Wahoo! This past week I finished transcribing
the last of my interviews with Peter, Side #23 of 23 45-minute sides. If you're keeping count, that comes to a total of 547 6x9 handwritten pages, or nearly 102,000 words of interview.
This next week I have to put my butt in the chair in front of the computer that knows how to write, and get great chunks of these interviews typed up. Then I have to figure out which stories we want to tell, in which order. I'll have to start massaging swatches of interview to make them interesting and readable prose.
What to leave in, what to leave out? Why should anybody care about these stories, anybody beyond me and Peter? How to transform this life into art and still keep it as true as is humanly possible? Those little challenges that writers face....
Here's another swatch from the interview, likely the last I'll share until we have final draft of some passages:
I was about 15 or 16. I'd been hustling, working. This was bootlegging time. I was driving to Indiana, getting alcohol, pure alcohol, and bringing it to Milwaukee. I was getting some from Canada. Sometimes you'd have men coming after you. They weren't federal agents but they were working for the government. They'd come with Model T Fords or a Model A, and you'd have this big Duesenberg that goes 140 m.p.h., or you'd have the Graham-Page. The seats had been taken out. What you saw looked like seats, but they were tanks for alcohol.
I was a little guy. I had cushions for my seat. Some of those fellows started following me; they couldn't come too fast. The Duesenberg was faster than anything. The mechanics really had to be on the ball with the cars. If they weren't on the ball, they were done. These beautiful Duesenbergs and Lincolns and Cadillacs - whatever - would purr like a kitten. You're a young guy, you've got a beautiful car, you're getting paid.
I was coming back from Indiana. I was coming up Highway 42 to Wisconsin. Here was a plain clothes car on the side of the road. I saw it, so I perked up my car and I was going and they were following. I put the throttle on. In those days cars had throttles. I steered the car with one hand and got out on the running board. I took the machine gun, started at the bottom - BRRRP. You didn't see them any more, and you were gone.
Another time I'm coming across the 16th Street viaduct. It was kind of nice - I was relaxing; the job was done, we had the alcohol. Here I saw this Ford V-8 police car with two cops in it, at the side of the gas station, a Mobil station. I was coming in from the south end on 16th Street. I saw them. WHOOM. I whipped up that Lincoln. I made this turn on Clybourn Street at the end of the viaduct about 45 m.p.h. I knew where to go, and I hid the car. And I walked. I walked back to the house. There were all the bosses. I walked to the kitchen. I didn't say anything. I went to eat. They knew.
Wow, this sounds like the movies...machine guns, really!?
Tom, this story-gathering reminds me how I wished I had been able to somehow gather my parents' stories of life in the "old country", emigration, and those early struggling years. Mom was always talking about the past and I remember some but much is lost through the veils and mists of time. Perhaps if they had lived longer, we would have gotten around to it. And the same for my husbands' family stories...
Posted by: Marja-Leena | February 06, 2005 at 11:30 AM
Oh, yes, Marja-Leena, it is like a movie, machine guns, and more.
A few years ago, I was reading at a bookstore in Minnesota from my memoir of growing up on an Iowa farm. Perhaps ten people in the chairs in front of me. About five minutes in, one of the women started crying and cried for the rest of my reading. Afterwards she apologized: she was crying because she'd realized that all the stories in her family have been lost - all the people who told the family stories were now dead, and no one had taken the time to tape record them or write them down. They were utterly GONE.
I encourage EVERYONE to go parents and grandparents, uncles and aunts, brothers and sisters, even, and record those stories - video camera or tape recorder and pen and paper.
In another five years, 99% of those who lived through the Great Depression and served in World War II are going to be gone, and their stories with them.
If you don't know what to do with the tapes you get, give them to a local, regional, or state/provincial historical society or museum. The tapes will be one more piece of evidence that *we were here and it means something.*
I say this all the time - am I starting to sound like a broken record yet?
Posted by: Tom Montag | February 06, 2005 at 11:47 AM