A MAN FROM MISSOURI

Back in the 1960s when I was drinking heavily and falling into ruin, I worked in this building in downtown Dayton, Ohio. I drank in the Magic Carpet Bar located on the first floor of the building. Occasionally, I drank in the alley behind this building with the stevedores who unloaded produce trucks in the district when much of the first floor was inhabited by small Italian-owned produce businesses. My experiences in and around that building will, from time to time, show up in what I write! The building is now called the St. Clair Lofts. It's been converted out of all recognition of my past life.

I've just roughed out a character sketch of the man from the The Greatest Generation who owned the company I worked for in that building. I plan to write several stories about the men from his generation I met while working in this building. Following are three paragraphs from that character sketch:

Born and raised in rural Missouri, Bruce was mechanically brilliant, a tinkerer and inventor as good as Edison but never able to come up with his own “light bulb”. Like so many engineers, Bruce Roberts couldn’t spell cat. I asked my father one time how Bruce managed to get a college degree as ignorant of the English language as Bruce seemed to be. Roughly paraphrased (as is most of the dialogue reported in my reminiscences), my father responded, “He’s brighter than you might think. I don’t know exactly how he got accepted into college but he did. Someone must have seen his potential. It’s not a full four year degree, I don’t think. Earned himself a two year degree in engineering from a Polytechnic college. In Indiana I believe.”  
   My father told me about Bruce’s anti-gravity machine. Bruce spent years and unknown quantities of dough putting it together. With my father as his sole witness one evening, Bruce stepped onto a round metal platform, threw a switch and waited. After a few moments, he stepped back off the metal platform and with genuine bewilderment, arms akimbo, exclaimed quietly, “It should work!”

Bruce was more than a wild eyed dreamer. He invented a successful throttle for the static testing of jet engines and sold it to General Electric in Cincinnati. His throttle ran more than 100 hours before needing repair. The throttle it replaced needed repair every 5 hours. My educated guess is that Bruce’s throttle kept Central States afloat through the years I knew him and long after I left Central States and Ohio for good.

A SILENT BOOMER IN THE NIGHT

Bought 6 tickets to the 36th Annual Portland International Film Festival. Tonight the film was at 8:45 pm and drove into the city by myself at an odd hour for me to be driving in but hardly any traffic at that time. Slightly misty and all the small bars I walked past after parking at a Smart Park looked so comfy and inviting that I didn't go in. The film, Shun Li & The Poet, was shown at the World Trade Center Theater so everything was new for me and the World Trade Center is a sprawling open, steel and glass structure that covers two blocks near the Willamette River. The movie was beautifully filmed and I was entertained. Tao Zhao won the Best Actress Award from the Italian Academy and I thought she earned it. Not for a minute did I remember that she was an actress. It thrilled me to be sitting on a Saturday evening, surrounded by people who enjoy good film making, and the excitement for this 75 year old Silent to be walking the streets of a major city all by my lonesome on a misty Saturday night was entertaining in itself. A delicious separateness set in that was not at all like loneliness. The film was about separateness too, being about two immigrants who meet and become friends in Italy...one a Chinese woman and the other a Yugoslavian. The globe is getting to be full of immigrants who have left home for a variety of reasons, isn't it?

The day has been full. My own writing crept along another few paragraphs today when I accompanied Mertie to a Buddhist meeting in Oswego. I waited for her at a nearby Starbucks and worked some more on "Tom Brokaw's Identity Crisis" which follows this paragraph. It's a transitional paragraph, setting up the conclusion. I'm very near finishing the first draft. After that I let it sit and move on to another chapter in the precocious fictional life of a 13 year old girl in 1940 Iowa. Then back for another essay about the life of a Silent Boomer.

"Brokaw’s impulse to glorify the American GI and their wives and mothers initially brought me, and many alienated Silents like me, right along with him back to the warm feelings about the generation which fathered me and about which I had so many questions and toward which I harbored so many ambivalent feelings after the Sixties smashed my rose colored glasses in one of the many street scuffles of that time. I’d worn them right up until that decade, only slightly cracked by my four years in the Navy. Inspired by Brokaw’s book, The Greatest Generation, and by the swoon of feeling that it created in America’s patriotic breast, I was impelled to go see Saving Private Ryan which came out in 1998. I devoured Band of Brothers based on a book by Stephen Ambrose (a Silent born in 1936) when it became available on non-premium cable channels. For good measure, I reread Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath to put me back in touch with the Depression Era and leafed through Studs Terkel’s oral histories for good measure."