Folks may not recall Mary Martin and Theodore Bikel starred in the Rodgers and Hammerstein Broadway musical, The Sound of Music, which opened on Nov. 16, 1959.
Maria Von Trapp published her memoir of 1938 before the Anschluss in 1949. It was immediately recognized as having commercial potential and two German films were made of the story, The Trapp Family (1956) and Die Trapp-Familie in Amerika (1958). While the Broadway production began without music, it was the songs, many of which have become standards, that engaged people. The play won five Tony awards in 1960, including best musical.
The Sisters of Mercy in my grade school had become enamored of music from the play, from the beginning. We performed several of the songs at the former Jackson School when I was in sixth grade. I had never seen nuns so enthusiastic about anything before. When the film version came out, it was a sensation among nuns, grandmothers, and parents who had lived through World War II.
The film starred a 20-year-old Julie Andrews as Maria and Christopher Plummer as Captain Von Trapp. It opened on March 2, 1965. My grandmother had heard about the movie, and in a rare instance took us all to see it at the Coronet Theater on Harrison Street in Davenport. She insisted on paying. The music of the play, and the character Maria spoke to her. The Coronet had been remodeled that year and the Sound of Music ran for over a year.
In school we sang and played the many recognizable songs repeatedly. The whole thing was a phenomenon for us Catholic school children.
There were other plays and films that came from the World War II experience, yet nothing like the Sound of Music.
I broke through 65,000 words on the current draft this week. What’s different this time is completion of the narrative from the beginning through 1970 without breaks in the text. It actually reads like a story.
There is a lot of editing to do. There is nothing to edit unless words get on paper. The writing went well and about a third of the main text has been drafted.
Once I established the process and got going, the words flowed. The section just finished, about where I lived with my family for the final eleven years, is by far the longest. I compressed many potential stories into fewer to make the key points of the autobiography. I wrote smaller inserted parts to set up some of the major themes.
I’m interested in dealing with a couple of themes.
When I was injured and hospitalized at a young age, I learned how interdependent we are in society. It helped me realize how much besides myself is going on. Learning about and leveraging our interdependence has been a part of my life for a long time. My outlook is what I call Cartesian, and I’ve written about that before. Is there anyone else out there? In the context of my hospitalization, the answer is definitely yes, and they can be helpful. We also have an obligation to give back.
My early experiences discussing ethnicity with Father led me to believe I was “American,” whatever that was. What I came to know through life experiences and research is there is a gaping hole in the oral history or what I’ve been calling “family lore.” My focus has been on the coal mining culture. Yet there were enslaved humans in Wise County, Virginia where the family came up, and a climate of racism that was never mentioned among family. The way I learned about Virginia and the Civil War, the enslavement of humans, post-Civil War racism, and the rosy portrait of Robert E. Lee and other southerners in school books, was problematic. Today I recognize being born into white privilege. How I came to that awareness is a major theme.
Lastly, in the first part of the narrative is a discussion of losing Father in an industrial accident when I was age 17. That affected my decision to leave home to attend university. It shaped my life ever since. Having a father and then suddenly not, was traumatic. There were no guideposts on how to handle it. Tracking the change and how I learned to cope is another theme.
What is new to me as a long-form writer is how setting these themes in the narrative is done. Simply put, I had no idea before now. Now that I am figuring it out, and as I do, the pace is snowballing. After writing thousands of blog posts, the challenge of writing in longer form is a voyage of discovery. I’m liking what I see.
It looks like it will be cold again this week, and a chance to stay indoors to write. The pace of social engagements is picking up and somehow I need to blend everything in and stay the course to finishing the main part of the narrative this year.
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.
1860 U.S. Census map with number of white and enslaved Virginians by county.
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.
Detail of the Antoine LeClaire grave marker at Mount Calvary Cemetery, Davenport, Iowa. Photo by the author.
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.
Bread made from a mixture of regular organic all purpose flour and flour of an indeterminate kind.
The coronavirus pandemic persists toward the end of its second year.
Mostly, I stayed home in January. I made five retail store visits: two to the wholesale club, one to a supermarket, one to the orchard, and another to the home, farm and auto supply store. I picked up milk at the convenience store twice when grocery store trips became too infrequent. Only so many jugs of milk fit in the refrigerator at a time.
Snow covered the ground for much of the month so I moved exercise indoors. I don’t want to risk turning an ankle on the snow pack during walkabout, or slip and fall on an ice patch. The trip to the mailbox and weekly delivery of trash and recycling bins to the end of the driveway became my main regular outings. Using sand collected from the road during previous years, I heavily sanded the ice patch where the concrete meets the gravel.
Other outdoors activities included pruning fruit trees and emptying the compost bucket. Compared to normal times, outdoors activities slowed.
Indoors, I have been cooking more and reading a lot. I finished nine books in January. I’ve been making steady progress on the autobiography. We are using up food preserved in the pantry, freezer and refrigerator.
In my quest to make a weekend, I’ve been thinking of the loaf of bread I baked Saturday. Setting aside some Saturday time for baking would be a positive, potentially recurring thing. It would also enable me to use up some of the older flour sitting in cupboard containers.
I found two containers of mystery flour. At first I thought it was whole wheat. After tasting them, I’m not sure. Mixed half and half with all purpose flour, whatever it is made a grainy loaf that was risen, yet somewhat dense. It was great for making finger sandwiches with mustard and cheese from the refrigerator for afternoon snack.
I started onions and shallots and they are doing well. In early February I plan to start cruciferous vegetables. Inch by inch the garden is beginning to grow. Outside, deer are beating a path between the plots. They are coming from the 25-acre woods and heading west to parts unknown, likely the wooded area west of our subdivision. The fencing hopefully discourages them from stopping to see what I’m growing during the gardening season. There is not much edible out there now.
Debt was incurred in January. On a fixed income, I use a credit card to handle spikes in expenses. There were one-time expenses: subscription to the Washington Post, biannual servicing of the John Deere, and printing an annual blog book. There were increases across the board on recurring expenses: the monthly escrow amount, gas, electricity, broadband, and health insurance. The debt is manageable and it won’t take long to pay down if there are no February surprises.
Noteworthy is the sense of being alone when my spouse is sleeping or busy working on a project. Since I can remember I’ve been active in society. I wrote a friend,
I’m leery of volunteering with the COVID-19 surge and all. I would like to volunteer doing something once I feel more comfortable being out in the world.
Just turned 70 years old last month, so there is a lot of living left to do.
Editor’s Note: Apologies to those who read this in 2016 or previous times I posted it. I continue to return to these paragraphs because the pandemic has driven me to seek ways to return to normalcy. One of them is by creating a weekend. It’s French!
A benefit of an American lifestyle is having the occasional weekend off.
Yet the weekend is more French than American – le weekend!
In June 1977, over two weekends, I was in France with the French military. Those days imprinted the meaning of “weekend” on me.
My guide for the exchange officer experience was an infantry marine platoon commander stationed at Vannes. The unit was on alert to deploy to Djibouti, which had recently declared its independence from France. If there was trouble in the transition, my unit would head there.
Upon arrival at the train station Friday afternoon, my escort took me straight to the officer’s club. I drank too many pastis before attending a reception in my honor. No one told me about the reception until several pastis had passed my lips. The non-commissioned officers lined up one aperitif after another in front of me with glee. Too drunk to be embarrassed, when someone mentioned the reception, I decided to leave the remaining drinks on the table, sober up, and listen and learn about the culture.
I practiced my French and mustered a dim comment about the Concorde, which was still new, at the reception. Because of the alcohol it was the best I could do. I’m not sure I made a positive impression.
In homes and apartments in which I lived, I did as French people did. Weekends continue to be French in Big Grove, although with much less alcohol and no drunkenness. God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world.
I heard about the Library of Congress partnership with Twitter to archive all of Twitter, past, present and future since its launch in 2006. I hadn’t heard the project went bust with insufficient funding in 2017. Too many tweets, one presumes.
Should we care? We should, but not because there is profound knowledge on Twitter.
Yes, noted scholars create multi-tweet threads with reasoned arguments, citations, and links to references. Yet what role does that play in advancing learning? The potential audience seems limited on Twitter. Wouldn’t the same argument inform more effectively in a newspaper, blog, or scholarly journal? It would be more targeted, for sure. Such targeting would garner better impact on learning than the transitory ephemera of Twitter..
News writers use tweets as a source of quotations from prominent people. A quote is a quote, I guess. It’s easy, which prompts the related sentence, “they are lazy.” What point are they making? Why not get an actual quote from a news maker? I know the answer: access is easier on Twitter. Definition of the word “access” is peculiar here.
With hundreds of millions of tweets per day, who could read all of that to glean valuable content? Some form of artificial intelligence or tweet-bot, maybe. Not a human. I can’t think of who would want to review all of that. I hardly look at my own tweets from yesterday, let alone something I posted in 2008. There are three hundred million or more tweets per day.
If a user considers their universe in Twitter, a time line can be carefully curated. It is only within this curation that any of it has much meaning. Archiving Twitter would seem to preserve little of that personal vantage point. Tweets are a fungible commodity only to the extent an individual user loses their individuality. We Americans resist that.
The role for libraries and archives with regard to Twitter and other social media platforms is to push governments to define better laws regarding collection, archiving, and ownership of our posting. As the example of Cambridge Analytica during the recent presidential election illustrates, there were few rules about scraping the internet to collect detailed voter information and using the aggregated data to influence the election. At what point does that become an illegal invasion of privacy? The answer hasn’t been defined and doing so falls in the wheelhouse of people who spend their lives compiling archives of information and documents.
When we examine the history of libraries and archives, my bet is as much that was important has been lost as was saved. I think of the Protestant Reformation and its raiding of libraries and archives to destroy the physical records of the Catholic Church. There are plenty of other examples. Regarding Twitter, if the Library of Congress can’t preserve it, then who can and to what end?
With planetary warming, we may not have to trouble ourselves with these questions for much longer. If archives exist to tell the story of humanity’s demise to beings living multiple millennia from now, there is no point. Like us, I doubt future such beings will be much interested in those billions of tweets.
Detail of the USGS quadrant map for coal mining in Bureau/LaSalle County, Illinois. There were three coal seams in the Cherry mine, the deepest at 485 feet.
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.
The place where I write is surrounded with books. There are more books in the next room, in boxes and piled on tables. There are shelves of books in the garage. There are documents going back to the 1950s. There are also boxes of artifacts. What is all this stuff?
To call it a library is not quite accurate. It is a collection of things, yet only in the loosest sense of the word. I set up my desk when we moved in, the same place it is today, before electricity was connected to the structure. Things collected here the way flotsam washes to shore. There is little agency in the word “collection” as applied to my place.
“Archives” doesn’t get it right either. In a corner is a tree trunk from the pine tree that grew outside my window during the 1960s. On top of it I pile each bill as it comes in and is paid. The stack of papers is 16 inches tall. When someone wants a document, I say it is filed on the stump. A stump is not a filing system, they say. I don’t argue the point.
As a newly minted septuagenarian I’m concerned with a couple of things.
When I die, I want people to be able to find relevant things, such as my will, whether I paid the last electricity bill, the title to the automobile, and a list of my computer passwords: an archive of the exigency of now. This is a given, it exists, and can be improved upon.
There are too many books to read or to pass on to someone else to sort through. A sorting has begun. A library is a place to find something specific. As needs change, so should the contents. Getting rid of many books and papers is common courtesy to my survivors. I try to be courteous. It is difficult to find things if I’ve forgotten what I have. This can be a problem when considering what I leave behind.
Mainly I want quick access to books and papers I need for my writing. Egads! I’m not there and time’s a wasting! Archival materials would describe this if I had taken time to archive everything, which I have not. I’d like to get the collection to a manageable size, one that would fit in a single room. Once I get there I may call it a home library and be justified in doing so. For the time being, it is what it is and the word “library” is not an accurate fit.
It is a place to work. A place of my own. That will have to suffice for now.
Journey Home 
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