boy ever had.

He was a junior member of the team. A member -not a mascot. He never outshone the scientists, but he pulled his own weight, mostly building electronic gadgets that the scientists had invented. This was during the electronic middle ages (first tubes, then transistors, then solid state), when a reader could go down to Radio Shack and buy the wherewithal to try his own hand at the trade.

Rick Brant was eighteen years old for 43 years, always working with his avuncular scientists and always learning. That’s good work if you can get it. During that time he went on dozens of expeditions throughout the world. He helped the Spindrift scientists launch a rocket to the moon, find a lost civilization, excavate a sunken temple – the list goes on for twenty-four books.

I so wanted to be Rick Brant.

A week is enough for now, but there are other authors that deserve attention, particularly Howard Pease. Someday soon, we’ll return to this subject.

194. Boys at Work: Lee Correy

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By at Wk atwIf you didn’t read Monday’s post, you might want to do so before you proceed. This week is on the subject apprenticeship literature.

Lee Correy had a considerable effect on my life. L. C. was a pen name of G. Harry Stine, an author with a long bibliography, but I don’t think of it like that. I have read some of G. Harry’s work without enthusiasm, and I haven’t read Lee Correy’s two seminal novels since high school. I still think of Lee Correy as a real person, separate from G. Harry Stine. It’s an artifact of my nostalgia.

I am referring to Rocket Man and Starship Through Space, both of which were in my high school library. They would be in my personal library right now, but they are rare, and copies are now out of my price range.

Of the two, Starship Through Space is clearer in my memory, probably because of its lame ending. Two young men travel back from Mars where they are attending a space academy, to find that they have been chosen to participate in the building of the first interstellar ship. They participate fully in the building of the Vittoria, are on the crew which flies her to Pluto and back, are deeply involved in the upgrade and rebuilding that follows, and continue on the Alpha Centauri. That is where it all fell apart for me, as the natives of New Terra resemble Native Americans and turn out to be displaced humans, part of the scattering that followed the Tower of Babel.

The two young protagonists participate fully in the work of building and flying the starship, but they are not running the show. They don’t invent a stardrive or save the universe. They are junior members of the crew, in training, and under the command of competent adults whom they respect.

This is the key to apprenticeship literature. The young protagonists are intelligent, well trained, diligent, hard working, and extremely competent. They aren’t the boss, but they will be someday. They have ambition and confidence, but typically don’t have a lot of arrogance.

The novel Rocket Man meant more to me, but is harder to portray. I don’t remember much, just the overwhelming feeling of lust and envy at what the protagonist was getting to do. The novel has all but disappeared, even from the internet. Goodreads list it without reviews or ratings. The only thing I found to jog my memory was a 1955 Kirkus review.

             Update, November 2019: As of today, there is a review on Amazon and the Kirkus review has disappeared.

Here is what I do remember. A young man wants to be a rocket man; to this end he enrolls in the international engineering school in New Mexico. The school is a co-op; students attend classes six months, then work on rockets for six months as apprentice engineers, earning money to cover tuition. I don’t remember too much of the story but I will never forget how badly I wanted to be on that campus.

Four years later I was at Michigan State, on a scholarship but short of cash. One option for my sophomore year was to move into Hedrick House, a student owned co-op. I lived that year in a closet sized room, attended meetings to decide house business, and cooked dinner for the fifty guys who shared the place with me. Every night I went to bed with a smile on my face knowing that I was on my way, and paying my own way. And every night I remembered Rocket Man. Thanks, Mr. Stine, known to me as Lee Correy.

193. Boys at Work

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By at Wk atwI grew up in the fifties, when men were men and women were women, at least in the movies, sitcoms, books, and in the minds of the adults I knew.

Reality was a bit different, of course.

Since we didn’t have modern conveniences – for the first few years of my life we didn’t even have running water – just doing “women’s work” was a full time occupation. Still, when you are young and poor, as my parents were, you do what is needed. When we moved to what became the home farm, there were no fences. My mother and I (I was seven)  put a fifty pound roll of barbed wire onto a crowbar and walked the quarter mile south boundary unrolling it, five times repeated, while my father set fence posts, tightened the strands with a block and tackle, and stapled up the wires.

Farm women did things like that whenever it was needed, but it wasn’t considered normal. It wasn’t the way things were supposed to be. Men had their work and women had theirs and crossing over was, if not abnormal, at least out of the ordinary.

I grew up. The fifties became the sixties. When women’s lib came along, I bought in 100%, but I still don’t criticize the old ways indiscriminately. They were a part of the way people made a living. Sometimes those customs made life unnecessarily hard on women – or men – but they weren’t without a basis in need.

The division of labor was also there in the books kids read. Boys read the Hardy Boys and girls read Nancy Drew.

The Hardy Boys worked for a living; they were detectives. But it always seemed more like play, and more like fantasy than reality. Tom Swift (Jr.) was worse; ten minutes at the drawing board and he would pass the plans on to the work force of Swift Enterprises. Three weeks later his rocket ship would be done. It felt like a portrayal of work designed for kids who had never worked, and who wouldn’t notice how fake it was. Frank and Joe and Tom weren’t kids at all. They were watered down, unrealistic pseudo-adults.

I’m sure there were plenty of books about kids living kid’s lives, with kid’s concerns, while their parents stayed in the background. I certainly read enough of those books after I became a teacher, but they never crossed my path when I was young. I don’t think they would have interested me if they had.

There was another kind of book that did interest me; fascinated me, in fact. You would not go far wrong if you called it apprenticeship literature. These were stories about young guys, usually in their teens, who wanted to become men. They worked. They learned from adults who knew the jobs the youngsters wanted to learn. They were young auto mechanics, or wipers in the engine room of a steam ship, or kids who did odd jobs at the air field so they could learn how to fly, or starry eyed young rocket engineers learning their trade.

I plan to spend the rest of the week on that kind of book.

192. Billy Joe Takes a Leap

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All right, we’ve been here before and you already know how it all turns out (see 178. Leap Boy, back in the news). I’ve already explained, long before the rest of America finds out, who will win the Presidency and what will come as a result. And how do I know? I’m a science fiction writer; I have a time machine lodged between my ears.

So you know about Leap Alan Hed, born on leap day, 64 years old and claiming to be 16. What you don’t know yet is what happened in the middle of the story.

Billy Joe Barker, newsman, regular contributor to the Tulsa World was a long time Republican. He had a dalliance with liberalism during the sixties when he thought he was a hippie. He had the hair for it back then, and it’s the only part of that era he misses. By the mid-seventies he was back to a buzz cut and back to being a Republican.

Billy Joe hated Hillary, passionately. He was a Ted Cruz supporter, despite the hesitation Okies have for anything from Texas, but Cruz didn’t last. Billy Joe really tried to like Donald Trump, but he couldn’t. The last straw was watching Trump’s first interview with his new running mate Mike Pence. After that, Barker had a continuing  vision of Edgar Bergen with Charlie McCarthy on his knee. He gave up on Trump even before Cruz said, “Vote your conscience.”

Barker couldn’t begin to support Hillary, couldn’t stand the Libs and Greenies, and knew there was no hope for a third party. He was flummoxed. That’s when he decided to use the Tulsa World to push a pseudo-candidacy. He didn’t care who he ran, it was just a joke in a political season that had lost any taste of humor. He needed someone like Pat Paulsen, back when he was briefly a hippie. On the same day that he came to that conclusion, he read about Leap Alan Hed in Reader’s Digest. The article told about Leap celebrating birthdays only on years with a leap day, and about his claim to be 16 even though he was born in 1952. Billy Joe Barker had found his candidate.

First he had to locate him; that took two days. Leap had moved to Dannebrog, Nebraska, a bustling metropolis of 307 people. Wiki says 306, but that was before Leap moved in. Billy Joe called him long distance. That took a day of phone tag since Leap didn’t have a phone, and had to take the call at a neighbor’s house.

Billy Joe explained his proposition. Leap almost fell off his chair laughing. He said, “You’ve got to be out of your damned mind. The second worst part of what you want me to do is the campaigning. The worst part is, if I lie well enough, I might win. The answer is no!”

Billy wrote up his weekly column for the Tulsa World, telling the story of his aborted search for a candidate. At the end, he said, “If only crazy people run for the office of President, then Leap Alan Hed is the sanest person in America. He really doesn’t want the job.”

Beware of what you ask for. Or what you don’t ask for.

191. Nobody Won

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World War I began 102 years ago today with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and continued until November of 1918. Millions died, centuries old dynasties disappeared, countries ceased to exist, and new countries were formed. It was the Great War, the war to end all wars, but when it was over, the dance continued.

Nobody really won. But then again, no one deserved to. It was, in many ways, a continuation of wars from Napoleon onward through the Crimea, when dozens of European countries, regions or ethnic groups tried to gain dominance, or to retain dominance, or to avoid being dominated. Only the last might be considered valid. Before the final smoke of battle had cleared at the end of World War I, the seeds of World War II had sprouted and were growing strong.

Until past the middle of the nineteenth century, Germany did not exist as a modern nation. Numerous small states coalesced under pressure from Prussia into a single country – Germany – in 1871. France and Russia feared this shift in power, and formed an alliance to counteract it. Germany reacted by forming an alliance with Austro-Hungarian Empire. Italy joined Germany and Austria shortly after. Britain reacted to the change in Europe by aligning itself with old enemies France and Russia.

The assassination caused Austria-Hungary to force war on the Kingdom of Serbia. Russia intervened on Serbia’s behalf, and the dominos fell.

In America, we tend to think of Germany as the aggressor and Britain as the victim. That won’t really hold water. All the groups on the battlefield were in contention for colonies, wealth, power, and trade. Germany was newly arrived on the world stage and aggressive. Bismarck made a good cartoon villain – he is sometimes painted as a sort of proto-Hitler – and the British have always been a gentle and civilized people in their own eyes and ours. Even though Americans would never have achieved independence from Britain without the French navy, we still think of Britain as our mother country.

It isn’t.

At least it is no more the mother country to America than France, Belgium, Denmark, Ireland, Scotland (who were not part of Britain when America was colonized, and who were still at war with England thirty years before 1776), Norway, Sweden, Italy, Spain, a dozen European states that no longer exist, China, Japan, and – oh yes – Germany. And let’s not forget Africa.

During the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth century, European nations changed allies more often than hippies changed partners at a love-in. Britain had been at war with her World War I ally Russia just sixty years earlier in the Crimea, and had been at war with her World War I ally France for most of the preceding two hundred years. Who was on our side and who was on their side was mostly an accident of which decade the war broke out.

I admit to an illogical fondness for Buchan and Edwardian espionage novels, but I also know that war was largely about possessing the wealth of Africa, the Middle East, India, and the Far East. The Germans who died under English guns were as much the victims of a senseless war as the English who died under German guns.

The people of the colonies world were the victims, whether there was a war going on or not.

190. Riddle of the Sands

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Riddle of the Sands was the first British spy story, according to Eric Ambler. Over the years, it has been a favorite of lovers of old-fashioned British writing and of small boat sailors, both real and wannabe. Riddle of the Sands is fiction, but it usually get listed with such books as Falcon on the Baltic (referenced internally) or A Voyage Alone in the Yawl Rob Roy – century old books about real small boat journeys.

Don’t expect a thriller; it may say thriller on your copy’s cover, but you know how unreliable back blurbs are. If you are a fan of Bond and Bourne, you’ll fall asleep by the third page, but it is one of my all time favorite books because it is so English, in the best sense of the word.

You might get the idea from the BREXIT posts and from 188. Before the Storm that I am down on the English. Far from it. It’s just that they spent several centuries as winners on the world stage, and winners get a lot of chances to do terrible things to the losers. America has now inherited their position, along with all its moral perils.

Riddle of the Sands is the story of two Brits, Davies and Carruthers, on an extended exploration of the waters off the Netherlands and Germany a decade before World War I. It unfolds slowly, in typical old-British fashion with intimations from the first that there is more going on than appears on the surface. Carruthers finally worms the truth out of Davies, and discovers that he is convinced that Dollmann, a German yachtsman of his acquaintance, is in fact a renegade Englishman acting as a spy for the Germans. Davies fears that there is a plot afoot to do great harm to England, and he has recruited Carruthers to help him ferret it out.

The plot against England is real and the danger is imminent, and its unfolding is properly slow and logical. But the charm of the book lies elsewhere, in the day to day work of seamanship as the two try to discover Dollmann’s intentions. And they are such good chaps, in the most English sense of decency, courage, and selfless patriotism.

Dollmann’s plot is uncovered, the British authorities are warned and danger is averted. Yet, at the end of the book, the author complains that the events uncovered by Davies and Carruthers have again been forgotten, and danger is still on the horizon.

Indeed, it was.

189. World War Zero

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They called it the Great War, for its size and horror. The term World War I came later, to distinguish it from WW II, which came with even greater size and horror. Neither name is accurate. By 1914, Britain had already been waging world wars for at least 250 years.

Of course early Europeans had been fighting since the first Homo Sapiens Sapiens hit the last Neanderthal on the head with a rock. With increasing food sources, skirmishes became battles. With the rise of social organization, so that armies could stay in the field longer, battles became wars. With increasing population density, the wars could become both wide spread and long lasting, but a world war could not be fought until Europe exploded across the globe as the Age of Exploration morphed into the Age of Colonization.

Portugal began it all. Spain – including Columbus – came close behind, followed by the Dutch, French and English. Exploration led to colonization, and colonies were fought over. The Dutch were early world wide colonizers, especially in the Americas and the far East. The Anglo-Dutch wars of the 1600s were primarily fought in the North Sea, but the prize was world domination. The English won, New Amsterdam became New York, and the Dutch were left dominating the Spice Islands (basically modern Indonesia).

North America was fought over for centuries by Spain, England and France. Our French and Indian War was only one theatre in the globe spanning Seven Years War, fought by England and her allies against France and hers. That conflict involved Europe, the Americas, Africa, India, and the Philippines.

The Treaty of Paris ended the war, but not the fighting. A decade later, France was again fighting the English as allies of the newly forming United States. The three way battle between France, England and Spain continued off and on through the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon, and at every step the nations’ colonies were involved as actors or as pawns. The Louisiana Purchase, which defined America, came about because France, which had control of the territory through its control of Spain, needed to consolidate its position before engaging England, by obtaining money while getting rid of a vulnerable possession.

You should realize that I have left out innumerable wars, battles, and skirmishes to keep the size of this post in check. All this conflict was on a world wide scale, in pursuit of world wide trade. Call it World War Zero.

Needless to say, this much active history can’t pass without an accompanying literature. My personal interests are not military, but they are maritime, so I found myself caught up in the stories of “wooden ships and iron men” despite myself. I discovered Forrester’s Hornblower when I was in my twenties and read them all, several times. Hornblower is such a complex character, so full of ambition and self-doubt, that I can’t recommend him to everyone, even though he is my favorite. I would start someone new to this kind of novel with Kent’s Bolitho. He is a more normally heroic captain; I liked him quite well, but by the time I was half way through his adventures I had overdosed on the genre. Bear in mind that I had probably read all the Hornblowers three times before I discovered Bolitho, so that isn’t a criticism. For the last decade or so, O’Brian’s Aubrey and Maturin books have been widely popular. By the time they came on the scene, I had moved on, so I can only report them as hearsay.

188. Before the Storm

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On July 28, 1914, 102 years ago Thursday, World War I began.

The years just before the war were a high point in British life, at least if we judge by Masterpiece Theatre. John Buchan set his early espionage novel The Thirty-nine Steps in that era, writing it shortly after WWI had begun. The Riddle of the Sands (see this Wednesday’s post) was an actual prophesy of the coming conflict, since it was published before the war began.

After the Great War, as it was then called, Buchan and many others looked back to the pre-war era with longing. They saw it as a golden age. Perhaps; it depends on your perspective. Young men who expected to work their way up through the ranks of British society – like Buchan when he was young – saw a world of opportunity before them. Their perspective was very different from the working class poor trapped by industrialism.

It was certainly different from the millions in British colonies, toiling to keep the Empire rich, and the ruling class richer.

Victoria was dead; Victorianism wasn’t, at least on the surface. Baden-Powell had just organized the Boy Scouts. Conservatism, especially in sexual matters, was the norm – on the surface.

What was going on at gatherings in the great houses of England was often a different matter. There:

much silent and furtive corridor-creeping between one double bedroom and another took place. . . . During the day, a clandestine affair could develop unobserved . . . At night, the names written on cards slotted into brass holders on the bedroom doors were as helpful to lovers as to the maids bringing early morning tea. Assignations confirmed by . . . a whispered exchange over the candle that lit the way up the stairs . . . ensured that extra-marital sex went on with ease. . . At six in the morning a hand-bell rung on each of the bedroom floors gave guests time to return to their own beds before the early morning tea trays arrived.

That quotation is from The Perfect Summer by Juliet Nicholson. John Buchan’s world never looked like this. (Some critics suggest that it would have been better if it had.) Nicholson has clearly cherry picked among the movers and shakers, the avant-garde, the spoiled children of the rich to whom the rules didn’t apply, to find the subjects of her book. She portrays a world of arranged, often loveless, marriages with gatherings in the great houses designed to facilitate swapping partners on the sly.

Discretion was the watchword. Letting the rest of the world in on your secrets, even if they had similar secrets, could lead to social disaster. Mrs. Patrick Campbell said, “Does it really matter what these affectionate people do in the bedroom as long as they don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses?” The answer to her rhetorical question was, Yes. It mattered very much. Just ask Lady Cunnard, who was in bed with Thomas Beecham when an early morning workman on a ladder saw the two of them through a crack in her bedroom curtain. The scandal almost ruined her.

This is the atmosphere in which the ruling class of England spent the summer of 1911, while their servants scurried about facilitating their dalliances, while the working class struck for higher wages and better working conditions, while natives in tropical colonies slaved in the pitiless sun. And while Germany hungered for their own colonies in a world where the early arriving nations had already gathered them up and sucked them dry.

Their days were numbered.

187. The Rest of the Landings

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Everybody remembers Apollo 11 because it was the first, and Apollo 13 because it failed. And because they made a movie about it. There were five other moon landings.

Apollo 12 — This flight made a precision landing in the Sea of Storms, near the landing place of the Surveyor 3 unmanned probe. Pete Conrad and Alan Bean walked on the moon while Richard Gordon remained in the command module.

Apollo 13 — Once we had reached the moon with Apollo 11 and repeated with Apollo 12, public interest dropped off dramatically. The Apollo 13 flight saw reduced coverage until the explosion. In the movie, Marilyn Lovell says about the newsmen laying siege to her house, “Landing on the moon wasn’t dramatic enough for them – why should not landing on it be?” It is a fitting statement about the last half of the Apollo program.

Apollo 13 suffered a catastrophic explosion and barely got its crew back alive, without landing on the moon. Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert became part of American myth, especially after the movie Apollo 13.

Apollo 14 — Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchel piloted their lander to Fra Mauro, the planned destination of Apollo 13. Stuart Roosa was command module pilot.

Apollo 15 — Al Wordon was the command module pilot. David Scott and James Irwin landed on the moon near Hadley rille. This was the first mission to carry a lunar rover, a powered wheeled vehicle that allowed the astronauts to range further from their landing site.

Apollo 16 — Ken Mattingly – who had missed the Apollo 13 mission due to a measles scare – was command module pilot. John Young and Charles Duke landed in the lunar highlands where they collected samples that were geologically older than those brought back by previous missions. Second use of a lunar rover.

Apollo 17 — Ronald Evans was the command module pilot of the last moon mission. Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt became the last two men on the moon (so far). They carried the third lunar rover. Schmitt, a geologist, was the only scientist-astronaut to reach the moon.

Apollo 20 was cancelled so its Saturn five booster could be used to launch Skylab. Apollo 18 and 19 were cancelled by budget cuts. All this was done before the launch of Apollo 16, so Cernan, Schmitt, and Evans knew that they would be the last.

For now.

*          *           *

There is one good video of a lunar lander launching from the moon, taken during the last mission. You see a few seconds of it occasionally on PBS space specials. I also found it a this URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlGis35Epvs

This appears to be legit, although the things you can find on You-Tube are sometimes outrageously fake. The pictures were taken from a video-camera mounted on the lunar rover, remote controlled from Earth. Similar filming had been attempted on Apollo 15 and 16, without much success.

186. Apollo 11

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Apollo 11 was the first moon landing, but Apollo 13 got the movie because of the extra drama. Except for the absent landing, you probably won’t find a better picture of an Apollo mission than that film. This visuals are stunning and the portrayal of events is quite accurate.

Apollo 11, 47 years ago today, was a complete success, but it flirted with disaster twice, in two separate events, minutes apart during the landing. It was broadcast live, so everyone in America and half the rest of the world heard the crises in real time, but you would have needed to be an insider to understand them at the time. I was listening, glued to the TV screen, and I only later realized what was happening right in front of me.

The lunar lander separated from the command module as scheduled. Armstrong and Aldrin fired its rockets to slow its orbit. As it fell toward the moon, there was an alarm – a code 1202 – on the lander’s main computer. Only two men at mission control knew immediately what it meant. The mission was so complex that there were probably thousands of things only a few of those present fully understood.

The computer was overloading. Too many things were happening at once for it to handle. You need to remember the incredibly tiny capacity of 1969 computers. It could not keep up with events, the queue was getting long, so the alarm sounded. Steve Bales recognized that the computer was still doing everything it needed to do, that it would clear the queue in a few seconds, and said GO when most of those present were thinking ABORT. The mission continued, the computer worked through the queue, and then the alarm went off again. Bales said GO. A third time the computer overloaded and Bales shouted GO for the third time just as the lander was approaching touchdown.

The problems weren’t over. The lander had overshot its target and Armstrong found himself over a massive boulder field. There was nowhere to land.

An abort would have meant firing off the upper stage rocket and returning to the command module, allowing the now nearly empty lower section to crash to the moon, and missing the landing. Instead, Armstrong chose to adjust his rate of fall to a near hoover, tilt the entire lander – now top heavy and prone to flipping – to slide sideways and, just as the last of the fuel was nearly gone, reach a clear area where he set the lander down on the lunar surface.

On Earth, we had all been holding our breaths. We just didn’t realize how much reason we had had to worry.