Category: Writing

January has been good for my writing. I organized an approach and it served to reduce stress. I’m better able to sit down, write, and feel like I accomplished something.

I eliminated a daily targeted number of written words. I mean, there is no deadline. It would be great to finish the book so I could begin the next project, yet I’m in no hurry. I want to be true to myself, not to an artificial writing goal.

Instead of a specific daily goal, I make sure to do something related to the project each day. Some days it’s hours, and some days it is minutes. I feel I have a grip on what was an unmanageable project.

I stopped writing and that enabled me to write. It’s the way a lifeguard overpowers a drowning victim to save them. I stopped writing and organized. First I developed a chapter list, or as I call it, the “big sections” list. There are 31 sections and seven appendices. I typed them all in a new document and as I find previously written sections or write new ones I hang them on the framework. The same with fragments located in folders or audio tapes of interviews. It is less hodgepodge than the way I wrote last year. Last year’s work can be plugged into the new framework and rewritten. The whole thing works.

The writing divides into some clean big parts. After the dedication and preface there are five sections where I combined my personal experience with whatever artifacts I could locate or had in my collection. These sections involved historical research and probing my memory. The working titles are Minnesota, Illinois, Virginia, Davenport and 1951.

The next part is written mostly from memory beginning with my earliest ones in the duplex where my parents brought me after being born. We lived there and three subsequent places before Father died and I left home. I don’t have much documentary evidence from these times: report cards, a few letters written to parents, and a small folder of school papers. The 1960s were the beginning of an explosion of home photography, so I have albums and extra photos from that time. I also scanned copies of Mother’s photographs before she died. While documentation is scant, there is plenty to prompt memories. I find it remarkable the detail with which I remember things long hidden in my brain. The working titles of these sections are Madison Street, Starting School, and Marquette Street. I’m a few thousand words into the latter and have to get through grade school, high school, music, work experiences, and leaving for college. This section ends with the Kickapoo Creek Rock Festival I attended with high school classmates the day after graduation.

The next sections are better documented. Leaving Home is about my conversations with my parents about going to university, and after Father died, about whether I should give up college to stay in Davenport and help Mother. I have many letters received from friends, university papers, photographs and newspaper clippings. There are also a few pieces of ceramics I made, some musical instruments, and memories of my time at the University of Iowa. I began writing a personal journal after graduation from university. This section also includes my 12-week tour of Europe in the Fall of 1974, and the year I spent in Davenport afterward.

There is a gap in recent writing during the period when I left for military service, returned to Davenport, and then moved to Iowa City for graduate school. That takes the narrative through four sections titled, Military Service, Homecoming, Iowa City and Graduate School. By this time, I was a regular journal writer and had published a small number of pieces, including travelogues for the Belgian Society in the Quad Cities. I was still taking photographs with film cameras, I had begun to write letters to the editors of newspapers. This section ends with the job search to find something to enable me to stay in Iowa City after graduate school.

A good part of the next section was drafted last year. It takes us from finding a job at the university, our marriage, beginning a career in transportation, the birth of our daughter, and moving to Cedar Rapids, then to Indiana. These sections are titled My Spouse & Me – 1982, Career, A Daughter – 1985, and In the Calumet (1988). By now I’d developed an extensive document collection method producing financial records, photographs, journals, letters, and all the raw material to turn into something. These were years before we adopted email or owned a home computer other than a word processor. When I worked at the oil company, I was introduced to email around 1990.

The final big section is of our return to Big Grove Township in 1993, where we currently live. Because this section has the most documentary resources, I saved it to write last. There are currently 11 sections and the organization and titles of them is fluid. No point writing them down because they are sure to change. I lived here longer than any other place, more than twice as long as I lived on Marquette Street with my family.

The difference this change in organization and methodology made is I have a sense of purpose when I’m writing. When I write something, I know where it goes, or whether it goes. I started a complete rewrite from the beginning and am now on section 10 of 31. It lets me know where I am. I can sleep at night knowing I won’t lose the thread.

January was a good month for my writing.

While revisiting my life history I’ve been increasingly aware of what doesn’t get said between family and among friends. In particular, a gap in the narrative exists on Father’s side of the family when it comes to the legacy of human enslavement.

I intend to use the 1927 Pound Gap, Virginia lynching of Leonard Woods as the coda to the autobiography. I have a photograph my spouse took of me standing in front of a Welcome to Virginia highway sign not far from where Woods was lynched, and a memorial of the event was erected in 2021. At the time of the photo, I did not know that history.

Below are two paragraphs I wrote Wednesday as an example of an approach to the section. Slavery was almost never discussed among family.

In 1860, the last year the U.S. Census counted enslaved African Americans, a third of the population of Virginia was enslaved. In Wise County, 66 enslaved persons were counted along with 4,416 white ones. Family lore does not include much about slavery. We note that Thomas Jefferson Addington, my paternal grandmother’s paternal grandfather, served in the army of the Confederate States of America during the Civil War. Family lore is men from Wise County served in both the Confederate and Union armies. There is no discussion of Thomas Jefferson Addington’s military service in his entry in The Stallard Connection, a thick family history tracing parts of our line back to the 17th Century. There is a Salyer – Lee Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy in Wise County. I have family photographs of Father playing with some of the Salyer girls when they lived in Glamorgan. They attended school together. During the two trips I made to Wise County, I don’t recall seeing any African Americans or even once discussing slavery. There must be more to the story, although it may be lost in history.

Leonard Woods, a 30-year-old black coal miner, lived in Jenkins, Kentucky, the same town where Uncle Melvin and Aunt Carrie operated a bakery. He was accused of murdering a white coal mine foreman named Herschel Deaton (no relation). On Nov. 30, 1927, a mob broke Woods out of the Whitesburg, Kentucky jail and took him to Pound Gap, Virginia, where they hanged him and shot his corpse many times. Accounts vary, yet when the mob arrived with Woods around 3 a.m., the crowd numbered 1,000 to 1,500 people, in some 500 cars. Members of the sheriff’s office who were present failed to note any of the vehicle license plates. It is difficult to believe members of my family did not know of this history or participate in it. It never came up.

Draft autobiography by Paul Deaton, Feb. 2, 2022.

I don’t know if it fits, yet I feel I should make it fit. Avoidance of the legacy of human enslavement is as American as apple pie. The sweetness is of short duration.

The history of Davenport, Iowa was largely absent from my upbringing. I was born there, yet nothing. There was no Iowa history curriculum in K-12 schools, nor at university. The first biography of George Davenport, one of the city’s founders and its namesake, was not published until May 21, 2020.

I left Davenport for university in 1970 and haven’t missed learning the history. I am revisiting it now that I’m writing my autobiography.

The Trader at Rock Island: George Davenport and the Founding of the Quad Cities by Regena Trant Schantz is a serviceable biography which reflects detailed research into the history of the region. Schantz obviously reviewed documentary records, physical artifacts, and sites. It adequately tells the story of early traders, mineral extraction, land speculation, river culture, and the relations with Black Hawk and other indigenous tribal leaders from the perspective on one of history’s most prominent participants. Because of my education, this history matters little in my outlook toward my home town.

By the time my awareness came of age, the city was in a post-World War II economic boom. Depending upon how one reckons economic history, this was preceded by the trader days, land speculation, the surge in lumber milling after 1850 (as Wisconsin and Minnesota forests were clear cut and rafted down river without replanting), and the rise in farming after the Black Hawk War finished in 1832. Some of my spouse’s family were among the early Iowa settlers after the war. A tide of immigration to Iowa started by the 1840s. With the removal of indigenous tribes and native forests, along with ripping up and plowing the prairie, the landscape in which I found myself was already in existence. There was little reason to think about the early days of settlement.

By the time Mother graduated high school in 1947, the city was ready for the post-World War II boom. Settlement had grown far beyond the initial lots surveyed in the 1830s. The house in which we lived while I was in high school was built in 1910, well above the antediluvian banks of the river. There was infrastructure, a bus route, medical facilities, a wide range of churches, and corner grocery stores waiting to get displaced by supermarkets. Many large manufacturing and food processing companies existed. A person could go their whole life without knowing about the exploits of George Davenport, Antoine LeClaire and other traders turned land speculators during the time before the initial plat was laid out.

What does my writing owe to the history of the city of my birth? Not much, I reckon. It served as a landing place for ancestors displaced from other states. Grandmother arrived with children in tow during World War II. My paternal grandfather arrived after the war and didn’t live much longer.

I plan to tell the story of the initial lot sales, the lumber boom, and development of industry. I suppose that’s needed to set context. Besides the meat packing plant where my father, grandmother and I worked, I don’t have many connections to the old days. Most of our early family stories are derived from immigrant experience in Minnesota and Illinois on Mother’s side, along with Father’s ancestry in Southwestern Virginia and nearby Kentucky.

The biography of George Davenport is engaging, and of interest as an alternative to many stories of settlement in the Tidewater and New England. The Louisiana Purchase is often discussed, yet what happened locally is not. I tip my hat to the work of traders, land speculators and developers yet realize that is not my history.

I am from there, yet not of there.

A Twitch-TV streamer played Minecraft in the background as I worked on daily rushes about… coal mining. From there I descended into the mines, at least figuratively, for several hours.

My maternal grandfather mined coal in Bureau and LaSalle Counties in Illinois for at least 30 years that we know. Besides family lore and my interactions with him while young, I knew little about this aspect of his life. He was the guy from Illinois, no longer married to Grandmother, who gave me a handful of pennies each time he visited. Coal mining was a much bigger deal than I thought in the basin of the Illinois River in Central Illinois.

The Saint Paul Coal Company operated the Cherry mine in Bureau County, one of the places Grandfather worked. The company was established in Illinois in 1902 and owned two mine properties in 1909, the year of the Cherry Mine disaster in which 259 men and boys died. The mine operated on 7,217 acres of land, producing about 300,000 tons of coal annually with a daily capacity of 1,500 tons.

Because of the mining disaster, a significant amount of documentation exists, including the 96-page report on the disaster from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. At this writing, the Cherry Mine disaster remains the third most deadly in American coal mining history. Grandfather first showed up as a miner on the 1910 U.S. Census in LaSalle County, old enough to have worked at the Cherry Mine during that period.

Rushes are the first draft of a section of my book. My process is to take a topic, typically a couple of paragraphs, and write rushes which will be heavily edited before being added to the draft of my autobiography. It gives me a chance to refine what I want to say without mucking up the main draft of my work. So far the process has served.

I decided the chapter about my maternal grandparents’ early days needed historical background. In a couple of ways, the mining history of LaSalle and Bureau Counties depicts a similar lure of wage work that attracted many European immigrants to the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This includes my maternal great, great grandfather, who mined coal in Allegheny, Pennsylvania after arriving from partitioned Poland in the 1880s. My paternal grandfather mined coal in the early 20th Century in Southwestern Virginia, although his ancestors were well established in the United States by then.

I found a history of Saint Hyacinth’s Church in LaSalle, written on the occasion of their diamond jubilee in 1950. Established in 1875 by a community of mostly Polish and German immigrants, it is named for the saint, a Polish Dominican priest and missionary who worked to reform women’s monasteries in his native Poland in the 13th Century. The Polish exclamation Święty Jacku z pierogami! (“St. Hyacinth and his pierogi!”) is an old-time saying, a call for help in some hopeless circumstance. Pierogi was a constant topic of discussion during family visits to our relatives in LaSalle. It likely remains available there. According to family lore recorded on Ancestry.com, My great grandparents contributed to establishment of the Saint Hyacinth cemetery where they and Grandfather are buried.

I started the day’s research late morning and the next thing I knew, it was time to start dinner. It wanted pierogi, yet we had to settle for enchiladas. I’m not finished with this topic yet.

It was a good week for my autobiography.

I made steady progress on re-writing the first four chapters. The time was about ten to one editing over writing. The most difficult challenge is getting the narrative right so it is honest and understandable. I located key documents I’d forgotten. I also created one empty banker’s box. That last part is particularly rewarding for a retiree with too much stuff.

There was a file with old resumes in it, including a Statement of Personal History (DD Form 398) I completed in 1982 or 1983. It includes every job I held and every address I had from birth. That will be useful in creating a time line. A quick glance revealed a number of inaccuracies. I know more now about my life than I did when I was living it, which seems normal.

Importantly, I located the family history documents Mother provided about my paternal line. It is a set of genealogy forms with a lot of information completed. This makes the process easier. Like with every documentation, there are some mistakes and omissions. I can fill in the blanks if I choose. I debate whether to tamper with the originals and have thus far mostly left them as is.

In 1983, we made a long automobile trip from Iowa City to Saint Louis; Evansville, Indiana; Wise County, Virginia; and then to Philadelphia to visit friends and relatives. It was a sort of second wedding trip after our first one to Chicago in December 1982. I located my journal entries from the trip, in which I recorded the interaction with my Uncle Gene when he traveled from Florida to Wise County to be with us. He explained his family life in and around Glamorgan, Virginia where he and Father were born. The journal will help. I may quote most of it directly as it tells the story as well as anything I could write now.

Uncle Gene also took us to some of the home places, including a parcel of land described as “lying and being in Wise County, Virginia on the waters of Guests River in the Rocky Fork section of the Gladewell Magisterial District.” This property, called Rocky Fork by family, goes way back. We explored it during the visit.

I spent considerable time thinking about the 1920s and 1930s this week. I’m reading a book called Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women by Kate Moore. It recounts the history of use of the element radium in manufacturing consumer goods, and the impact of radioactivity on workers. The radium girls literally glowed from toxic radium contamination.

Part of the Radium Girls narrative presents the history of The Radium Dial Company, founded in 1917 in Ottawa, LaSalle County, Illinois. It supported what became the Western Clock Company in 1919, featuring the Westclox brand. Radium Dial Company made watch dials painted by hand with radium so they would glow in the dark. The Westclox manufacturing plant was in Peru, LaSalle County, Illinois.

In the book there are two references to Starved Rock, which is where my maternal grandmother worked when she arrived in LaSalle County from Minnesota about 1925. It was a place for group outings for the radium girls and others. I hadn’t considered the broader context of LaSalle County in my autobiography, but now I am. Reading this book was a breakthrough.

As Moore points out, not everyone had automobiles at that time. Likewise, there was radio but no television. People mainly got news from each other, and from newspapers. For a historian, newspapers make it relatively easy to follow coverage of major stories like the one of the court cases of the radium girls.

This led me to think about how I gather news.

We need news, especially during the coronavirus pandemic, yet always. First priority is news about key family members, which is mostly sourced from networks of family and friends. After that, we seek news about what could impact our daily lives. How we gather news changed since the 1920s and during my lifetime. It will likely continue to change.

Our family tuned the television to watch the Huntley-Brinkley Report for news during my formative years. With theme music from the second movement of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, it had a weighty feel. News stories were told in direct, clear language. It catered to what passed for adults back then. It went off the air the summer after I graduated high school.

We subscribed to local Davenport newspapers, the Times-Democrat and the Catholic Messenger. In eighth grade we had a project to read and clip newspaper articles into a scrapbook. I got an A on the project. I was a paperboy who delivered the Times-Democrat in our neighborhood yet hardly read it except for a school project.

In graduate school we watched KWWL-TV news when we had a chance. They had opened a news bureau in Cedar Rapids which featured a recent college graduate, Liz Mathis. Mathis is currently running for Congress. I can’t recall when I stopped watching television news. It was long ago.

Today the day begins reading newspapers. I subscribe to online editions of the Washington Post, Cedar Rapids Gazette, Iowa City Press Citizen, and Solon Economist. Each of them informs me from a different part of the community. I’m a member of Practical Farmers of Iowa, the Arms Control Association, and the Climate Reality Project. Each of these sources provides specialized news. I subscribe to the governor’s press releases, to the county supervisors and public health news releases, and to a number of political office holder newsletters, including people who represent me in the Iowa legislature and the Congress. Lastly, I follow news reporters on Twitter. One exercises caution in picking them. I read their biographies and some of their work before following. There are a lot of great people writing relevant news stories about contemporary society if one is lucky enough to find them.

I had a good writing week and felt like sharing. Thanks for reading.

Starting an autobiography is easy. Finishing it… is something else.

I began my autobiography a dozen times over a period of decades, and each time it found no conclusion. Last year, while making substantial progress, I had an epiphany. I had no idea what the process should be. I start 2022 with a work plan to remedy that.

Process became a collection of things.

At first I sat and wrote about whatever came to mind, about 150,000 words in 2021. I merged this writing into a single document (with multiple backups). After all that writing, I determined another, better method was needed to write. Too much of the blogger in me was coming out in my daily writing.

I had to get a better plan written down. I began with 3 x 5 inch index cards in a rough outline of topics, one per card. I made a Word document with a more detailed outline. It included most of what was on the cards and more. Finally, after a year of writing, I wrote a Word document called “big sections” which is a list of the chapter headings. I printed it out and placed it on my white board. The big sections will change going forward, yet I developed a way to add topics as the meaning of them was discovered or developed. It took last year’s writing experience to sort out what I would include in the finished product in the form of chapter headings.

As written on Dec. 16, 2021, I made a shelf of three-ring binders to contain my rough draft. I set aside my 2021 draft document and began a new rough draft which I expect to print and place in the binders. The binders have become a storage place for documents and writing I find along the way. As I write the 2022 draft, documents in the binders will be used as reference. I expect the number of binders to increase as writing proceeds, with the printed draft in front of each chapter heading and source documents behind it.

A main challenge is to follow Robert Caro’s advice to turn every page. At present I don’t know where all those pages reside. I organized my collection of personal journals beginning with school work in 1966. I have a shelf of books which contains my blog writing since 2007. I also placed the letters written to Mother from her estate in three-ring binders. There is a significant trove of emails in electronic form dating to 1999. In a pile on a table are stacks of clippings of opinion pieces, letters written to the editor, and articles I wrote as a freelance journalist. These documents alone are a lot.

What is more challenging is the many boxes of documents and artifacts stored throughout the house. I haven’t counted, yet there are scores of them. They settled in beginning when we moved here in 1993, and I can’t say what is in them with specificity. The way they exist is not in usable form, so I’ll have to open and go through them.

I developed a discovery process to interface with source material. The idea is to methodically go through everything to decide whether it goes in the autobiography, will be stored elsewhere, or discarded. If a particular container is useful to the autobiography, I’ll write about what is in it.

The format will be what I call “rushes,” a name taken from daily rushes in the film days of motion picture making. I’ll encounter an artifact and if applicable, will write a rush, and then edit and place the rushes into the main autobiographical document. I’ve been writing rushes since the beginning of last year. This formalizes what I’ve already been doing.

Along the way, I will edit the main draft of the autobiography for continuity, grammar, spelling, and better word choices. Once the whole document is done, and I’ve examined all the artifacts, true editing will begin. This will lead to eventual publication of the work in an undetermined format, although it likely will be both on paper and in electronic format.

The first year of writing my autobiography felt productive. What I learned makes me optimistic about progress this year. I don’t know if I’ll finish the first draft this year. I know it will be better than the draft I produced in 2021. There is clarity about process, better than there was. Like any process, it will be subject to improvement as I write and learn.