Bill Steigerwald's Blog, page 6
July 20, 2014
The death of the great Curt Gentry
The author Curt Gentry was a big Steinbeck fan and he went out of his way to kindly help me with my book “Dogging Steinbeck.” Here’s the beginning of his obit from the San Francisco Chronicle today: Curt Gentry, a San Francisco author who wrote or co-wrote 13 books including best-sellers “Helter Skelter” about the Charles Manson case and a harshly critical biography of FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, died July 10 in a San Francisco hospital. Gentry was incredibly kind to me when I met him in the spring of 2010 while doing research for what became “Dogging Steinbeck.” He bought me lunch twice and gave me his notes and the draft of his Chronicle article (see below) from his encounter/interview with Steinbeck in the fall of 1960, when Steinbeck and wife Elaine stopped at the St. Francis Hotel on Steinbeck’s “Travels With Charley” trip. Gentry was one of the first to read my book and he wrote a wonderful blurb about it. When I read it at my book store/library appearances, I can hardly keep from choking up. He was a great guy with great stories. I’ll always be sorry he was too sick to meet with me the last time I was in San Francisco. The blurb Gentry wrote for my book, which was perfect and fair: I still believe John Steinbeck is one of America’s greatest writers and I still love “Travels With Charley,” be it fact or fiction or, as Bill Steigerwald doggedly proved, both. While I disagree with a number of Steigerwald’s conclusions, I don’t dispute his facts. He greatly broadened my understanding of Steinbeck the man and the author, particularly during his last years. And, whether Steigerwald intended it or not, in tracking down the original draft of “Travels With Charley” he made a significant contribution to Steinbeck’s legacy. “Dogging Steinbeck” is a good honest book. – Curt Gentry Author of “Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders” (with Vincent Bugliosi)
July 16, 2014
Paul Theroux drives into the South
The great travel writer Paul Theroux is done with the continents of Asia, Africa and South America and is now working on North America. He’s written a long article in Smithsonian magazine, “the Soul of the South,” that will be part of the book he’s writing about the American South. He was also interviewed by NPR’s midday news program “Here and Now,” so you can listen to him. Here’s a previous interview with him from NPR, before he took off on his Southern trip. Here are some pull quotes pulled from WBUR’s interview: Interview Highlights: Paul Theroux On reactions to being a Northerner traveling through the American South “I stuck to the rural areas. And rural America has its deep roots, and, I think, great values. I said to a man in Aiken, South Carolina, ‘I’m a stranger.’ He said, ‘You’re not a stranger, there ain’t no strangers here.’ And a woman said the same thing to me in Tuscaloosa [Alabama]. ‘I’m a stranger.’ She said ‘You’re not a stranger, there are no strangers here.’” On visiting the infamous Bryant’s Grocery in Money, Miss. “Bryant’s Store where Emmett Till met his doom, is still standing. It’s on a crossroads. Money, Mississippi, is a back road, there’s a railway running through it. Train doesn’t stop. The walls are crumbling, there are vines and roots sort of holding it together. They don’t know whether it’s a monument, a horror — it’s a haunted building. And Money, Mississippi, is a very tiny place. I doubt there are two dozen people who live there.” On unexpected encounters in the Delta “I was in the Delta, in the town of Greenville [Mississippi] in the Delta. And I must say, the Delta is a very poor place — poor in money, great in spirit. I was asking a lady about the B.B. King Museum and this woman’s colleague said, ‘Should we tell him?’And she said, ‘I don’t know.’ And the [colleague] said, ‘This is B.B. King’s ex-wife.’ His last wife! Most recent wife. So we talked about B.B. King.” And here’s quote from Theroux about how helpful people are when you travel — alone. THEROUX: When you’re traveling in the South, you get a warm welcome. I mean you, I go from New England, rather chilly and, you know, people barely say hello to each other in the post office. They kind of stare and think, you know, you look – they look at you as though you might be asking them not to pay their taxes or something. And, you know, in the South, I mean one of my earlier experiences was I was stuck. I was looking in a map in my car and the woman in the car next to me said: You lost, baby? I said, yeah, I’m looking for this church. And she said: Well, I can tell you – I told her the church – she said I can take you there. Follow me. She drove three miles out of her way. I mean, we had been in a parking lot and she was going to church that morning too but not there and took me to the church. And I thought, this is wonderful, I like this. And afterwards, I thanked her profusely. And she said: Be blessed. [...]
July 12, 2014
John Steinbeck’s bad trip
John Steinbeck set out to do his “Travels With Charley” trip the right way — alone and like a serious journalist. But it quickly unraveled and he had to resort to fiction and fibs to tell his tale. A free excerpt from “Dogging Steinbeck,” an Amazon ebook that’s the antidote of truth to “Charley.” A Good Trip Gone Bad A stranger passing like a bullet through his own heartland, Steinbeck spent twice as much time relaxing on his 11-week journey than driving. He discovered no new facts or insights about the USA or its citizens, mainly because he did no real journalism and spent relatively little time with ordinary people. Yet he deserved a lot of credit just for taking the road trip. Despite his shaky health and age, not to mention his princely lifestyle and celebrity social circle, he had the balls to roll up his sleeves and take on what was essentially a major journalism project. What other great American writer would have even considered traveling the rough way he did? Initially, he fully intended to do his trip the right way and the only way it would work – solo and at the grassroots level. His ambitious plan – going alone, taking photos, writing dispatches to newspapers or magazines from the road, going to a different church every Sunday, spending quality time in the Jim Crow South – was basic, sound journalism and a perfect vehicle for his talents. A nonfiction book based on his original plan wouldn’t have been as popular with readers or kept its romantic appeal for 50 years, but it would have made a better, more substantive book. It would have slowed him down, forced him to meet hundreds of other real people and given him a chance to discover more of the America he went searching for. But Steinbeck’s great exploration never materialized. He never learned to use a camera, didn’t take notes or keep a journal and never wrote a word for publication during his 75 days away from New York. His grand plan was unraveled by the reality of his lifestyle, health and the punishment of the open road. He quickly got lonely and tired and no doubt bored. Ironically, in one sense he may have been lucky he lost heart so early. The daily pressure and logistical nightmares of trying to do real journalism on the back roads of America in 1960 could have killed him. What’s more, in the Analog Age it was an unrealistic mission even for a man in good health to circumnavigate America alone. Transcontinental car travel was still an adventure, not the smooth ride it is today. As Steinbeck learned, just finding a public pay phone so he could call his wife every three days was a major accomplishment. Before he left Maine he had already realized the obvious – the country was too damn big and diverse to pin down or sum up. No one person, not even a Steinbeck, could discover the real America in 11 weeks or 11 months. Anyway, as he wisely said, there was no single “real” America. As he knew and advised his readers, every traveler must take his own trip and find his own version of America. Trouble was, his was largely a 50 mph blur interrupted by luxurious vacations with his [...]
June 30, 2014
A nice plug from the Blaze.com — for “Dogging Steinbeck” and Johnny Steinbeck, too
Pulling a libertarian quote from John Steinbeck out of my book and tying it into the 4th of July, Alak Mehta of the Blaze.com gives me a priceless plug and alerts the folks in Glen Beck Land to the existence of “Dogging Steinbeck,” which he kindly — and accurately — calls “a hilarious, exuberant read that reveals much about John Steinbeck and the diversity of people, places, and attitudes that is America.”
June 23, 2014
John Steinbeck and the Galbraiths critique JFK’s inauguration address, 1961
For anyone who wants to see and hear the John Steinbeck of 1961, here’s your chance. Steinbeck and his wife Elaine were invited to JFK’s inaugural address in DC on January 20, 1961. They went to the speech on a bitter cold day with JFK insider John Kenneth Galbraith and his wife Catherine, but skipped the inaugural ball that night and watched it on TV. It was about six weeks after John Steinbeck returned to New York following his 1960 “Travels With Charley” road trip. Steinbeck, 58 but looking 70-something, shared a limo ride with the Galbraiths to and from the speech. On board with them was a camera crew that was shooting a Robert Drew documentary produced for an ABC “Close Up” TV program called “Adventures on the New Frontier.” In the documentary footage the Steinbecks and the Galbraiths are seen praising Kennedy’s inauguration speech and making jokes. The Galbraiths went to the inaugural ball in Washington that night, which is where the video ends. The original chapter Steinbeck wrote for “Charley” was entitled “L’Envoi” and was about his trip to the inaugural. Never seen publicly until 2002, it was cut from the book for good reason — it didn’t fit with the rest of “Charley’ and it was pretty boring.
March 30, 2014
What the Great Geert Mak said about me, my politics & Steinbeck
My pal Michael Challik, the great veteran “shooter” at KDKA TV and a born Dutchman, did me a great favor the other day by translating part of a video interview with Steinbeck-chaser Geert Mak. Mak, a famous and renowned Dutch journalist/historian/author, retraced Steinbeck’s “Charley” route in the fall of 2010 and wrote a big fat, footnoted book that became a best-seller in Holland. Mak’s book, “Travels Without John in Search of America,” is being translated into English. Mak kindly mentions me about a dozen times, favorably. Unfortunately, the book, like the video interview, is in Dutch. Here’s a link to the video — Geert Mak talks about the journalism & politics of “Bill Steigerwald.” And here’s the translation of the 5-minute video, courtesy of the kind Michael Challik: Geert Mak is lying awake thinking of the competition. You think you have designed a great plan, but one afternoon in a little town, Lancaster, we were looking for a place John Steinbeck had stayed. The night, a motel, pouring down rain, got out at a gas station, asked where is the motel from the 1960′s. I can still see him, a hat on turned backwards, “Oh Steinbeck! Right?” (The service station attendant continues.) “Yesterday, there was also somebody here.” So you think you’re the only one. Real quickly Googled, wondering who that could be, and got the answer in about three minutes. Bill Steigerwald, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, retired journalist. Did exactly the same, except took off half-an-hour sooner. We left at at 8:30…he left at 8, so we just missed him on the ferry to the mainland. Bill wrote in his blog on the ferry at 8:45 where he met a third journalist, a guy called John Woesdijk (sp?), who was walking the route with a dog for a dog magazine. Later we found out that there was a fourth. She was with the Washington Post with her Mum. The last two I didn’t hear anything from again. All four wanted to follow Steinbeck’s route, but Bill S., I must be honest, tried to follow Steinbeck’s whole route. I must say I couldn’t agree with his political views, to say the least, but he did describe the route very precisely, like where Steinbeck bought his gun, with all kinds of movies, including if you would like to follow the route through his eyes. I really recommend his website. QUESTION: You didn’t have any contact with him? ANSWER: Oh yeah, later on we talked a lot about it. I really did want to talk to him because I really did find – even though he had opinions on Obama, etc. – he was very dedicated, and he did it by himself, and he was the only one who was roughing it, because Steinbeck stayed in hotels mostly. Bill really roughed it out. I got a lot of respect for him, but I thought the only thing I can do is to use him in my book…and so it goes. But as soon as my book was finished, I wrote him – and he had also heard of me. He heard about a book in Holland, and we talked openly and frequently, and we are planning in our lives absolutely to come together, and with a great glass of beer and talk about world problems and [...]
March 18, 2014
The Great Geert Mak says something nice about me, I hope
Twenty-nine seconds in, Geert Mak starts talking about “Bill Steigerwald” during an interview in Holland last spring. Mak’s book, “Travels Without John in Search of America” is being translated into English. Mak kindly mentions me about a dozen times, favorably. Someday we plan to meet — over there. If you read/understand Dutch, enjoy: Geert Mak was in Leeuwarden. Hij vertelt over het boek Reizen zonder John. Maar zijn roadtrip was niet helemaal uniek vertelt hij de aanwezigen. Er waren meer mensen die in de voetsporen van John Steinbeck treden. For English readers: If you can read Dutch, you can order Geert Mak’s new book “Traveling Without John in Search of America.” Mak, a well-known and high-quality journalist and author in the Netherlands, did what I did and carefully repeated Steinbeck’s trip in the fall of 2010. Mak did a lot of the same Steinbeck research I did and his nearly 600-page book about the current state of America includes much of what I discovered about Steinbeck’s real trip. Here, translated by Google’s clever but imperfect computers, is how the book is described on Mak’s web site: Travelling without John Looking for America On September 23, 1960 left the legendary writer John Steinbeck and his poodle Charley for an expedition across the American continent. He wanted his country and his countrymen again know. Exactly fifty years later, on the hour, was Geert Mak again for the old house of Steinbeck. It was the beginning of a renewed inspection tour in the footsteps of Charley and John, but now with the eyes of 2010. What is the past half century in American cities and towns changed? Where is Main Street USA go? Which dreams chased the Americans over the centuries their ideals? What is it ended? What remains of that “city on the hill”, the Promised Land which was once the world looked? And above all, what we have together, America and Europe in the 21st century? Geert Mak avoided, like John Steinbeck, the beaten path. He drove thousands of miles through the potato fields of Maine and the infinity of the Midwest, sat day after day at the table with farmers, laborers, fishermen and schoolmasters, met with shiny suburbs and boarded-up village shops, searched, again and again, to the stories of this country which nobody ever gets finished.
January 10, 2014
Why publishers are dying and why I’m not crying
In my never-ending quest to get a legacy publisher to publish “Dogging Steinbeck” so it can get into libraries and bookstores where it deserves to be, I left a phone message and sent a token pitch to the University of Nevada Press. The folks there were nice and responded, which itself was a rare treat. Here’s the response I got: Thank you for telling us about your book Dogging Steinbeck. I regret that we cannot take on this project because it has already been published and is available on Amazon. I do agree that there will be new attention to Steinbeck this year, given the anniversary celebration of The Grapes of Wrath. You might find that the best use of your time is to try again to promote the book you have already released. It was a typical response. And so, in response to their response, I wrote this gripe, which applies to every publishing company big and small in America: It’s a pretty annoying and strange publishing system we non-famous, non-tenured authors are up against. I couldn’t get a book advance from a major New York publisher in 2010 — despite my fine proposal — because I was not famous, because road books don’t sell and/or because no one cared about Steinbeck anymore (these were the top reasons I was 0-35, despite my readable, crazy style, according to my Madison Avenue agent). I went ahead anyway, did my trip and wrote my book. On my own time, on my own dime. I got lucky, I met many memorable Americans along the Steinbeck Highway, I made real literary news by exposing the deceptions of a major American writer. And I forced a major publisher, Penguin Group, to confess that, after 50 years of masquerading as a work of nonfiction, “Travels With Charley” was really a bunch of fiction and dishonest BS. You’d think that in the declining world of publishing, all this would be worthy of a book. But after I took my road trip I still had no interest from legacy publishers. I did everything right and got really lucky, thanks to the Steinbeck scholars who were asleep at their desks for half a century. I wrote a road book that tells, in an entertaining and authoritative way, how I made major literary news, how I changed the way “Travels With Charley” will be read forevermore, and how I — by my self-promoting self — got media attention and editorial-page praise from the New York Times, got praise and plugs from the world’s most celebrated travel writer (Paul Theroux), got on NPR and CBC radio in Canada, got written up in the pages of the Washington Post and, best of all, got an hour of airtime with Brian Lamb on CSPAN. I also got grief, not praise or thanks, from the Steinbeck scholars. Then, after I self-publish my book and have some success, I hear from some small and medium publishers that they can’t publish my book because I did too good of a job promoting it and my “scoop.” Then I hear from other publishers that it’s too late for them to publish my book in print (so it can get into its natural market of libraries and bookstores) because I already published it as an ebook on Amazon. (I’m sure you [...]
October 26, 2013
Return to Steinbeck Country
As part of our long-awaited Two American Road Trips tour, Ethan Casey (“Home Free”) and I are venturing into Steinbeck Country to promote our books. We’ll be at Old Capitol Books in Monterey at 1 p.m. Friday, Nov. 1 and then at Oldtown Book Nook in Salinas at 4 p.m. Although Steinbeck scholar Susan Shillinglaw is appearing around the corner at the National Steinbeck Center at 6:45 Friday, we don’t plan to don Steinbeck masks and crash her talk. She’ll not be trashing my book “Dogging Steinbeck,” but she’ll be talking about her new biography of Steinbeck’s first wife.
October 8, 2013
Why, asks an otherwise satisfied reader, is there so much dumb libertarian stuff in “Dogging Steinbeck”?
Bill Emerson of Kansas City read my book and liked it enough to give it four stars, for which I am grateful. But he couldn’t understand why I had put so much of my libertarian politics in the book. Here’s his comment from Amazon.com, followed by my explanation/response. I had read several Steinbeck books, but not Charley. I really did like the “investigative” parts to this. Bill Steigerwald does a great job of tying the time of Steinbeck in with today. One thing I did not understand and would like to ask the author: What in the hell does Libertarian have to do with it? Don’t you know that there are only 17 Libertarians anywhere in the world at any one time? Except when a Democrat is president, then it mushrooms to most of the Republican party….. My response: Thanks for the nice comments. As I write somewhere in the book, when you drive the miles and write a road book about America you — the author — get to air/spew your political opinions about what you see and think. Steinbeck did, though most of his (liberal Democrat) comments were taken out of his original manuscript. Bill Barich did in “Long Way Home.” Philip Caputo just did in “The Longest Road.” Heat-Moon did.Everyone does. Sprawl, commercial development, cars, the environment, energy policy, city planning, race relations, the ups and downs of the economy — they’re all driven by politics (unfortunately) and open to debate. Most travel books are written by liberal Democrats who, as I point out in the book, all sound like they’re reading from the editorial page of the NY Times. They hate sprawl, they hate malls, they make fun of free markets, they unthinkingly embrace government regulation, they hate the culture and the conservative politics of Flyover Country — and they say so in their books. Most reviewers don’t even notice or mention the authors’ left-liberal-East Coast politics, mainly because the reviewers invariably are liberals too. I’ve been an open libertarian journalist/columnist/media critic for 30-plus years. For me to pretend not to disagree with Steinbeck’s political point of view or the liberal Democrat point of view of Barich et al., or to let their political commentaries or biased asides about America or its people pass without comment, would have been dishonest and phony, not to mention foolish. Road books are about the road, the country, the people you meet, etc., but they’re all filtered through the author — his life, his thoughts, his politics. Not everyone is a Republican or a Democrat, thank god. The two major parties have brought us a national government that is a Big Nanny/Big Snoop at home and World Cop overseas. It’s pretty sad that my libertarian politics — that peaceful people should be as personally, economically and socially free as possible; that government should be as decentralized and weak and unnoticed in our daily lives as possible; and that America should mind its business overseas — would seem exotic or out of place to a fellow America today. Those basic libertarian principles have been forgotten and abused. But they would be very familiar — and very dear — to Jefferson or Washington or Grover Cleveland or Twain or Mencken or Milton Friedman or hundreds of other dead great Americans whose politics were essentially libertarian.
