Author Archives: gail chumbley

A Malleable Girl

In my dating days I employed the habit of acting the way my dates expected.  There I said it.  I submerged my identity for a guy.  Now if you are reading this post thinking “what a bimbo,” take a moment to recall your own dating history.  We lose weight, we drink less, we put makeup on for an evening of television, we attempt to be funny and charming–we wear a mask.  You know, the Bridget Jones school of dating.

I’m not absolute about this, but I think Helen always remained Helen in her single years.  Back reading for River of January  I got the sense that she didn’t play any coquettish games to land an evening out.  My observation of this girl was that men saw what they wanted in her, attached their own sense of who she was.  And their frustration trying to put a ring on her finger stemmed from a deep misunderstanding of Helen Thompson.

Aside from the reality that her mother called the shots in Helen’s life, three men attempted to win her heart, and take her for their own.  And I suppose we could start by looking first at the last, Mont Chumbley.

The young pilot became infatuated with Helen nearly from the first time he laid eyes on her.  Those spotlights hitting the stage, in hues of blue, pink, yellow, and white can intensify an already dazzling girl.  Once he decided he loved her, he posted himself every night at the club until her contract ended.  If any drunk (or sober) patron made advances, Chum  intervened assuring her safety.  And that is how he saw himself, her protector until she could leave show business.  It never seemed to occur to him that she loved performing and had no intentions of giving up her art.  That caused big problems later.

Her middle admirer, the boy who courted her the longest, across continents, was Elie Galeki.  Now Elie was a person who lived life systematically and deliberately.  He worked hard to establish his own photography business, caring for his mother and sisters in Brussels.  His suits were pressed, his appointment book organized, his expectations orderly.  However, with Helen he had his hands full.  To is way of thinking, once he met “the one” she would naturally love him back, and they would marry.  Elie, too, expected Helen would give up the stage and settle down as his dutiful wife.  That wasn’t actually Helen’s style, and she knew he wasn’t the right guy.

Her earliest boyfriend, and vaudeville partner, Grant Garrett, was an entirely different sort of character.  He was a comedy writer, dancer, and singer, and Helen did respond to his charms.  Grant was ready with a zinger, usually targeted at Helen’s intransigent mother.  He was smooth in style and rough in attitude.  He liked to fight for money around bonfires in hobo camps, and he drank hard.  Of all three blokes, he may have been temperamentally the best suited to Helen.  He treated her as an equal, and understood her drive and ambition for the stage.  She was a professional, and so was Grant.  They shared their love of performing.

I don’t believe Helen submerged her personality for any of these three suitors.  But Grant was the one her understood her the best. Mostly they saw what they wanted in her beauty, grace, and bubbly sense of fun.  I suppose that if any of these gentlemen became frustrated with the girl, they only had their illusions to blame.

Memories of Telephones Past

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My parents kept a beige wall phone when I was growing up.  The ring could wake the dead.  Both sides of grandparents settled for basic black, one a desk phone the other fixed to their kitchen wall.  If my paternal grandparents were expecting a long distance call we all waited in the living room, reverently, as though it was God calling.  And God help you if you made any noise while my grandmother was on that phone, conversing with her relatives back in Minnesota.  Those calls were an almost holy occasion.

Their phone exchange was Fairfax, ours, on the other side of town, was Keystone.  My husband remembers their phone exchange began with Plaza, and his mother, Helen, growing up, used the famous prefix, Murray Hill in New York City.  I think that’s the same one actress, Barbara Stanwick requests in one of her old movies.

It is my understanding that many rural Americans had a phone installed before even electricity was available in vast tracts of the country.  My Minnesota relatives, for example, didn’t have an indoor toilet until the early 1960’s, yet had that telephone on a doily covered end table as early as the 1920’s.  Chum recalled that their phone on the farm had a different ring for each home connected along a party line.  He remembered that the different rings didn’t matter because everyone eavesdropped on everyone else.

Operators, or “hello girls,” as they were known, plugged connections on regional calls offering choices for long distance service.  There was “Station to Station,” which meant you talked to anyone at the number dialed.  Then came “Person to Person,” where you hailed a specific individual.  I remember dialing collect calls, which were long distance too, connected through a live operator, costing my parents a bundle if they accepted.  And they always accepted.

The telephone of yore was a mysterious device.  The phone company, AT&T held a monopoly and innovated very slowly.  I recall when the clockwise dial was replaced by gray push buttons.  Then there was the desk phone offered in green and red, as well as black and beige.  I vaguely remember “Ma-Bell,” as we irreverently referred to the company, marketing blue, white and pink “Princess Phones,”.  Geez, how sexist.

But what telephones held then, which is gone now, was a sense of mystery.  When that device rang it was a crap shoot who waited on the other end.  We could only call on land lines, and if no one answered there was no evidence of our call.  If that certain someone called me, and I missed it, well, I missed it.  We had no call waiting, no answering machines, and certainly no ‘missed call’ record.

And long distance calls were fashionable and expensive, folks largely opting to stay in touch through less expensive letters.  While Helen toured Europe from 1932-33, she had no cause to use a telephone.  If Elie wrote to her and scheduled a call, she would take it at the prescribed time at her hotel.  But calling her mother back in the states was never an option.

Public phones could be found on nearly every city block as I grew up.  Now they are as scarce as manual typewriters.  Formality, phone etiquette, the necessity of saying hello to mother’s or father’s who picked up, are all gone.  I would sit in the stairway of our house for some telephone privacy, because my family was everywhere, my brothers especially snoopy and irritating.  Even that modicum of supervision is gone for teenagers.  They can call, text, Facetime, use Facebook, stay connected all day everyday.

Perhaps the extra effort required for telephone calls gave them a higher value.  Our capacity for electronic interaction is nearly effortless today, but also somehow has cheapened a once-regarded gesture.

Who Takes The Blame?

Yesterday my car was totaled.  True story.  I don’t think it has quite sunk in that my familiar, comfortable, Sirius radio equipped car will never move again.  And I didn’t cause the demise, either.  And I can’t even really blame my husband, though he was behind wheel at the time.  The actual culprit was mother nature.  I need to explain.

We live in the mountains.  There is a small grocery store in our little town, but for real shopping we have to drive to the city.  The highways we use were cut out years ago from the granite walls of the Northern Rockies.  The rivers below the road and the hot springs alongside maintains a perpetual cloud of steam, that quickly sets up into ice when the temperature hovers around 20 degrees.  The canyon itself is so narrow that the sun’s rays rarely touch many sections of route.  The point is that the highway is a damn treacherous roller coaster ride.  My husband lost control on a particularly slick curve, though his speed was slowly cautious.  He hit another oncoming truck, and the impact destroyed both vehicles.  The two drivers are okay.  One broken arm, lots of bruises and scrapes.

The state troopers wrote a ticket placing the blame on my husband and my poor smashed up car.  They explained that though the accident couldn’t quite have been helped, someone had to assume responsibility.  The blame game in this case feels unjustified, but the trooper explained that with the damage and injuries blame has to be assigned to someone.

Her explanation has set me to thinking about assessing blame for damages and injuries that cannot be seen.  In River of January hurt abounds among the main characters.  Pain plays an instrumental part in moving the characters emotionally and geographically throughout the pages.  Death, all kinds of abuse, fear, and manipulation steer my central figures as they move through their lives.  Where is blame to be assigned for all that type of damage?  The father who abused the son?  The mother who died abandoning a lone and sensitive child?  The daughter who attempted to live her own life apart from her overbearing mother?  Where did the legacy of hurt begin?  When exactly did it start?  Who’s name would appear on the ticket that initiated all that multi-generational sorrow?

The police have their set definitions assessing blame and culpability for inevitable, unpreventable collisions on the road.  But where do we as members of a family pinpoint where our unhappiness began?  How many generations must we trace back to isolate the first fateful hurt?

Perhaps we all live on figurative ice, and cannot place blame on any other soul.  There are no traffic tickets for operating a life while bearing inevitable injuries.

Time and Words

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Written records have provided a wealth of information for my book, River of January.  It’s rather interesting that I have carefully read and analyzed these letters composed in ink and soft lead, and they have taken me into vibrant lives, flowing with adventure and color.  So much feeling lives in those envelopes–devotion, pain, fear, reassurance all scribed into hand written correspondence.

A character in the story, Elie Gelaki, a Belgian boy who pines for Helen, produced volumes of letters and postcards.  Just picking up a handful of his letters are vivid proof of his perpetual love.  Helen’s letters to her mother bear updates, stories, and news (and promises of money) filling 4 plastic containers.  I can see that her mother was important to her, just by looking at her blizzard of correspondence.  In the same vein, Chum’s letters to Helen, are steeped in longing, with loving language that reached her from across hemispheres, time zones and war zones, placing the reader directly into the deepest reaches of his heart.

Sadly, today, personal letters exist somewhere in the same black hole as slide rules, floppy discs and cassette tapes.

The beauty of cursive writing, the artful style has disappeared.  Take a look at the Declaration of Independence, or the Constitution and notice the intricate flourishes that embellish the words.  People made their living writing script, and the hands that penned these two documents were skilled for sure.

And another feature of handwriting is what it reveals about the writer.  A former student became enthralled with handwriting analysis, fascinated by the personality traits exposed in cursive writing.  I’m not sure I buy all that hocus pocus, but the change of Richard Nixon’s signature from his heyday to his resignation is remarkable.  He signed his name at the end of his presidency in an almost straight line.  Nixon’s signature looks pissed-off.

I would argue that a person’s handwriting is as unique as their fingerprints.  It is a shame that most informal communication between any two people today is through cryptic, brief electronic texts.  I won’t argue that electronic communication can reveal a story too.  It certainly can.  I think that was how Martha Stewart got caught violating SEC regulations and ended up in jail.

But in the realm of the heart, the messy, dramatic, embarrassing human heart, driven by love to hemorrhage passion on stationary has sadly become a casualty of neat, quick technology.

Logging

Creative Non-Fiction.  That is the category that River of January will market under.  I am comfortable writing in that genre because of the latitude I have in stringing together the story.  I don’t know exactly who said what to whom, through all those years, except for the letters that have been left for my keeping.  And those letters concern limited stretches of time.  So the story outcome is a combination of actual episodes and creative glue to keep the story cohesive

This approach has worked well . . .until now.  The major difference for writing in book two (yes, there is a second volume) are Chum’s logbooks.  The ramifications of possessing some twenty-odd logbooks, is that I know exactly where he was, and when he arrived and departed.  That exactness poses a problem for the creative side of composition.  Let me explain.

I placed my protagonists in Virginia at Thanksgiving, 1936.  But Chum’s logbook doesn’t put them there until the next month–Christmas of 1936.  I had to ask myself, ‘How anal is this process?’  And the answer was, Creative Non-Fiction.  I can place them loosely where I need them to keep the flow of the narrative moving.  But those damn logbooks really like to argue with me, demanding things that they are.

His literal trail is fascinating to read.  Chum carefully noted each flight he flew, the equipment, passengers, time in the air, where and when he landed.  He or should I say I can account for his whereabouts from the time he boarded his first aircraft in 1928.  The war years offer a particularly revealing journal of wartime aviation.  Added to his own notations are his official Navy orders, which are neatly attached together in a vertical file.

In so many ways Chum’s logbooks provide a connect-the-dots composition of his adult life.  Where he landed on any given day, where he was when big events took place around the globe, where he was the day I was born.  His notations provide a fine straightedge where his life took measure.

By the way there are mysteries in those logs.  He and his crew had some hush-hush missions during the war, and the logbook reflects that security.  For destinations he scribbled in some cryptic nonsense.  The only reason that I know the nature of those flights was because he told me later in taped interviews.  Thank Goodness for that.

There are some pretty cool names of places that I’d never heard of before.  Nanty Glo, Pennsylvania, Havre de Grace, Maryland, Fitler, Mississippi–FITLER!  And the war years mention islands beyond my geographic knowledge; Espirito Santo, Suva, and Numea.

I guess we would all benefit from a life logbook tracing where we have been, how long we stayed and when we left.  A picture would assuredly materialize, accounting a good deal for who we are now.

What Can I Do For You?

For inexplicable reasons there are individuals in my life that I need, to assess my quality as a person.  A thousand more people, family, friends, acquaintances breeze into and out of my days, leaving a pleasant warmth in their wake.  But somehow a tiny few slip under my shield, and inflict deep and lingering pain.

Now, I’m no expert on interpersonal relations, but I know enough to see my part in the dynamic.  I can see enough to watch myself set up for another emotional blast.  Perplexing as it seems, I continue to come back for more, with this miniscule group of perpetrators.  And what annoys me most is that I’m so pleasant in return, because I don’t want to escalate any rows.

Well, enough about me.  We all know that taking crap from loved ones is just one more inevitable, invisible gift under the tree.

Unraveling family interplay in River of January forced me to fall back on my own experiences with loved ones.  My female protagonist, Helen, was helpless to change her relationships with family members, so ingrained was her role.  The unthinkable pain of even trying to declare independence from her mother made the act impossible.  She simply could not see herself outside her position as daughter, trusting her mother’s judgement without question.  Any defiance was impossible, because Helen had no identity or definition without her mother. This matriarch was the center of her universe.

Manifesting her predicament, Helen trusted her mother’s decisions and directions, believing those decisions were for her own good.  As is true for the rest of us, she was blind to the manipulation behind her mother’s choices, such as keeping away suitors because Helen was to dance, not marry.  The girl never had the perspective to see that she was more a pawn, moved about by a stage mother who was equally blind to any harm she inflicted.

I often try to apply resolution to these postings, but when it comes to family interaction I’m not sure that exists.  We begin our lives together, mothers, fathers, children, and build from that starting point.  Most of us have no notion of the bad decisions or actions we take that hurt other members of the household.  None of us start out with a pain inflicting agenda.  It’s as though we fall into roles, behave as we read others expectations.  Helen acted in a way that pleased her mother.  She grew to please audiences, and tried to please her husband.  All that pleasing backfired, and in that there must be some kind of life lesson.

I’ll let you know when I’ve discovered the secret to perfect interpersonal relationships.  Happy Holidays.

Rhythm in My Nursery Rhymes sung by Dinah Miller

Another Song Helen performed in Rio.
Merry Christmas
(lyrics vary in this version)
(IF I HAD) RHYTHM IN MY NURSERY RHYMES
——————————————–
I could learn my ABC’s, Bring home A’s instead of D’s
And my Mom and Dad I’d please if I had rhythm in my nursery rhyme

In the corner on a stool I sat ’cause I broke a rule
But I’d show them that I’m no fool If I had rhythm in my nursery rhyme

Tra-la-la-la-la won’t get me far — Lately I’ve been thinkin’
If I had a little bit of rhythm, I’d could be a Washington or a Lincoln

Simple Simon at the fair Met a Pie man who was there
About those two guys I don’t care
‘Cause I need rhythm in my nursery rhyme
__________________________________________________

Lullabies were all OK, when my Mama sang ‘em in her day
But I’d rather hear them in a swingin’ way
‘Cause I need rhythm in my nursery, rhythm in my nursery,
Rhythm in my nursery rhymes – boo dah beep

My Book Report

ImageAs I have worked on my book, River of January I’ve been told by patient listeners that my writing sounds like me.  Of course I have no idea what that means.  How do I know what I sound like?  The comment has led me to think a lot about writers that have impressed me over the years with their wonderful and unique voices.

I love Vonnegut, Helen Hooven Santmyer, Twain, Willa Cather, Steinbeck, John Irving, Wallace Stegner, Tim O’Brien, but I think I’ve decided on my favorite writing voice.

Above is one of the many covers for author, E.L. Doctorow‘s Ragtime.  The realization finally came to me from my writing struggles, that his style, his narratives have resonated deeply into my notion of good writing–good story telling.  Doctorow is just flat brilliant.  Here is an author who can take a fictitious character and move them easily through a time and place.  He folds in historic figures believably,  effortlessly into and out of the plot.  I loved how he wove in Enrico Caruso and Evelyn Nesbitt, as viewed in their own era, in a way that feels almost as intimate as a Murdoch phone tap.

Reading a Doctorow novel is a privileged journey into his rich, fanciful imagination.  Billy Bathgate glides along much the same way, luring me into the deadly world of organized crime, while keeping a light heart and affection for his shady characters.  Checking out his list of works before writing this blog tells me Doctorow has more to offer in this first winter of my retirement.

My book, too places many famous and almost famous into the story telling. But now I have recognized my North Star, and hopefully that fixed position will aid my efforts.

If I can even touch Doctorow’s genius in wedding the real to the imaginative I will count myself the luckiest kid that ever hit the keys.

Before War Was Cool

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The protagonist in River of January, Mont Chumbley, or “Chum,” as we called him, pined to join the Navy in 1927.  In fact Chum knew that the Navy was his destiny from the time he witnessed a barn-stormer, (stunt pilot) fly miracles across the rural Virginia sky.  What the boy didn’t count on in his hopes was the resistance he met from his own family.

The Chumbley’s were not alone in their disgust with the military.  All of America suffered from a giant hangover after the Great War (World War One), convinced Americans that their participation had been a horrible mistake.  Though not fully true, the US still viewed itself as a simple republic, not an empire builder bound for global influence.  That policy came later, after World War Two, in the Cold War.

President Wilson staked his own presidency on his Treaty of Versailles and League of Nations, which would have bound the country to Europe in a forerunner to the United Nations.  The public, through their Senators voted the Treaty down, killing it as dead as the soldiers who would never come home.  Books were written after 1919 that discredited war as nothing but a fools errand.  “Johnny Got His Gun” was one such novel, and Erich Maria Remarque‘s “All Quiet on the Western Front” was another.

Folks stateside strongly regretted sending Doughboys across the Atlantic to battle the Kaiser and his evil Hun army.  By the year Chum pushed to join the Navy, the US had negotiated a treaty with the French, called the Kellogg Briand Pact, which outlawed war as an alternative in international conflict.  (“Don’t plant that mine, if you can’t do the time?”  Seriously?)

The Nye Commission, a House investigating committee was charged to find out why America joined the war.  In the end these law makers judged money was the culprit.  War manufacturers, such a poison gas producers the Dupont Corporation and financiers,The House of Morgan, were condemned for their roles in fanning the flames while counting their profits.

It was in this cultural/political atmosphere that Chum wanted to join the Navy.  When his father and aunt objected, they simply parroted the opinion of a nation that believed the military was only for scoundrels and suckers.  If Chum succeeded in enlisting he would draw shame on the family’s name.

Now, I am a child of the Vietnam era and understand the power of public opinion concerning war.  Too many young men came home to condemnation for rendering their duty to their country.  Many were already angry from their combat experiences, especially if they were drafted in the first place.  War protestors vented their fury on those boys who did nothing more than complete their mission.

Still for many young people, such as Chum in the 1920’s, the service still offers training and opportunity.  Perhaps it would benefit us all to remember to separate the advantages of military training, from the poor use of young people deployed for uncertain, poorly planned political agendas.

Chum did meet his service obligations, later after Pearl Harbor.  But he would agree, I think, that he gained more from his service in the Navy, than he returned.

Servicemen have never been suckers, and decision makers must never lightly treat them as such.