Lit Hub | December 7, 2020
Here he is, 26, forever young, team leader of Flight C in the 549th Night Fighter Squadron of the VII Fighter Command of the Seventh Air Force, on Iwo Jima, in either the spring or summer of 1945, half turned, gazing straight at whomever is documenting the moment. Is he going up tonight? I wish I could say. There’s no date on the back of the photograph. My siblings and I share a fair number of pictures of our father from World War II, but this is the only one we have in which we’re able to see First Lieutenant Joe Paul Hendrickson of Morganfield, Kentucky, sitting in his “glass treasure-hole of blue light.”
Lit Hub | September 23, 2020
I am looking at a faded page from my broken-backed baby book.
On September 20, 1944, at about nine in the morning, two farm kids from Ohio and Kentucky told each other goodbye out front of a sad-sack-looking motor court in Amarillo, Texas. Perhaps the only thing extraordinary about the moment was how ordinary it was to its time and place. They were my parents, and they are dead now. No matter what else I might ambivalently say about what turned out to be their largely sorrowful 61-year marriage, this part of their story seems to me absolutely good, even heroic.
I have been thinking about this parting moment a lot lately for too-obvious reasons: the idea of terrifying things swirling invisibly about you and over which you seem to have only limited control.
Lit Hub | November 6, 2019
No single piece of Wright architecture moves me more. I haven’t seen all of his extant buildings, but I’ve seen plenty. Long before I started this book, well before I started the last, which was about Ernest Hemingway, I was going to Unity Temple whenever I could, to sit in one of its old smooth wooden pews, with all its light and silence and seeming saving grace pouring down.
Going to Unity, during the years of the work on Hemingway, so I believe, helped me to begin to understand things about him I wouldn’t have otherwise remotely understood. Similarly, sitting these days in Unity (no less than standing now and again at a stone on the South Side of Chicago) has helped me to find, or re-find, the person who I think Frank Lloyd Wright truly was…
The New York Times | May 17, 2013
In a foreshortened life that didn’t make 62, Ernest Hemingway got a lot down on paper. If, by his middle and later years, enough of it seemed self-parodying and sometimes even mawkish, great swaths of it remain immortal — and not just the early work, as some critics would claim. Hemingway changed the look and sound of American speech on the printed page. But how did he get so much work done, the stories, the novels, the nonfiction (not to mention the thousands of letters he wrote), amid all that wasteful boozing and boasting, the depressions, the freakish accidents, the bouts of soaring blood pressure, the stark-awake and Seconal-stoked nights?
Smithsonian Magazine | February 2005
The name alone would make a stomach-growling man wish to get up and go there: PieTown. And then too, there are the old photographs—those moving gelatin-silver prints, and the equally beautiful ones made in Kodachrome color, six and a half decades ago, at the heel of the Depression, on the eve of a global war, by a gifted, itinerant, government, documentary photographer working on behalf of FDR’s New Deal. His name was Russell Lee. His Pie Town images—and there are something like 600 of them preserved in the archives of the Library of Congress—portrayed this little clot of high-mountain-desert New Mexico humanity in all of its redemptive, communal, hard-won glory. Many were published last year in Bound for Glory, Americain Color 1939-43. But let’s get back to pie for a minute.
The New York Times | April 28, 2002
WHAT are some of the sexual tensions and moral predicaments of seminary life? I can only tell you of my own experience, which was a very long time ago. That is all that's valid here. Two decades ago I tried to put some of those tensions and predicaments into a first book, called ''Seminary: A Search.''
To start where it starts: from 1958 to 1965, from age 14 to 21, I studied for the Roman Catholic missionary priesthood. It was a small and fevered American religious order called the Missionary Servants of the Most Holy Trinity. The school of religious formation was at the outback of Christianity, in a red-dirt and loblolly-scented place called Holy Trinity, Ala. You can still find it on maps, although Holy Trinity hasn't been a seminary for decades. It's still the holiest ground I know, which may seem like either denial or dishonesty in terms of a particular event I am going to describe, or at least outline. But, you see, that is why it is all so ambivalent and morally equivocal in me even now, that seminary life, thinking about it on the far side of 50, with 60 in sight, a father to teenage boys, a husband for 23 years to the same, good, decent, Catholic woman. Oh, that's probably incorrect; Ceil and I are ''cultural Catholics,'' if we are anything. We don't go to Mass, not with any regularity. But we believe. We fear. We each say our prayers.
The Washington Post | November 12, 1998; Page A1
These old, old men, breasting their medals, lost in the castles of their memories and stories: Here they were yesterday, about 15 of them, game and proud old duffers, vets, in their seventies and eighties, in the 9 a.m. gloom and spitting rain. They were dressed up in their Legion hats and VFW blazers, dressed up in their Uncle Sam ties, trying to climb aboard -- sprightly or not so sprightly -- a Blue Bird bus at the U.S. Soldiers and Airmen's Home…
The Washington Post | Wednesday, July 22, 1998
HATTIESBURG, Miss.—Ellie Dahmer's right hand has risen to the side of her neck, as if to feel for something that can't be seen in dimming evening light. "My nerves got so bad, I'd just break out," she says.
"Rashes," says another woman, much younger, her daughter, seated a few feet away on an opposite sofa. Her name's Bettie Dahmer, and on the night of her family's burning, she was a 10-year-old asleep in a back room. "Mama means rashes. She would break out in rashes. See, it was always the fear of whether they were going to come for Daddy or not."…
The Washington Post | Wednesday, July 22, 1998
HATTIESBURG, Miss.—Ellie Dahmer's right hand has risen to the side of her neck, as if to feel for something that can't be seen in dimming evening light. "My nerves got so bad, I'd just break out," she says.
The Washington Post | June 4, 1998; Page B01
Like his brother, he died on the road. Who could have known there would be less than five years between the rifle in Dallas and the snub-nose revolver in Los Angeles? It was an eye-blink of time in America, from the crack of one to the pop-pop-pop of the other, during which so much about our national life went helter-skelter. Martin Luther King Jr. died also in those five years, and cities burned, and Vietnam became the hemorrhage no one could stanch…
The Washington Post | Tuesday, May 5, 1998
Can you picture James Dean, can you imagine Janis Joplin, grown old and wheezy and boring, trying to deliver clever patter on late-night talk shows? Horrid image. No, far better to have them in our minds now as smashed idols, as icons of their separate fiery moments.
You think of Janis Joplin, whose music is so redolent of the '60s, and what comes to mind? A woman who could bellow and cry and stamp and then turn around and go achingly tender. Someone who could sing up every song any truck driver ever knew. Someone in whom there seemed so much need, which somehow she transformed to our need…
The Washington Post | Sept. 6, 1997; Page D01
All week the world has heard the word "humanitarian." It's been connected to a ravishingly beautiful woman who died too young and too terribly. But yesterday, the word "humanitarian" took a deeper slice at our psyches. A wrinkly, bent, 4-foot-11, 87-year-old, globally admired holy woman died in Calcutta. Her name was Mother Teresa. She died of heart ailments and malaria and simple old age…
The Washington Post | July 3, 1997; Page B01
What we will remember about him always is the recoiling modesty, that winning stammer, but most of all his sense of utter naturalness. How many movie stars in history can that be said of? Watching him, and he was so compulsively watchable, you never got the idea he was playing a role. You never felt he was in a movie. The actor in him just disappeared…
The Washington Post | January 20, 1997; Page E17
Say the words "presidential inaugural pageantry" and many recall John F. Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline.
It was fine to go around town these past several weeks, as Washington got ready for a morality play, and hear the high dental whine of electric saws, the clean steady pound of nails driving into wood. Christmas was over, the January blahs were upon the rest of the country, but here, in a maligned city that isn't a state but somehow is far more than a city, there was a kind of lingering Christmassy air…
Washington Post | October 9, 1991; Page C1
He's standing there right beside it, bold as brass. The photographer is down nearly on all fours, trying to get the perfect angle. Here come two flatfoots.
Cool Disco Dan, with a bandanna over his nose. Cool Disco Dan, the phantom urban name scrawler, posing next to one of his "tags." In broad daylight, rush hour.
"I always wanted to get this wall," he says. "Did it the first time a year ago. About 10 o'clock at night. Then came back a few months later and traced over it. See, I like the way the buses stop right over there. All kinds of people can look out and see it."
Officer H.B. Burton (or that's what's on the nameplate above his badge) is three feet away now. He and his partner study this little tableau. Their visages are knotting.
Washington Post Magazine | November 18, 1990
He was the essential Washington activist, organizing everything from welfare rights protests to the Barry Commoner campaign. Then, still trying to change the world, he headed back to the land - and toward a fate no idealism could prepare him for.
Bert DeLeeuwThe pathologist testified that the blast entered at the victim's right posterior flank, not dead center in his back, as was commonly thought by the people of Walker Township. The weapon was an "over-and-under." Over-and-under is gun lingo for a rifle-shotgun combination, which is to say a .222 rifle mounted atop a 20-gauge. Hunters often use this model when going for turkey, although some like it for deer. The target-like wound, measuring roughly 14 centimeters in diameter, formed a very distinctive pattern of concentric circles -- a kind of smooth, horrid pebbling. Although there was probably never any real chance of survival, surgeons at J.C. Blair Memorial Hospital labored furiously to remove the pellets for close to two hours.
Washington Post Magazine | May 13, 1990
What I know about trout fishing is that it's done in green places, on quick-moving water, with unlikely equipment - and I'm mad for it.
That Idaho night, the trouting took place in a moonrise, on the Henrys Fork of the Snake, with the Centennial Mountains rising on one side and the Tetons on the far other and with lodgepole pines standing up on the near bank like spooky 60-foot stalks of corn. I was with Ernest Hemingway's middle son, Patrick. I had been interviewing him and his wife for a story all afternoon, and suddenly, after a 9 p.m. dinner, he said, "So why don't we go out?" You see, I just happened to have brought along my gear.