Life’s connections can be unpredictable—some warm, surprising, and rewarding, others fickle and hurtful. Guessing which will be which can be frustrating, particularly if one’s self-esteem is on the line and, despite what they might say, it always is for writers.
There’s a reason at least some of the breed do not read their reviews.
In the case of my book Football, Fast Friends, and Small Towns: A Memoir Straight from a Broken Oklahoma Heart, the reviews (few, but good) have not offered the most affecting takeaway. The surprise has been confirmation of where I still belong.
I put careful thought—as much as I’m capable of, anyway—into the book’s title. I recognized the binary risk in my choice, particularly Oklahoma’s inclusion in the subtitle. I have lived in Ohio for the past 40 years. I worked in journalism for more than 22 of those years and then for a time in academia/public relations after accepting an early-retirement buyout from the Akron Beacon Journal in 2001. However much columnists register in the community—I wrote for many sections of the newspaper: metro, sports, features, editorial—they at least flicker on the Northeast Ohio radar. The late Dick Goddard might have described my career as hot to cold but almost always stormy.
My work was published in five previous books, four from the University of Akron Press, and has run the gamut from sports to local history to political biography. (For more information, visit https://stevelovewriter.com.) Most recently I reprised one of my ABJ stories—“The Death of Charlie Wright”—for an essay collection put together and edited by former colleagues and forever friends Deb Van Tassel Warner and Stuart Warner. As they explain in an introductory note to Akron’s Daily Miracle: Reporting the News in the Rubber City, the book by those who lived their work was “written in the hope it will reinforce the value of excellent local journalism,” an institution that may be down but is not yet out.
Though my reaction—overreaction?—is personal, sometimes I wonder if local authors are valued at all. Judged by the local attention to Football, Fast Friends, and Small Towns from the usual suspects—print and electronic media and even the library—the inescapable conclusion would be that my work is not. Barbara McIntyre wrote a favorable review for the Beacon Journal in her “Book Talk” column, but it is fair to wonder how much that had to do with what and where my writing used to be.
Certainly other Northeast Ohio response would support the doubter’s question. The Devil Strip, which is supposed to be interested in Akron culture, ignored the book. So did Cleveland.com and former Beacon Journal sports columnist Terry Pluto. The silence from radio stations WAKR and WKSU has been deafening, and I have done many interviews over the years with both. WKSU’s reaction is particularly daunting, given that it is a National Public Radio affiliate that appeals to the public for most of its support and for years I have given it because it so richly deserved it. WKSU, with its weekly “Shuffle” segment, does devote a significant amount of coverage of local music, which I admire.
Maybe they’re trying to tell me something.
When the Tulsa World’s Barry Lewis and I spoke about the book this week, the response was different. I’ve known of Barry for what seems like forever. He once told me he used to read my work in the Tulsa Tribune when he was a boy, which he no longer is. That reminded me how old I am. By the time he joined the Tribune staff, I had taken my leave and my column elsewhere. We’ve connected a time or two over the years when I had questions, usually about my Oklahoma hometown Nowata Ironmen.
The afternoon Tribune could not survive the World’s decision in 1992 to terminate the Joint Operating Agreement that had kept the smaller newspaper viable. It did not even own a printing press, but it was a great newspaper with a fiercely devoted, talented staff. Barry told me he was surprised when Tulsa World Executive Sports Editor (and columnist) Bill Connors called him out of the blue years ago and offered him a job at the World. He is now High School Sports Editor, guiding coverage and continuing to write.
I had hoped Barry might identify with the book and understand the connection it makes with small towns everywhere but especially in Oklahoma. As he spoke, the clarity of his grasp of the threads of a life—of love and loss—came out strongly. That didn’t surprise me. What did was the deep interest he had in the period I had grown up—the 1950s and early 1960s. His oldest sister—by 15 years—had been born in 1946, the year of my birth. In the book, he saw what her life must have been like as he had not seen before.
“This isn’t just a football book,” he told me and then compared it to Friday Night Lights, especially the television series in which lives off the field become such a presence that the fictional characters birthed from a nonfiction book become so true they seemed real. And the viewer comes to care about them.
Whatever revelations Barry Lewis shares in the story he is writing will be important to me but could not be more so than one he has already shared. His wife, Deanna, identified with the defining early piece of my life and, as it turned out, hers. In the middle of my sophomore year in high school my veterinarian father, who worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, moved us from small-town Nowata to the California metropolis of Sacramento. I went from a town of about 4,000 to a school that felt that large. Deanna likewise had to leave border-town Arkansas City, Kansas, where she had grown up, and ended up in smaller Westville, Oklahoma, in Eastern Oklahoma.
Deanna made new friends and a success at her new school in Westville, but it was not the same. The high school reunions she attends, Barry said, are Ark City’s, just as mine are Nowata’s, not Mira Loma High School in Sacramento. Most of my California friends probably do not understand this because they took me in and made me welcome. I still feel grateful but they are not the faces I saw each day, from first through tenth grade.
Deanna understands. And because she does, I feel a little less alone in my loss. As for Nowata, it has become a place hungry to read what one of its own has to say about it. With his grasp of and feel for the book, Barry Lewis could open other Oklahoma doors.
