Prairie Hill – New Profile on BookGoodies.com

21 Apr 2013 2 Comments

by Fred Burwell in Peregrinations, Prairie Hill Tags: , , , , ,

Hello everyone,

My novel, Prairie Hill, is featured on the BookGoodies.com website here: Prairie Hill Profile

Along with information about the novel, I answered a few questions about writing, including the perennial, “What advice would you give aspiring writers?” Below, find my answer, although I know that I could write (and talk) at much greater length about this topic!

Read for pleasure and read as a writer. I’ve learned so much from reading widely, discovering what I like, what I don’t like, figuring out what works, what doesn’t work. and why.

I’ve spent a lot of time writing in notebooks (and on the computer). I have a long-time diary/journal which serves many purposes, but especially as a way of learning how to write. The journal helps me capture the life around me, gives me the opportunity to think about and ponder people, play with dialogue, experiment with description, tell the story of a given day or event. I also have more topical notebooks – dreams, memories, and “people,” and I carry a pocket notebook wherever I go. That concentrated, but informal writing – not intended for publication – resembles sketches for a painter, practice for a musician, rehearsal for an actor. It all pays off by making you a much better writer. Each writer, though, must find his or her own path and best methods.

For my earlier thoughts on the writing process and more, see my “self-interview on BookGoodies.com here: BookGoodies Interview

Thank you for taking a look.

Thoughts on Writing – New “Self-interview” on BookGoodies.com

24 Mar 2013 2 Comments

by Fred Burwell in Peregrinations, Prairie Hill Tags: , , , ,

I recently filled out a “self-interview” on the BookGoodies.com website. Click on this link BookGoodies Interview to check out some of my thoughts on the writing process, writing advice, publishing, and about my novel, Prairie Hill

Here is a sample:

What inspires you to write?

I can’t really imagine not writing. When I was a little kid I adored listening to my father and grandmother tell amusing tales and I loved their reading bedtime stories to me. I began reading as soon as I could and then my teachers complained that I would get lost in books. I found diary/journal writing a wonderful way of capturing the world around me, slowing it down, allowing me to ponder and try to understand. I began to write fiction in my teens, at first autobiographically, but after a time using my imagination more and more. Editing literary magazines taught me so much about writing. My son, who constantly craved “pretend stories” on our walks together, inspired me. Now, my journal is ever more narrative and I dream stories. I feel happiest when writing. There is nothing I like better to do.

Prairie Hill – a prequel short story

08 Jul 2012 3 Comments

by Fred Burwell in Peregrinations, Prairie Hill Tags: , , , ,

My novel, Prairie Hill, has its origins in a short story first published in Fan, a baseball literary magazine, in 1992. Although “Jimmy Lathrop” is not an autobiographical tale, the setting and atmosphere come from my own experiences playing high school baseball in the late 1970’s. No doubt the strangest game I ever played took place against a reform school run by monks. We wore old-fashioned flannel uniforms, but the reform school team donned tattered uniforms dating from the 1950’s. Their baseball diamond featured an outfield that no one had mowed yet and a rocky infield with ruts and pits, a non-existent pitcher’s mound and a rusty chain-link backstop.

After publishing “Jimmy Lathrop,” I kept thinking about the central character and I began to take notes about his life, sketching out a character study, meeting his family members, exploring his world. A few years later I passed through a quiet, dusty small town in Wisconsin. Looking out the window, I spotted a forlorn-looking black and white Holstein cow, waving to passersby, inviting them to stop at a local inn for the “best burgers in town.” The image stayed with me and, in time, came together with the mysterious Jimmy Lathrop, only he wore a chicken costume instead…

My brother Jeremy graciously rummaged through my mother’s meticulously kept photograph albums and scanned a few photos of me in my ball playing days, used here to illustrate “Jimmy Lathrop.” As an avid collector since the age of six, I took the opportunity to try out some of my favorite baseball card poses!

Jimmy Lathrop

Pulvey parked on a dirt lot next to a couple of baseball fields. Behind a thin line of trees and up on a hill, I saw a huge, gothic stone building with slate-shingled turrets.

“Come on guys! Get a move on!” yelled Pulvey. “Let’s warm up. The other team ain’t here yet.”

We shook out our travel-weary legs and trotted past the rusted chain link backstop and onto the lifeless ball field. I shagged some fly balls out in right, but grounders were hopeless. The grass grew above my ankles.

“This place sucks!” shouted Snitzer in center, when a grounder stopped short ten feet in front of him.

“Shut up, Bump,” came Pulvey’s voice from home plate. His words, and the next ball he swatted, died with the wind that kicked up dust and candy bar wrappers.

The sun had snuck behind clouds when the St. Boniface team filed down the hill to the filed, followed by a monk in a brown robe. We Emory Friends Schoolers crowded onto a bench, and watched them play pepper. Their ratty flannel uniforms were too big or too small, depending on the player. They seemed unfriendly…and strangely silent.

Pulvey walked over to the monk and said, “I’m Coach Pulvermacher,” and held out his hand. The monk ignored it. “We will play seven innings,” was all he said. They exchanged lineup cards.

Bump nudged me as their pitcher took the mound and fired some in. “Look at this dude. He probably shaved when he was ten.”

The St. Boniface pitcher was well over six feet and dark-faced, pockmarked. He threw one hard that got past the catcher and lodged in the backstop. “Be glad that’s not your baby face,” said Butterfield, our second baseman.

The umpire, whose blue shirt strained over his immense belly, shouted “Play ball!” I was the first batter up and stepped into the box. I felt the sweaty presence of the catcher next to me, and behind the cage, the monk. I nearly fell on my butt when he growled, “Hum it in there, Jimmy!” The first pitch was a called strike. The monk kept up a steady patter, “He’s no hitter; Swing! batter batter Swing! You got a strikeout Jimmy, hum it.” I swung hard at the next pitch, which hit the dirt in front of the catcher, and knocked him back. I dug in.

Pulvey was dancing around in front of our bench. Our players struggled to see past him. “Good eye, Kimball, good eye. This guy’s wild. Take your time.” I took the next pitch for a ball. Jimmy shrugged his shoulders up and down in a way that looked familiar to me. He kicked high and the next one came in fast and low. I swung, missed, heard the monk cheer, but not a word from the players perched on the St. Boniface bench. I gazed at the mound and saw a look of intensity on Jimmy’s face that was damn familiar.

Pulvey ignored me as I plopped down. He was already shouting at Bump. “Get your ass in there, Snitzer. He ain’t gonna knock you down!”

I asked this little eighth grade kid, Tony Lopello, our “manager,” to pass me the scorebook a second. I looked down their lineup. Batting fourth and pitching, Jimmy Lathrop. Jesus, the last time I saw him he was my height and sunny-faced. Sixth grade. Five years ago. “Hey Coach.” I jogged up to him.

“What?” He didn’t look at me. “Jesus Christ, Bump. Keep your eye on the g.d. ball! What do you want, Kimball?

“What are these kids in here for?” I asked.

He glanced at me quick, raising up one of his railroad track eyebrows. “Shit, I don’t know. All kinds of stuff. They mess up at school. They steal cars. They beat people up. You know. Delinquents.”

“Thanks Pulvey.” I sat down again. The Jimmy Lathrop I knew was a gentle farm kid. Apple orchards – I remembered climbing up the mountain of sweet-smelling apple crates to a tunnel that led to his hideout. We’d talk about girls and whether the Phillies would finally reach the World Series again. Baseball. He was always good at that.

We went down in our half of the first. I grabbed my glove and crossed the hard-packed infield. I passed by Lathrop. “Hey Jimmy,” I said. “Pete Kimball.” His head jerked a little, but he kept right on for their bench.

Our team made no progress against them. We misplayed grounders hopping off infield pebbles, threw to the wrong cutoff men, under threw, over threw. Once a heavy kid pounded a ball into the outfield. I was sure he was too much of a snail to get very far, so I ran it down. Snitzer had the same idea. “Outa my way you fucker!” he yelled. His blue cap flew off and his curly hair bounced around like it was trying to hold on. We nearly crashed, then watched the ball drop. We stomped around the tall grass, looking for it. The umpire was all ready to call it a ground rule double, when Snitzer (the bozo) came up with the ball and a fistful of grass. “Here it is! I found it!” The fat kid made it home, no problem.

Back at the bench again, Snitzer tapped “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” on his teeth – teeth tapping is one of his few talents. “Bump, next time you run for a ball, leave your ego at home,” said Pulvey.

Butterfield picked up his bat. “I wish he’d leave his teeth at home.”

Bump kicked at a dried out patch of grass. “Hey, this team is really gruesome. The pitcher’s psycho.”

“What you need Snitzer, is a muzzle,” said Pulvey walking away.

I faced Jimmy again in the top of the fourth inning. We hadn’t hit a lick off him, but he walked a couple of us. It was either a walk or a strikeout. “The bastard throws about ninety miles an hour,” said Pulvey. “I don’t know why the hell he isn’t on their varsity.”

I wanted to say something to Jimmy. Ask him how his sister Molly was. Ask him if his Dad still rigged up the tap so apple cider’d trickle out. Ask him if he still spent hours in his homemade darkroom. I still have the photo of me in a field holding up a gourd shaped like a girl’s breast…His first pitch slammed into my butt and I limped to first base. I watched those shoulders shrug up and down again.

When Jimmy hit the next two batters, Pulvey’s face turned red and he kept wiping his brow and mussing up his brillow-pad hair. He didn’t like his batters knocked down, but he wanted the run. Maybe the only one we’d get that day? The monk strolled out to the mound, and Jimmy stepped off the rubber, which was actually a wood plank with the paint rubbed off. The monk slung his arm around Jimmy, turned his head and spat, just like a big league manager. “Is he always like that?” I asked their third baseman. He ignored me and took a pinch of Skoal from the can in his back pocket.

I was positive the monk would trip over his robes as he jogged off the field, but he didn’t, and sure enough Jimmy settled down. Three strikeouts and he was out of the inning.

“Nice going,” I said to Jimmy as I passed him. He didn’t even look up.

The score was eight-zip by the top of the seventh inning. Jimmy’d walked a few, hit a few, struck twelve of us out. He had a no hitter going. Pulvey paced back and forth in front of us. “He’s tiring,” he said. “I can tell he’s getting tired. You gotta take advantage. Get in there, Kimball.”

My last time up probably. I stepped in again. Jimmy took his time out on the mound, inspecting his cap, the ball, hiking up his stirrups, scraping up some clay. We used to play something we called “Great Catch.” You’d throw the ball in a hard to get place, and the other guy would dive for it, leap or jump at a weird angle, then roll over, twisting and turning, at last coming up with the ball, smiling and filthy. We’d play past dusk. Did Jimmy remember? “Come on, Play Ball!” hollered the ump. Old fart probably wanted to get home.

Jimmy finally let one go and I tipped it back into the cage. “That’s the way, Kimball. Good eye. Good eye!” yelled Pulvey. Jimmy’s next pitch was so slow I missed it by a mile. I peered at him. No, he didn’t look tired. Just fidgety. He threw the next pitch as fast and wild as ever. “Ball!”

I heard the monk again. “Lay it in, Jimmy. He’s no batter!” Jimmy kicked up and threw another slow one. I’m positive I heard the monk mutter “Jesus Christ.” I hit a weak grounder that just got by the third baseman, who must have been in shock. I raced to first and beat out a single.

Pulvey clapped his hand on my back. “Way to go!” He stepped back away from the bag and their first baseman elbowed me. “Quaker prep shit,” he said. I looked over at Jimmy. He was smiling.

After I stole second base, Jimmy struck out Snitzer and our catcher. When Butterfield popped up, the game was over. Our team huddled together, fists in the center for a desultory post-game cheer. “Hurrah Res, Hurrah Res, Hurrah Hurrah E.F.S., Yay St. Boniface!” After an incomprehensible cheer from them, we stood in line to shake hands and mumble “good game” a couple dozen times. When I got to Jimmy he looked straight at me and shook my hand hard. He held on just a little longer than he had to, but when I started to speak, he moved on to the next guys. From the bus I watched him climb the hill, the last in line.

Prairie Hill – pondering the sources of fiction

25 May 2012 2 Comments

by Fred Burwell in Peregrinations, Prairie Hill Tags: , , , ,

Prairie Hill cover

Now and again people ask me whether my novel, Prairie Hill, is autobiographical. I answer “no” but it’s not strictly true. Looking over the novel I find all sorts of odds and ends of details which come from my life – a dingy, cobwebby basement I once explored, pigeons flapping from rafter to rafter inside an abandoned building, a ruby-crowned kinglet taking me for a walk along the railroad tracks, and a man dressed in an oversized rooster costume waving to passersby, advertising the best chicken in town.

I like to think about the sources of fiction. These tidbits from “reality,” close observations of friends and family and strangers, overheard conversations and glimpses through the windows of daily life, combine with an author’s perceptions and imagination to create setting, characters and story. None of the characters in Prairie Hill are exact replicas of people I know or have known. However, even when a writer describes a real person as accurately as possible, the filter of his or her own sensibilities moves the writing a step or two toward fiction.

I’ve kept a journal since the summer I turned ten. It evolved from an account of my activities from breakfast to bedtime, to seemingly endless declarations of teenage angst, to a more conscious attempt at capturing life around me – people I encountered, places I spent time in, daily life lived through. The many thousands of pages made me a more thoughtful observer and a better writer. The journals also provided me with a huge amount of useful material. Have I used any of it in my fiction? Not directly, but I have a good example of how what I absorbed long ago proved useful when writing a novel many years later.

In my 20’s I knew an old woman named Franny who spent much of her day pushing a mop across what seemed like acres of linoleum floor. Her feet hurt her and she’d need to rest and so she often came by where I was working and talked with me, or “chewed the fat” as she liked to call it. She was bitter and given to scowling, but the lines would soften on her face when she reminisced. We became friends and she’d bring me little presents such as apples from a local orchard. I liked her colorful way of speaking and I began to write down what I recalled. Her voice stayed with me for many years and it is Franny’s voice and a touch of her appearance and personality that I gave to Hulda Bjorklund, the old farm woman who becomes friends with and even a mentor of young Jenny Diggles and Jimmy Lathrop in Prairie Hill.

Here, for comparison, is some of Franny’s dialogue, taken from my journal, followed by an excerpt from Prairie Hill told from the perspective of Hulda Bjorklund.

A journal from the late 1980’s

11/21/88

“I still miss that of my mom, her bread. Every Sunday at noon she’d fry some bread dough before puttin’ the bread in. My girlfriends, they all knew when she’d be makin’ bread. They could smell it outside the house.

“My dad gave me a licking I’ll never forget. They gave me a brand new snow suit, and we went to the hill for sleighing. I tore a hole in that snow suit and my sister went and told my dad before I ever got home. He was waitin’ at that back door for me with a razor strop. He took my snow pants off and whipped me till my mom told him to stop. They said ‘money don’t grow on bushes around here,’ that’s what they says back then. It was the Depression. I was young then, maybe that’s why I didn’t like him. My mom said he and me we’re too much alike.

“One time up at our cabin he showed us where he went huntin’, way down in what they called a hog’s head. We girls got bored and walked back and got lost in the marsh, and we had to call him when it was dark to find us.”

“He had enough guns ta buy a house. He wouldn’t clean them guns once a year. He’d just take ‘em out of them three gun cabinets and rub ‘em down with a rag. There weren’t ever no fingerprints on them guns. That son of a bitch up at Taco John’s, he got most of my dad’s guns. My nephew chased him home once and told him never to come to his door again. He wasn’t gonna get no more guns.

“Before he passed away I had to drive him around. He liked to drive fast, too. But the doctor said he couldn’t drive no more. He had cataracts in both eyes. But did he like the way I drove?

“He was stubborn, and I ain’t saying I’m not.”

From Prairie Hill:

Hulda Bjorklund

I’ve lived a long time in this house, seventy-three years from the day I was born. In them days there weren’t too many farmer kids born in the hospital and I was no exception. I had a real good childhood, better than them kids today. Daddy was tough on me, no doubt about that. I weren’t good enough to suit him, he said, but I could tell deep down I was. They said I wasn’t that all fired good looking, but I coulda married. There were a couple fellers hanging around, even after Daddy gave them the third degree, but they didn’t hang around long enough to catch me. I grew older and lost what looks I had and the folks needed me more and I just stayed on, working the place until I was the only one left. Every now and again I wonder what will happen to this old house and barn and what’s left of the acreage. My brother’s family don’t want nothing to do with it. They’ll just sell it. “Hulda,” they say, “nobody vacations in Prairie Hill. Nothin’ there.” But that just makes me mad. You don’t hear the whippoorwills like you did when I was a little girl and the foxes are gone – good riddance if you ask me – but I still feel awful good on a spring morning listening to them birds, eyeing them pretty flowers and knowing I got food on the table I grew on my own land. It hits me sometimes that they’ll tear my home place down and pave it over like all the rest. You know, I couldn’t believe it when they put up that shopping center, Fox Hollow (ain’t been no foxes there for thirty years!) on the edge of town where the Nilsson farm used to be and they kept the silo right there sticking up like a big corncob at the end of the parking lot, with a bed of petunias planted all around it. Looked damn silly. I asked Norman Cobb about that silo and he said the shopping center people wanted it for atmosphere. I craned my neck to look way up at that silo and remembered how tickled the Nilsson’s were when they got it ‘cause it stored a sight more corn than the old cement kind. I wondered if there was a single kernel left in that big old thing. The pigeons found the silo before the shopping center came and they never left.

Jimmy rapped on my door and I opened up, old Ollie bursting past me and jumping up on the poor fellow. “Get back you crazy fool,” I says, “get back.”

Jimmy don’t care none. He gives Ollie a big ole hug and pats him all over and I can’t remember the last time I saw Ollie’s tail tick so fast, back and forth, back and forth. Anybody Ollie likes is alright by me. “You know dogs, Jimmy, dontya.”

He nodded. “Yeah, I had a Labrador retriever named Shadow, the sweetest-tempered dog you could ever meet. She was alive last I knew, but old. Her muzzle was turning gray, but she still couldn’t wait to go out for long walks.”

“You ain’t been home in awhile,” I said, knowing it was true.

He nodded.

“Your folks must miss you.”

He shrugged. “I don’t know, Hulda.”

“Ain’t you in touch with them?”

“No.”

“Ain’t they in touch with you?”

Again he said no.

I gave him my best scowl. The Lord’s blessed me with a face that’s good at ‘em.

A Writing Family Pt.4 – My Great Aunt, Florence Beckett Bennett

18 May 2012 4 Comments

by Fred Burwell in Peregrinations Tags: , , , , , , ,

Florence Beckett


Although I never knew my great aunt Florence Beckett, who died before I was born, over the years I heard intriguing tales about her career as a professional musician and about her mouth-watering New England-style cooking skills. After my father died in 1997, I began the process of sifting through the mountainous heaps of manuscripts and papers. One day while rummaging, I pulled out a creased and tattered manila folder labeled “Auntie Flo Memoir.” The folder revealed a stack of brittle yellow pages filled from top to bottom with her neat, flowing script, which had the look of a schoolgirl’s, even though Florence wrote it in her 70’s. Sometime later I turned up a typescript entitled The Sharp, the Flat and the Natural (An Autobiography) by Florence Beckett as told to Basil Burwell. The typescript sample, stamped with the imprint of my father’s literary agent, Bertha Klausner, must have made the rounds of publishers, only to reside for the next 60 years in its decrepit folder.

Florence Emeline Beckett was born on August 24, 1876, in Portland, Maine. Her mother, Antoinette Schnare, hailed from St. Margaret’s Bay, in Nova Scotia, while her professional musician father, Edward Parry Beckett, emigrated from Cambridge England to Canada, where according to legend he worked as “bandmaster to the Queen’s Own.” After the eldest, my grandmother Amelia, was born, Edward took his young family to the United States, where eventually he and “Annie” had three more children, all of whom performed as professional musicians, although other than Florence, only the youngest, Alice, persevered in show business. Alice worked for years with Allen’s Western Minstrels. The Beckett family traveled, but spent much of their time at Crescent Beach (now Revere), Massachusetts. The children grew up in a colorful world of performers and met famous people like General Tom Thumb, Peter Tchaikovsky, John Philip Sousa, and their father’s friend and mentor, composer and conductor, Victor Herbert.

Florence fell in love with the flute, her father’s primary instrument. She became proficient at an early age and then far more than proficient. At 14 she joined the Marietta Sherman Orchestra, played in smaller units at society functions and that winter debuted as a soloist with a full orchestra. Over the course of the following 15 years she worked with numerous women’s orchestras and played in concerts all over the United States, performing alongside opera stars, famous orchestra conductors, and theatrical luminaries such as Lillie Langtry. She also toiled in summer resorts, vaudeville theaters, and honky-tonk music halls. The locations ranged from cosmopolitan cities to small town America, from the World’s Columbian Exposition to rowdy frontier towns and isolated Indian reservations. Newspaper publicity sometimes billed Florence as the “leading lady flute player of the world.” Although she sometimes played in mixed orchestras, there were clearly fewer opportunities for fame and fortune if you were a woman musician at the turn of the century.

Florence [top, second from left] with the Boston Ladies Orchestra at Mt. McGregor, 1893

Florence met Myron Bennett in Sanford, Maine. They married in 1903 and had one child, Dorice, and for a time lived on a houseboat, but the marriage did not work out. To be closer to her mother and sister Amelia, Florence moved to Madison, Wisconsin, where as Florence Bennett, she lived in the 1920’s and 1930’s, playing flute in the Madison Symphony Orchestra and to make ends meet, she also gave private lessons and led orchestras in moving picture theaters during the heyday of silent films.

Accolades from a Madison newspaper, 1930

She must have retired by the 1940’s, but much of her life after leaving Madison remains a mystery, even the date of her death.

Florence Beckett Bennett in 1941

In oral history interviews, my parents recalled her visits during the 1940’s and 50’s. Dad remembered details of her phenomenal cooking: “In her later years, she would travel about from one branch of the family to another, taking her special cooking tools, her pie crinkler, her cake tester, and so on. She always had to have the right tools as well as the right ingredients. She would make her delectable potato starch – kind of sponge cake and turn it into a Washington cream pie or Boston cream pie, as the case might be, and make fabulous pies of all descriptions. Of course I’m particularly fond of apple pie and this was a fantastic thing to watch her make. The tender loving care with which she would lay apple slice upon apple slice in a really geometric way was something I’ll never forget.”

My mother reminisced about a visit from sisters Florence and Alice when she was just a “shy young thing,” not long after she’d met my father: “Florence had a loud voice. She was very jolly…I met them at a restaurant in New York City and I’m sitting in the middle and here’s Alice and here’s Auntie Flo and they’re talking over my head – ‘Oh! You remember that time? Oh yes…ha ha ha ha!’ Oh God was I embarrassed, but it was very funny. They were theatrical. Extrovert. Dear people. But oh my, was I embarrassed. I’m in the middle and the whole restaurant is hearing wild conversation with loud, loud voices. But they were delightful.”

I wish I’d known Great Aunt Florence, yet another member of my “writing family.” Her passion for music continues to run through the family veins. Perhaps one quiet night, if I close my eyes and think about her and listen as hard as I can, I’ll hear the sweet notes of her flute.

Excerpt from Florence Beckett’s memoir, as edited by my father, Basil Beckett Burwell. From the first chapter, entitled “The Magic Flute.”

“Girls should learn to be ladies; and no lady every plays a flute,” said Father, glowering at me across the music stand in the parlor and tapping his foot. The foot gave him away. He wasn’t as angry as he was pretending. The foot tapping was a trick he had learned from some actor at the Boston Museum. Now he raised his eyebrows as if he was reaching for a high note. “No, Fodie. The flute is the noblest of instruments and the most ancient; it is to be found in every land where man has dwelt; the Greeks played it on the slopes of Olympus and the Indians before their council fires; but to my certain knowledge it was not played by women.”

“But Father, I love the flute and I can’t stand the violin. I want to play the flute like you.”

“If only you had been a boy,” he said with a sigh. He had just finished his finger-limbering exercises and in a few minutes he would be on his way to Boston to play a matinee at the Boston Museum. It was the best time to speak to him. I watched him now as he stood his flute up in a corner to drain out the moisture. He straightened up and stood looking at me meditatively as he stroked the tuft of hair that grew Louis Napoleon fashion from his nether lip. “Fodie,” he said, “the violin is also a noble instrument. With the tail-hairs of a horse tones of incredible beauty can be drawn from the stretched gut of cats. What is more miraculous? My father used to talk to me by the hour about Paganini, the great virtuoso. He had heard him once in London between voyages. The man was a magician; he could play anything. Sometimes he would be annoyed at the audience and he would stop playing and make the instrument baa at them like a sheep or grunt like a pig. But when the audience was right and the spirit was on him he could outplay an angel. Hearing about him made me determine to play the violin. Unfortunately, circumstances caused me to enter the army and become a bandsman. In the British army, at least, one cannot march and play the violin. I chose the flute. I have, perhaps, a shade of regret. That is why I should like you to learn the violin.”

“But Father, you never even heard Paganini, but I have heard you. I want to play the flute.”

“No, Fodie. You cannot flatter yourself into a flute,” said Father, rolling up his music and preparing to go. “You will obey me and continue with the violin.” He looked at me hard. He had brilliant blue eyes and sometimes they could be very cold, but they were not cold now. There was something queer about them as if he was secretly laughing. He called goodbye to Mother and to my sister, Millie, who were in the kitchen, and then hurried off. I watched him go past the front of the house with his chin in the air and his lips puckered as he whistled a snatch of the overture he had been practicing. There was something dashing and military about him with his turned up waxed moustache and I was proud to have such a handsome father. I was only fourteen in 1890 and, as yet, had not been attracted by other men. I adored my father but I was not in awe of him the way my mother and my sister, Millie, were. I had a temper which I had demonstrated more than once in the past two years since Father had insisted that I learn the violin. Millie had to study the viola and she didn’t like it any more than I did the violin. She wanted to play the cornet. But while she obeyed orders philosophically, I had tantrums which could be heard all over Crescent Beach, Revere. The tantrums hadn’t accomplished anything so now I was trying “sweetness and light.”

When Father passed out of sight down Garfield Avenue I turned around and saw his flute standing in the corner. He had never left a flute at home before. He always took both his flutes with him. I went over and picked it up, holding it as I had watched him hold it, putting my fingers in the same places, and pressing it against my lower lip just as he did. I blew and it made a sound.

“I can do it,” I thought. “I can do it.” I blew hard. A sound like that of a factory whistle at noon shrilled through the house. For a moment I froze, half fearing that that tone might penetrate as far as the narrow-gauge railway station and bring Father hurrying back to reclaim his flute. Then, delighted with myself, I blew again, pressing a different key. A new sound, fuzzy and blurred and less loud presented itself. I began with many false notes and new beginnings to pick out the scale. At first, not all of the notes were in the same octave, and I discovered that the firmness of the mouth and the pressure of the lip against the flute seemed to affect the pitch. A somewhat slack mouth made a low note and a tense mouth a high note. That was the trick. The fingering scarcely troubled me at all. I had watched Father often, even sitting with him in the pit at the theater. How thrilled I had been when he played a solo! It was this experience, I think, which was at the bottom of my longing to play the flute. Now, with the instrument in my hands, I felt happier than I had ever felt in my life before. Time did not exist, nor place, nor family, only the flute and my swiftly growing knowledge.

No doubt the sounds I made at first must have sounded outlandish to Mother and Millie in the kitchen. They must have wondered what had brought Father back to the house and what was causing him, the master of the flute, to bring forth such incredible and discordant sounds. The door opened behind me and Millie looked in at me. “It’s Fodie!” she called back to the kitchen. Mother came at once, wiping her hands on her apron. “Land sakes,” she said, “so you’ve got a flute in your hands at last. I thought someone had stepped on a cat’s tail.”

“Father left it behind,” I said, defensively. “I couldn’t help myself.”

“Well, you did help yourself,” said Millie, “and Father isn’t going to like it.”

“I’m not so sure,” said Mother, her eyes bright with humor. “I have an idea he left the flute on purpose. It’s his way of giving in. Men are just too stubborn to give in without pretending that they’re not. Fodie, if you can’t play something for him by the time he comes home after the matinee, you are not the girl I think you are.”

“I will, Mother, I promise.”

“That’s my girl. Millie, you come with me. If Florence is allowed to give up the violin for the flute there’s no doubt you’ll be allowed to give up the viola for the cornet. Meanwhile we’ll make apple-dumplings. They always put your father in a good mood.”

After supper, as Father scraped up the last of the lemon sauce that had covered his dumpling, I excused myself from the table and went into the parlor. Picking up the flute, I stood nervously, listening for a pause in the conversation in the dining room. When it came I blew a wobbling note on the flute and, gathering courage, continued to play a fairly acceptable version of “Yankee Doodle.”

As the last note dwindled, Father came into the parlor. “Is that how you practice the violin?” he asked, his face blank and non-committal.

I didn’t know what to say. Tears came into my eyes. “I do so want to play the flute,” I said.

He came over to me and put his arms around me. “Then you shall,” he said and kissed me. I looked up and there were Mother and Millie smiling in the doorway.

Florence Beckett in 1894

[Postscript: Florence practiced the flute nine hours a day. After three months, Edward brought home a difficult flute part from an overture and told Florence that once she mastered it, she’d be ready to join an orchestra. She played it right through perfectly, auditioned for Marietta Sherman and then joined her Beacon Orchestral Club. My grandmother Amelia (“Millie”) became a prize pupil at the Boston Cornet Conservatory.]

A Writing Family Pt.3 – My Uncle, Edward Langworthy Burwell, Jr.

12 Apr 2012 2 Comments

by Fred Burwell in Peregrinations Tags: , , , ,

Edward Langworthy Burwell, Jr.


My uncle never wrote a book. If you’d asked him whether he was a writer, he would have said no. And yet he was.

Edward Langworthy Burwell, Jr. was born in 1895, 16 years before my father. Dad always said that “Lang,” as they called him, was more father than brother to him, especially since their elderly father was often away on business. Lang grew up in Chelsea, Massachusetts, where in 1908 he fled the famous Chelsea fire along with the rest of the family.

Marjorie Burwell and Edward Langworthy Burwell, Jr. circa 1898

The Burwells lost their house and belongings and started over again in nearby Winchester, where Lang attended high school and played on the baseball team. Around 1913, the family moved again, this time to Madison, Wisconsin. Father Burwell had become traveling agent of the Midwest territory for the La France Textile Company and he chose Madison for its physical beauty and for its university, since the oldest children were ready for college. They settled in a large frame house at 30 Lathrop Street not far from Camp Randall and the football stadium. Lang entered UW-Madison, interested in studying horticulture. He loved gardening, taking long walks and bicycle rides and snapping photographs with his camera. At the university, he joined the Reserve Officer Training Corps, quickly ascended its ranks to captain and spent a lot of his time at the armory, training. He was a member of the Beta Sigma Alpha fraternity and of the Scabbard and Blade military honor society. Dad remembered Lang wearing a beanie hat and having to combat the usual freshman hazing. “He would come home a long way around, not the short way,” Dad told me once. “He would go way down to the railroad tracks and circle around because if he was caught by a sophomore, they might make him push a peanut up the street with his nose.” Lang took Dad to his first circus and liked to entertain the family with his ragtime piano playing, especially his favorite, “Kitten on the Keys.”

My father, who always called Lang, “Brother,” remembered him as a very kind and gentle man, with a soft-spoken voice, blue-eyed and pink-cheeked. And yet he must have had something of a commanding demeanor, as his military career later showed. He liked his work with the cadets of the ROTC and so it wasn’t surprising that his thoughts turned toward what he would do if the United States entered World War One. On February 4, 1917, he wrote to his father, “What are your wishes in regard to my conduct when war is declared?” We do not have the reply, but in his next letter Langworthy wrote, “The protection of the country is the first duty, and as you said, I am fitted to aid in training others.” He decided to seek out a commission in the Marine Corps. He passed the examinations only to find out that he was underweight, so he ate his way into the job. My father watched, enviously, as Lang wolfed down bananas and eggnog and other treats. Madison’s Daily Cardinal issue of June 1, 1917, ran the banner headline “Student Gains 14 Pounds and Gets Marine Corps Job.”

Later that month, the Burwells watched the newly minted second lieutenant march down to the railroad station behind a local band. He trained at Quantico, Virginia, and by August he was in France, an officer of a machine gun battalion in the American Expeditionary Forces. He spent a year in Chaumont where he served as military censor and prepared for action that didn’t arrive for him until the final stages of the war in 1918 during the Meuse-Argonne Offensive.

Basil Burwell and Edward Langworthy Burwell, Jr. at 30 Lathrop Street, Madison, 1919

Dad remembered the family eagerly crowding round when one of Lang’s letters arrived, usually addressed to “My Darling Mother,” but meant for everyone. He was a prolific letter writer and hundreds remain in tattered envelopes, awaiting exploration. His vivid, graphic descriptions of the Meuse-Argonne battle in which he took part are a testament to his skill as a writer. Below, I include three extended excerpts. The first describes Lang’s impressions as he reaches the war zone while in a supporting role. In the second, Lang experiences battle at firsthand, while in the third, weary soldiers up and down the Meuse River celebrate the armistice that October. Following the armistice, Lang joined forces in occupied Germany, where he lived until the middle of 1919. He continued his career as a Marine officer with many further adventures and also married and had a family. He passed away in 1935.

Basil Burwell and Edward Langworthy Burwell, Jr. at 30 Lathrop Street, Madison, 1919. Basil wears captured German helmet.

My uncle never wrote a book, but then again, perhaps he wrote one after all. With the centennial of World War One only a few years away, I hope to edit a collection of Edward Langworthy Burwell’s letters as both a tribute to my father’s beloved brother and an opportunity to share with others this talented writer’s words which still seem fresh and alive today.

Autumn 1918

Excerpt One Lang Reaches the War Zone

That day I saw for the first time what devastation war can bring about. We passed through territory, in the Champagne sector, where a mighty battle had been fought. First we came to the old trench area, where the line had remained stationary for a year or over. The system of trenches was easily discernable, zig zagging across the whole country, dug-outs bomb-proof and otherwise, machine gun emplacements or positions, observation posts and advance listening posts, firing steps, loop-holes, – all these things and many more were there, but in such a terrible state of repair. The shells and high explosives had torn everything to pieces. Some trenches were nearly filled in with the caved in dirt, the posts and barbed wire in front of them were thrown up and cut to pieces, and the ground everywhere within sight was a mass of holes, big and little, where shells had landed. Down in a ravine were a couple of tanks which had been destroyed by shell fire probably, and on the slope was the remains of an aeroplane. Scattered everywhere over the territory was equipment of all kinds, rifles, belts, bayonets, canteens, haversacks, empty cartridge boxes, machine gun strips and belts, some loaded and some empty, shells which had failed to explode, grenades, clothing, and all manner of rubbish of every description. For it was newly conquered ground, just a week or so before, and the salvage and clean up outfits were still at work. And in all this vast area where the trees were like those of Chelsea after the fire, and the ground was heaved and torn up beyond seeming repair, no life was visible but a few parties of French-Indo China natives and German prisoners who were working on the roads so that we could get through. Such an expanse of waste you can never imagine unless you see it yourself. Pictures and stories about it can never do it.

In two places we had to make detours on newly constructed road-beds around mine craters, where the Boche in their departure had blown up the road. These craters were round and symmetrical like shell holes, but for size compare as an ostrich egg with a pin head. Just imagine a hole as wide as an ordinary road and then 10-15 feet more on each side of the road and as deep as from the second story window of a house to the ground, and then imagine what happened when the mine went off. And if anyone or anything happened to be on top when it happened, no one afterwards would know it, for there wouldn’t be a piece large enough to give evidence.

We passed on through this country and then came to the German back areas, what had been before the offensive, comparatively safe regions where the German troops could rest. This was now our territory. There was still much evidence of the recent struggle, but the ground was not so torn up as it had been further back. It was quite plain that the struggle had been to dislodge the Boche from his trenches, and that it had taken considerable artillery to do this, but that as soon as the shelter of the dugouts and trench systems had been left behind, the Boche had made a speedy retreat. As we went further into his old back area, this became even more evident, for the damage became less and less as we proceeded.
Enormous piles of empty shell cases showed what a part the artillery had played, and the many newly built grave yards neatly arranged with a wooden cross at the head of each mound, and perhaps a French flag or two, showed what it had cost to regain this ground.
That night I kept off the damp ground by crawling inside of a couple of ammunition cans. I turned them end to end, stuck my feet in one and head in the other, then manouvered around until the openings were quite close together. I used my gas mask for a pillow, in fact, did so right along. My shoes I set outside and covered the tops with my helmet to keep the rain out, if it happened to rain in the night.

The Boche began to shell the artillery near us and that with the noise of our own guns, made quite a commotion. I wondered what would happen if a shell hit nearby and some pieces went through my tin cans, and wondered if I hadn’t better sleep out in the open. But I figured if I was to be hit, it would hit me anyway, so decided to stay where it was most comfortable.

About 11:00 P.M. I was startled and awakened by shouts of, “Gas!” I extricated myself from the cans in a second and began reaching around madly for my gas mask. I was still so much asleep that I couldn’t think straight and it was some time before I finally remembered that I had been using the mask for a pillow. I thought it must be gas all right, too, for I heard some shells that sounded like gas, but I guess they were duds. I couldn’t smell any gas, so went back to sleep. The following night the same thing happened. In both cases the alarm came from the artillery, but no gas came near the Marines.

Excerpt Two Lang Experiences “Zero Hour”

In my last letter I left off with the company arriving about 1:30 A.M. at its appointed position along the road near Sommerance. We were supposed to find machine gun positions all prepared, but they were full of water. So we dug some new ones and then the men dug holes for themselves. Captain Hale and I, and the company runners found shelter in a ditch along the road in rear of the company a short distance. We had to be careful in walking about, because every few minutes the Boche would send up star shells which would illuminate everything in great shape. When one goes up you have to stand still until the light dies out. Behind us, our artillery was quite active, sending shell after shell into Bocheland and keeping them from sending too many back at us. On our right and left were other machine gun companies, and the infantry was rapidly taking up its positions.

It was cold sitting by the road in our “dug-out” waiting for zero hour to come. I unrolled my blankets and spread them over my legs, but still I was frozen. I was awake at 3 A.M. but must have dozed off for a while for I next found it to be 3:25 by my watch. The artillery behind us was still banging away. A column of fifteen tanks rumbled by us.

At 3:30 everything suddenly quieted down for a second, but only
for a second. And then there burst forth a roaring and a banging the intensity of which was never before equalled. To the right, left and rear, everywhere there seemed to be a big gun planted, and in advance of them in all directions were hundreds of smaller guns. Then in front of all were machine guns, all sending a constant stream of lead towards the Dutchmen. The whole sky and the hills were ablaze with the flashes of the guns which roared their terrific bombardment, sending shells shrieking and whistling over our heads. And then the Boche began his little counter barrage, which added to the uproar, and also made life uncertain. Star shells and colored lights of all kinds were continually sent up by both sides to enable each to see what the other was doing. It seemed like the end of the world, with lightning, thunder, earthquakes, volcanoes and everything thrown in. I stood up in the road and gazed at it all as if in a trance.

For two hours without a let-up this barrage continued. Five thirty came, and it was zero hour. The machine guns ceased firing, and the infantry went over the top. The barrage kept up, but it was not stationary now as it had been. It was now a rolling barrage, timed to move forward just ahead of the infantry, serving not only to hasten the flight of the enemy, but to prevent him from counter attacking or making a very considerable resistance.

Our battalion was in reserve, which means that there were two battalions directly in advance of us as we went forward. One battalion is attacking, one is in support and one in reserve in each regiment. But during the action the positions are switched around for equal distances so that each battalion has its turn at all three positions. To the ordinary person it would appear to be safer in reserve than forward, but there is not much difference. You draw all the artillery fire, most of which misses those in the first waves.

Daylight came at just about the time we jumped-off, so I was able, as we waited for our time to go forward, to see the whole thing unfold,, as the companies spread out over the fields and advanced in waves with the men well apart, or (as in the reserve) in small columns of twos. And it was so big, so unreal, and so different from what I had pictured.

But just then a big shell landed about twenty yards away at the edge of the wood, and then another, and another. It suddenly became quite real. Up to this time there hadn’t been any shelling near me, but the Dutch had evidently got their guns in place and had our range. They were bouncing them all around us, and big ones, too. One landed in the midst of a group just ahead, and up they went.

Usually when a shell is coming it whistles and you can judge about which direction it is going, and you will frequently be able to avoid being hit by the humming shell fragments by ducking to right or left or falling down. Sometimes you will duck when you hear one whistling towards you to prevent it making a direct hit, only to find that it was some distance away after all. It is said that the one that gets you you do not hear, but instinct tells you to duck when they come close, and you do so. Nor is it a sign of fear. Everybody is supposed to protect himself in every possible way, and this is one of them. They all do it.

Excerpt Three Armistice at the Front

We had seen the newspaper which stated that Germany had until 11 A.M. on Monday to sign or not sign the armistice. And it was supposed to be straight dope that they were to sign it this night of our attack. But we had been ordered forward, and were suffering with cold at 4 A.M. on the 11th ready to cross the Meuse. It didn’t look much like an armistice to us. Bets were even made that it had fallen through.

About 4:00 o’clock word was passed to fall in. We didn’t know which way we were going, forward or to the rear. We knew, though, that something would have to be done soon, for it would be daybreak in an hour or so, and we were absolutely out in the open, with the nearest cover 3 to 4 kilometers away. It would have been fini Marine Brigade if we had been caught out there.

We went to the rear, for the Engineers had been unable to get out other bridge across. And we certainly hustled back. Instead of zigzagging, we followed the railroad track and then the main road. Tired though we were from a night without sleep and a forced march followed by the terrible cold, we came back a-stepping, for we had to reach the sheltering woods.

When we finally came to the woods we had left the night before, our exhaustion was so complete that the fact that they started shelling us meant nothing. We trudged right along and paid no attention to them at all.

We found a likely spot in the woods, spread our blankets on the ground, and went to sleep. A big battle was fought that morning, when some of our Marines and others of the 2nd Division crossed the Meuse and occupied those heights, down stream from where we were to have crossed. But we didn’t hear a shot fired. It took more than that to wake us up.

A runner came at 10 A.M. and gave us an order stating that an armistice effective at 11 A.M. had been signed. And we all woke up: you should have heard the cheering. It echoed and re-echoed all over the woods.

Our chow wagon came up at noon and we all felt better by that time. It seemed strange not to hear the guns roar. Everything was very quiet. The last shot was fired about 10:55.

About 2 P.M. I received orders to proceed with some other officers and men across the Meuse and to reconnoiter positions then being held by the 1st battalion of the 9th Infantry, in support of the Marines on the heights.

We went across the field where we had been shelled the night before, wearing our overseas caps instead of helmets. It was strangely quiet, and it seemed as if something was wrong. And then we saw the shell holes, the wreckage of equipment and other stuff, and above all the dead men, all of which had come about that morning while we slept, a few hours before and right up until the last minute of the armistice. And I thought, what a terrible fate it is, to be killed on the last day of the war. It seems worse than if it happened in the regular course of the war.

We came to the Meuse, which is not wider than a stone’s throw, and crossed on one of the pontoon bridges that had been used in the morning’s attack. We climbed a slope and came to a road which skirts the woods at the base of a high hill. Along this road the infantry was dug in, and we were to relieve them.

After we had selected positions for the company, I found a good place for my tent in the woods, and put it up. I then searched around and salvaged about six blankets and four or five shelter halves. These I placed on the ground in my tent, and the next few nights I enjoyed a soft bed and also a dry bed.

In a German officer’s dug-out in this woods (Bois des Flaviers, on the east bank of the Meuse opposite Villemontry) I found among other things a bag of Dutch hard tack. It comes in small cubes and has a sweet taste. It is not very hard either, and I found it very good. I carried the bag in my overcoat pocket and gradually used it up. I also found a pair of new knit socks and seized them at once, for I carried only one extra pair and the many days of wet and mud had put both pairs out of business.

The company didn’t get across until about 10 P.M. So I had quite a wait. But we had some big bon fires to stand around. All up and down the Meuse, every hillside was lit up with bon fires, and the Dutchmen were sending up flares and rockets of all kinds, even sending up first a red, then white, then blue. This was done repeatedly. I guess they were pretty happy. It was strange to see all these fires, because before you couldn’t even light a match for fear someone would see it.

The next day we remained in our positions, and had a good chance to rest, the first for many days. Our galley and other wagons came right down to the west bank, and the chow was carried across the pontoon bridge each meal. And we had some good ones. Then that night we had more fires and beaucoup songs. All the popular and old time songs were sung over and the valley resounded with it. The hills were lit up and the Germans sent up more rockets and colored flares. It was a scene to be remembered a long time, and could only have happened like that at the front. This day also was a red letter day for we could wash our hands and face in the Meuse, a rare treat. I also managed to wash some socks and handkerchiefs.

Basil Burwell in miniature World War One uniform and Belgian cap sent by his brother, 1918

A Writing Family Pt.2 – My Grandmother, Eda Hoode Sadler (aka: Ida Fingerhut)

24 Mar 2012 Leave a comment

by Fred Burwell in Peregrinations Tags: , , , , , ,

Ida Fingerhut, skating at Central Park in New York, circa 1910.

“Grandma, tell me a story.” I was six years old. My mother’s mother, Eda Hoode Sadler, sat in her comfy chair, reading. She looked up, distracted for a moment and then smiled. She placed her book on the coffee table, took her glasses off and then gave the familiar pat on her lap. I climbed up and heard her groan as I settled in. How many times had I asked her for a story? How many times have I wished I could go back and hear her words that are lost forever? Within a year and a half, she was gone.

Eda Hoode Sadler with grandson, Fred Burwell. Note pad on grass and pencil in hand, ready for a writing session.

My grandmother’s life included more twists and turns than most plot-driven novels, but she didn’t talk about her eventful childhood. She told tales of magic and mystery. I remember an underwater world visited by two children – my age, of course – and populated by clever porpoises and other wild creatures. As much as I craved her stories, Grandma always made a deal. “I’ll tell you a story and then you tell me one,” she’d say. And so, from early on, I had the notion that you could pluck a story from the air.

At first glance, Grandma’s early life seems hidden behind an impenetrable bank of fog and yet there are tantalizing scraps, half-remembered stories from my mother, confusingly inconsistent “facts” from census records and naturalization documents, and autobiographical accounts in her unpublished novel, Jessica Brown, and in short stories. Ida Fingerhut was born in Poland in 1888 and traveled with her family to the United States just a few years later. Her father Abraham was a rabbinical student who contracted consumption while selling Christmas tree ornaments on the streets of New York and died soon after. In a letter to my mother, Grandma described him as “the quietest man imaginable,” and yet he, too, told stories. “My mother just absolutely adored him,” my mother Nancy told me during an oral history session. “One of the things she used to tell about him was, she had this fantastic doll, well, the only doll she ever had. And it was given to her, and the doll fell and broke and it didn’t seem reparable, so her father gave the doll a really grand funeral and told her all about the imaginary, wonderful place the doll was going to, and he consoled her.”

Her mother Mary, with five children in tow, went to work as a milliner. In order to make ends meet, she placed Ida and her brother Herman in the Hebrew Orphan Asylum of New York, a place that included many “half-orphans” of poor Jewish immigrants. My mother recalled Grandma’s tales of the orphanage: “She got the nickname of ‘Princess’ because she wouldn’t eat the thick yellow gruel…She remembered they had a fence around the orphanage and the parents had to be on the other side of the fence to see their children. There was a playground of sorts. My mother remembered seeing her mother outside the fence, watching the children at play.”

Eventually, after her mother had opened her own establishment, Ida returned home. She loved learning, but like so many others of that era, her schooling ended after eighth grade graduation, when she received a prize, a two volume set of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass that she kept all of her life. She had no feeling for the millinery business and after a year working in a factory, she got a job at Brentano’s, a famous bookstore. “She used to spend an awful lot of her time in Brentano’s, when she wasn’t busy, curled up with a good book, a Brentano’s book, and she read up a storm,” my mother told me, also noting something true of more than one member of my family: “In fact, her mother really got very annoyed with her because she always had a book at every meal, open at the table, whatever the meal was, and Mother was reading and paying no attention to anything that went on.”

Ida Fingerhut 8th grade graduation, circa 1902

Even in her mid teens she knew that to get ahead in the world, to get out of the tenements of the lower east side of New York, she would have to hide her background, even change her identity. While at Brentano’s, she learned to type, and she learned the old-fashioned Pitman method of shorthand. She became a topnotch stenographer, working her way up through jobs at banks to a position with New York City Chamberlain, Henry Bruere, a charismatic man who helped mold the new Ida, teaching her proper deportment and even helping her shave off all traces of a New York accent. She became involved in some of the issues of the day, helped found a stenographers union and hosted a suffragist tea.

Ida Fingerhut plans a union for stenographers, 1915

She also married Dr. Herman Seidler, a troubled man with a voracious passion for the arts – music, theater and books. Their marriage ended in separation and divorce and Grandma brought up my mother on her own, making a good living as a career woman. She also changed her name. From Ida Fingerhut to Eda Hoode to Eda Seidler, to Eda Hoode Sadler. She followed no religion and rarely if ever brought up the fact that she was Jewish, although she had Jewish friends. “See, Mother went a whole different way,” my mother commented. “She became something else completely than what she might have, because she didn’t follow any of her background.” She claimed that she didn’t know any Yiddish and yet in unguarded moments she’d drop a Yiddish word or phrase into conversation. Tucking my mother into bed at night, she’d sing songs from the old country, remembered from childhood.

And she’d tell my mother stories: “Mother was wonderful at storytelling. I never could tell a damn story in my life. You know, you have to make it up? But I used to love my dolls and she’d make the most wonderful stories up about my dolls. She was really full of all kinds of imagination and used it. There were two fairies that she made up, Peeps and Conundrum who took my doll Annabelle-Lee around the world. Imagination, yes, tremendous. Her stories were delightful.”

Eda Hoode Sadler with her daughter Nancy, mid-1920's

At some point Grandma began to write. Perhaps her success writing advertising copy spurred her on. Or perhaps Peeps and Conundrum had something to do with it. She took courses on the short story and attempted to tailor her pieces for the slick women’s magazines of the day, without success. By the 1950’s she was working on Jessica Brown, a long novel based on her own life. She entitled a shorter version, Lamplighter Days, which focused on rich details of her childhood. Her literary agent and friend, Bertha Klausner, sent them out and they received “positive rejections.” Publishers found them “charming” and “delightful” but too old-fashioned for changing times and so the aging manuscripts sat for decades in a desk drawer and then in cartons. They moved whenever we moved and today they reside in my Wisconsin study, awaiting rediscovery.

In loving tribute to a spirited member of my “writing family,” I post the following excerpt from Jessica Brown, a work by Eda Hoode Sadler which shows that Ida Fingerhut, an identity so long discarded, wasn’t so far below the surface after all.

Ida Fingerhut in 1911, age 23

Jessica Brown

The employment office was crowded with men and women whose faces showed worry, hope or resignation – anything but expectancy. For the older ones, with their firmly pressed lips that had thinned and puckered with the rancid taste of their lives, Jessie felt pity rise in her and a vague sense of guilt for her own advantage of youth.

The printed application blank appalled her. So many questions, so many vacant lines like hungry mouths that she must fill with bits of herself. The print swam in a jumble before her apprehensive eyes, and to steady herself she looked around, then back to the shabby long oak table at which she sat. A girl opposite her was writing industriously, with no hesitation, as if it were all a familiar process, her dark hair neatly coiffed under a small-brimmed blue hat that matched the color of her short tightly buttoned jacket out of which billowed a white frilled jabot. She saw the girl suddenly hesitate, lift the paper in well-kept square-tipped fingers as if to tear it, her dark face taking on an angry frown.

What made her angry? Jessie wondered, and glanced over the form before her.

“Why did you leave your last place of employment?” caught her eye. Because – stop it, Jessie, she warned herself. Stop it or you’ll cry. Get to work. Begin at the beginning.

“Name.” Jessie (No, Jessica is more dignified) Brown. Fill in the easy things first.”

“Age.” She hesitated and glanced up. The girl opposite her was at least twenty-five. Everybody seemed older. If she said seventeen they would think she was a beginner. Nineteen, she decided.

“Experience.” Think of the experience and see how it adds up. Four jobs in the first six months. No, that would give an impression of instability. Just the last job would be better. Two and a half years on the last job. She could be truthful about the job.

Her eyes followed the girl as she rose and went over to the clerk. What a lovely suit she wore, how trim and business-like she looked.

“Mmm.” Jessie saw the clerk appraise the girl, her smooth black hair, the sloe eyes and highbridged nose. “You’ve had nice experience, but the only job I have I’m afraid wouldn’t suit you…”

“I’ll take anything,” the girl interrupted.

“No,” the clerk shook her head. “The bank won’t take Jews. You’re the kind of girl they want, but – your name, and – well,” she shrugged, “there’s no use sending you.”

Jessie averted her eyes from the girl’s bitter face as if she had been caught peeping into the privacy of her room.

Surprise and fear, like a sudden spasm, cramped her stomach. Names made a difference! She looked down at the application blank. Jessica Brown. The name she had been given in school by some indifferent clerk suddenly seemed fraudulent. But lots of foreign names were changed in school, were accepted as the first step in Americanization. That’s the way even mama had taken and used the name. Now Jessie felt a sense of disloyalty to her father, a sense of shame as if she were being dishonest. And yet she felt grateful for its anonymity, as if it were a shield against an enemy.

“Religion?” The question leaped up at her challengingly. Religion…Once she had answered that question she would be discarded like the girl before her. She remembered her father’s words on that long ago Christmas Eve. “In America you are free…to be what you want to be…to take your place anywhere…Freedom and opportunity – they are your birthright.”

Saul’s voice echoed in her ears while she stared at the word “Religion” until each letter formed iron bars closing her in, imprisoning her. Saul’s words beat at her with hammer strokes. “Be what you want to be!” He had believed in the freedom of America. “Freedom and opportunity are your birthright!” He had been willing to starve for that belief. If she let herself become a prisoner of prejudice, she would betray all his hopes for her, his faith in the country of his adoption.

And mama. Mama’s eyes were afraid. Remembering the fear in mama’s eyes, desperation filled Jessie. Shutting her eyes for a moment as if she felt the impact of the word as a blow, she wrote “Protestant,” then sat frozen and grieved.

“Are you ready?” The clerk’s voice cut sharply into the fog of her distress.

Jessie nodded.

“Let me have it,” the clerk said. “There are others waiting, you know.”

Others waiting…Mama waiting, frightened, remembering the early days after papa died. Mama must never know such need again. Stiffly, Jessie handled over the application blank, and waited. It seemed to her that the clerk glanced at one item only.

“Don’t be so nervous,” the clerk said. “You’re just the type of girl they want. And it’s a large bank, lots of room for advancement…You didn’t put down any salary.”

“I…”

“They’ll pay seventy-five a month to start.”

Jessie nodded. It was more than she had hoped for. It would take care of mama and herself. Mama would not have to draw on her last few dollars. She would no longer be haunted by fear. But Jessie found no satisfaction in the thought. Her throat was parched. She felt empty of all emotion save a sense of shame for herself and for the country she grew up in.

“All right. Here, take this card. You’ll like the people, and you’re just the kind of girl they want,” the clerk repeated.

I’ll hate the people, Jessie thought savagely. I’ll hate them. I’ll never be happy with them. And I’ll never forgive them.

A Writing Family Pt.1 – My Father, Basil Burwell

23 Feb 2012 14 Comments

by Fred Burwell in Peregrinations Tags: , , , ,

Basil and Fred Burwell and Friend

Where did my passion for words come from? I think back to my childhood and find many sources, from the intriguing typeface and old-paper smell of a 1920’s hardback book to a dog-eared copy of the mysterious Dr. Strange Marvel comic left around by my brother Jeremy, to the fresh ink glow of a Dell paperback bought at the local department store. As much as I loved reading words, I also loved the sounds of words and so I became a listener. Every night my father read to me as I slurped up Cheerios and scraped sugar from the bottom of the bowl. When I pull The Phantom Tollbooth off the shelf today, I half hear the echo of my father’s booming voice merging with the bell-like clink of spoon on ceramic bowl.

Basil Burwell reading to Fred and Jeremy

Or we’d be out driving, my father at the wheel, my mother beside him, me in the back, gazing through the window at the passing scenes, then –

“Flug!” my father would say.

My mother would wake out of her reverie. “What?” And then she’d look out the window as we rolled past a busy Gulf station. “Oh, Basil!”

A block later he’d intone, “Deeps Timil,” in his rich actor’s baritone.

My mother would present him with one of her patented scowls. “Oh don’t be ridiculous!”

I’d pinch myself, trying not to burst out laughing when I realized that “Deeps Timil” was “Speed Limit” backwards. My father adored backwards words. A father in one of his novels – probably an alter ego – named his daughter, “Devorppa Klim,” which of course was “Approved Milk.” Magical backward words appeared everywhere, even in our own names. Sometimes, his blue eyes twinkling but with a straight face, he’d introduce himself to strangers as “Lisab Llewrub.” I learned that if I ever felt bored with plain old Fred Burwell, I could always switch it around to Derf Llewrub and pretend I was Welsh.

If you wonder where my Tales from a Misinformed Dictionary comes from, it’s the spirit of Basil Burwell perched on my shoulder, whispering into my ear.

My father once confessed to me that he thought of himself as an unsuccessful man. That surprised me. How many fathers did I know who could say they’d acted professionally for more than a decade and appeared in films with such oddball names as Park Avenue Logger and I Was a Captive of Nazi Germany? But in the 1940’s he left the world of Hollywood and summer stock and became a master teacher, both of the theater and of English literature and creative writing.

He’d always loved to write and he couldn’t resist telling stories. How many times had I bugged him for the further adventures of “Georgie Kleenex?” Especially after the beloved, flimsy character had somehow floated all the way to the moon? He liked to point out that one of his first published stories, “The Flag that Set Us Free, published in the famous Story magazine in 1944, was based on one of his schoolboy stories that had received a C+, possibly due to his incorrigibly bad handwriting. Story editor Whit Burnett urged him to “think long” and in 1954, the historical epic, Our Brother the Sun, became his first published novel.
A Fool in the Forest, which appeared in 1963, was his personal favorite. It was an autobiographical novel about a young man fresh out of high school in 1929, experiencing a wild summer with a troupe of actors at a summer theater set in an old fashioned amusement park.

When I first became interested in writing, Dad would take my penciled rough draft and cover it with red pen corrections, comments, and suggestions. Then we’d sit down and talk about it. I knew I was getting somewhere when less and less red marked up my work.

Perhaps Dad had so many strong passions he couldn’t simply hue to one path. To my mind he was an extremely successful man – a fine actor and director, brilliant teacher, published author, delightful storyteller, and a warm and generous father and mentor.