When I had a life as a journalist, among my myriad jobs during 20+ years with the Akron Beacon Journal, one involved writing columns about books. I was a critic, of sorts. Not New York Times quality, but I did win a national award once. My principal work during this fallow period involved serving as deputy features editor. Maybe like Deputy Dawg.
My immediate boss, the late Joan Rice, whose duties included supervising the books pages—there was more than one then—liked having a local voice among the national reviews. Our boss, Features Editor Ann Sheldon Mezger concurred and both of these smart and talented women knew that allowing me a writing outlet would hold my whining to slightly less than the decibel level of Top Gun’s Tom Cruise revving his jet for takeoff.
I loved the work but felt barely adequate. I know how difficult it is to write intelligently about a book whose author is smarter than you and a better writer. Stuart Warner did not have to address either of these worries. He always outranked me for a reason. So when he sent me this synopsis and critique of my sixth book—Football, Fast Friends and Small Towns: A Memoir Straight From a Broken Oklahoma Heart—I was thrilled. In another life, Stuart must have been a translator. He did not have to decipher a foreign language and turn it into English. It was worse than that. He had to decipher me, and do so succinctly and, I hoped, in a way that I could not. I had spent 320 pages trying.
Every book needs a champion and I am grateful to many: Here is what Stuart Warner wrote for Amazon.com:
Steve Love’s “Football, Fast Friends and Small Towns: A Memoir Straight From a Broken Oklahoma Heart” begins as a paean to small-town life and high school football, an homage to Nowata, Okla., and the city’s mighty Ironmen. It was a place where your neighbors remained your neighbors and teammates remained teammates forever, and bad boys raced their cars on deserted streets late at night. Think “American Graffiti” without the California Cool.
Growing up in Nowata in 1950s and early ’60s, Steve may have expected it to always be that way. But fate and his Daddy’s job yanked him out of his comfort zone, ultimately catapulting him into a journalism journey that few people from Nowata likely ever experienced.
The book evolves into a series of essays about the people he met, the events he covered, and the successes and tragedies he experienced as he pinballed from one newspaper job to another, from California to Miami, before finally settling in Akron, Ohio, where we worked together for almost two decades.
Along the way, he seamlessly connects stories about world-famous Oklahoma quarterback Steve Davis and little-known Nowata High quarterback KB Berry, who both died in aircraft. He puts you at his side while writing on deadline as an earthquake rocked San Francisco during the 1989 World Series and escorts you into the past as he co-authors the history of rubber in the Rubber City. You can almost taste the tears as he details the murder of a family he knew oh, so well, and of a little boy he knew only through interviews and court records.
So don’t be fooled into thinking this is a book just about sports or small towns; it is a book about life told through the eyes of a writer who traveled far from Nowata, Oklahoma, but always kept the lessons he learned there close to his heart, broken or otherwise.
In a personal note that accompanied his generous abridgement of my book, Stuart wrote: “I applaud your willingness to open some real veins . . . we journalists are taught to watch from afar, not become involved. You shied away from nothing in your personal life, at least that I know of. Maybe you like to dress in women’s clothes, not that there’s anything wrong with that.”
Indeed. My personal preference was and always will be those little short skirts the cheerleaders wore. Of course, I have never looked quite as good in mine.
When Stuart wrote of a “willingness to open some real veins” he was alluding to a famous quote from the late, great Red Smith, “Sports of the Times” Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, who when asked if writing a column was difficult explained: “Why no. You simply sit down at a typewriter, open your veins, and bleed.” This was in 1949. I was three years old. There are different versions of the quote’s origination, but, it seems most likely to have come from Paul Gallico’s 1946 book Confessions of a Story Writer. Before he became known for writing The Poseidon Adventure, which became a blockbuster movie in 1972, Gallico was, yes, like so many of us, a sports columnist.
When my press-box seat at a 1980 World Series game in Philadelphia one cold October night was near Smith’s—a columnist in Wichita, Kansas, I was covering the Phillies’ opponent, Kansas City—he seemed concerned, either for the fact I might be dying from a terrible case of the flu or, more likely, that I would give it to him. The fear was legit. I shouldn’t have been at the game. But duty called, and I was not exactly Red Smith. I had to answer the bell and try not to breathe on him. (No masks pre-COVID.) I did not want Red Smith’s obituary to blame his death on flu he had contracted at that game.
We both lived to tell the adventure, but I’m sure he did not even know who the ill unmasked columnist was. If he did remember me, he would not have had a name to attached to my hacking. This particular story is not in the book but many are and they did come straight from the heart, as the book’s title suggests. I tried to be as accurate as possible, given the fallibility of memory. This much I can assure readers and victims: I respect the truth, something in short supply in the wake of our Trumpian epoch.
I examined truth in memoir, how it is squandered and sometimes rescued, to write a late-in-life master’s thesis, or capstone, at Hiram College, a wonderful, small liberal arts college in Ohio. It was the most illuminating of learning experiences. I have attempted to apply the lessons learned, especially the one about not intentionally hurting those whose lives have come into contact with mine. If I failed, it was not for lack of trying
