James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 29, 2018
It is humbling to have the Clinton County Historical Society (CCHS) invite me to speak to the citizens of my hometown on my writing career.
It is doubly flattering in that I am remembered by most members of my generation primarily as an athlete, first in my courthouse neighborhood, and later at Clinton High School.
As I’ve told many of you before, I was in athletics but not of athletics. Academics always trumped athletics as there was little opportunity to aspire to a career in sports seventy years ago as this was the era before television or, indeed, before the Internet where professional sports would become mainstream entertainment.
To give you a sense of how I became a writer, I must go back to my earliest memory as a child. When I was not yet five, and my sister not quite three, we were separated from our foster home with “Miss Sadie.” My little sister had run out to retrieve a ball on North Roosevelt Street in Lyons, when she was nearly hit by a car.
A man came who told us he was our father, shuttling me off to my Great Aunt Annie Dean on Second Street just off Sixth Avenue North in THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE, which would be the title of one of my books.
That separation has remained with me to this day although my sister, Pat Waddell, has been married for the past 64 years to William Waddell of Clinton.
Has trauma directed my spirit to writing? I don’t know, but do know trauma has often been a core influence to such writers as Hemingway, Joyce, Steinbeck, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and many other authors. There is something in the unquiet soul that feeds the impulse to invent, record, and make one’s mark with the printed word. Alas, nuance thinking that writing nurtures is under threat in this digital age.
That said, like any vocation, a nudge is needed to get the soul to do what the mind entertains. Mine occurred when I was a sophomore at the University of Iowa taking a required course in literature.
After spending two weeks in the university’s infirmary with infectious mononucleosis, I returned to class to have my professor opt for an oral examination of James Joyce’s PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN.
When I completed my oral presentation, he asked, “How do you explain that you understand Joyce so well?”
I answered simply, “I am Joyce.” The experiences of this Irish author were similar to mine in my Catholic education of the church’s rituals, priests, nuns, and sometimes incomprehensible authority.
“What is your major?” the professor asked.
“Chemistry,” I replied.
“What are you doing in the sciences, you should be in the humanities. I’ve read your papers and now I see you are the genuine article. You expose your soul in your writing. That is rare. I would like to recommend you for the HONORS PROGRAM IN THE HUMANITIES.”
He asked me to go home and discuss the subject with my parents. My da said I’d starve to death as a writer, “You don’t even write a good letter.” I stayed in chemistry.
After a career as a chemist, chemical sales engineer, and corporate executive with Nalco Chemical Company, I retired in my mid-thirties after experiencing South African apartheid where the 20 percent white population managed with draconian authority over the 80 percent Bantu (black) population.
This policy made no sense to me, finding me returning to school to earn a doctorate in industrial psychology. Consulting followed with me joining Honeywell Avionics in Clearwater, Florida as an organizational development (OD) psychologist, being promoted to Human Resources Director Planning & Development for Honeywell Europe SA., retiring in 1990 to dedicate myself to a writing career.
What I have learned in this long journey is that what you are, whatever that may be, you must be aware, then accept it as who you are, in order to control what you do.
Each of my books represents a fragment of my philosophy, starting with Confident Selling (1971). CS carries a central essence: accept yourself as you are and you will accept others as you find them. This gets you past common biases of which you are aware and accepting, enabling you to see your situation clearly, whatever that may be. The other message in CS is that to succeed you must have a healthy ego, fine sensitivity, and high energy level, along with self-awareness and self-acceptance.
Culture dictates behavior, and one's education is especially significant in that regard. My first eight years were spent in the Catholic parochial school system which taught me to pay attention, focus on my work, be disciplined and respectful of authority.
This translated into athletics where I excelled from the sixth grade on, which brought me and Bobby Witt to the attention of Clinton High School’s head basketball coach, Ed Rashke, who often observed us playing baseball on the courthouse grounds.
When Bobby and I presented our parochial school credentials for registration at Clinton High, it was apparent that a St. Patrick’s “A” was the equivalent of a Washington Junior High “C.”
This found me in classes with marginal students. One day in my English class, a student was sent to the blackboard to diagram a complex sentence that he found clearly challenging. The teacher eventually attempted to diagram the sentence encountering similar difficulty. I rose from my desk and took the chalk from her hand and quickly completed the diagraming, smiling, returning to my desk.
She handed me a sealed note and pink slip and sent me to Olen Higbee’s office, the high school principal. He dressed me down saying I was arrogant, narcissistic, self-centered and opinionated, apparently derived from the teacher’s note. That pink slip and note would haunt me the rest of my high school career, keeping me out of National Honor Society, although finishing academically in the top 10 percent of my class. (Years later, I would learn from emeritus school principal Stanley Reeves that my teacher was trained in home economics and not as an English Major).
That redress would spear me on to win every academic honor designated for the undergraduate and graduate student including Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa. Were I of a different temperament I doubt if I would have written these many books or be invited to address Clintonians tonight at the Clinton Country Historical Society.
Speaking of temperament, it wasn’t until I was in my middle years that I conceded to the fact that I was an introvert, although forced by the circumstances of my career to act as if an extrovert. Writing is a solitary affair, and doubly enjoyable if you write out of love than necessity as has been my experience over the past 30 years, producing a score of books and more than a thousand missives, articles and philosophical pieces. Likewise, I’ve been doubly blessed with Beautiful Betty at my side during this period who has inspired me to write my conscience without concession to convention.
Were it not for laboring five summers at Clinton Corn Processing Company, after high school, and during my academic career, I seriously doubt that I would ever have had a college education. To this day, I feel gratitude to that company, now ADM.
My second book, Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches (1991), published 20 years after having had a corporate, consulting and academic career, was named one of the ten best business books of the year by Industry Week for its departure from convention with a refreshing theme: management is atavistic and the complex organization is anachronistic.
The theme of culture was dominant with a particular focus on the professional worker who had essentially replaced the blue-collar worker.
This was followed by other books, including The Worker, Alone! Going Against the Grain (1995), which reminded the reader that professionals were not “taking charge,” but waiting for management to do only what knowledge workers were skilled to do. In frustration, professionals resorted to passive behaviors which proved silent killers of organizational efficacy.
The book with which most Clintonians are familiar is In the Shadow of Courthouse: Memoir of the 1940s Written as a Novel (2003). I felt we, as a nation, were retreating from our roots, and from the culture that had launched ordinary working class children into significant careers in society. Incidentally, only half the 650 pages of manuscript were published, after being edited by high school classmate, Burt Kirkman.
The balance of the courthouse manuscript would make another book. I mentioned this to Hank Dihlmann tonight, who was not yet KROS’s sportscaster, as I have him broadcasting the fatal fumble of Dean Burridge on the one yard line against Davenport in 1945, ruining a perfect Clinton High football season. Hank said I could use him in the new book should I so desire.
Older boys such as Jack Dunmore, Lyle Sawyer, Gus Witt, Bob Becker and Dean Burridge, as well as senior officials such as Sheriff Ky Petersen, Deputies Chris Stamp and Jim Gaffey, taught us how to play these sports and to be good sportsmen. The book is replete with names of people of that era (1941 – 1947) as a window of the times.
When you are a published author, people with an occasional interest in writing inevitably present themselves. My mother, who read a book a day for years, once said she would like to write a book. I sent her a book on how to get started. She called me and said, “That looks like a lot of hard work!” She never wrote her book. Another man was telling me about the idiosyncrasies of his wife, including putting wet goulashes in the oven, then forgetting, turning on the oven to prepare dinner. “I’ll tell you all of them, and you can write a bestseller.” I suggested that he write them down, and send them off to a publisher, who has ghost writers for that purpose. He looked at me askant. That is not what he intended.
At the Temple Terrace Library in Tampa, I gave a seminar on “Everyone is an Author.” Some thirty people showed up, several already in the process of writing their first book. I believe everyone has a story to tell. The act of writing expands one’s consciousness, and puts one in touch with what truly motivates one to exist. If you then write honestly about your experience, it is likely to touch others of a similar inclination.
Even great novelists write from what they know. English journalist and satirist Malcolm Muggeridge (1903 – 1990) claimed that he could identify every one of Tolstoy’s characters in “War & Peace,” out of the author’s own life.
Now, I’d like to open the discussion to your questions.
Michael Kearney (MK): Do you think a subject always requires a predicate? I ask this because of your sentence diagraming episode.
Author (A): Alas, no! Stephen King and Tom Wolfe, and many other popular novelists spurn the simple declarative sentence that Hemingway made famous. Philosopher Isaiah Berlin often writes long sentences as single paragraphs, disregarding the relationship of dependent and independent clauses, yet you get his idea.
MK: Are you familiar with Thomas Mann (I nod)? He also writes in long sentences, and in German the verb is at the end.
Carole Gilbert (CG): You were a star athlete yet you don’t favor athletics, why?
A: I was speaking of my time. Today, I might think differently, as athletics offer many opportunities that might not otherwise exist, especially for African Americans.
CG: You mention you were an “A” student, but did not earn membership in the National Honor Society (NHS), why?
A: My grades were good enough, but NHS is not simply about academics but also about citizenship. I failed that fault line.
CG: But not in college as you have won many such honors, right?
A: Admittedly, my early drive for excellence was sponsored by my immaturity. To this day it is reflected in my writing, as clearly I have a chip on my shoulder. I wear my early trauma and working class roots as well as my Catholic conditioning as if a scar on my soul, needing to prove myself useful, never wasting time in idleness. I am a renegade Catholic but nonetheless a Catholic writer.
Jeanne Herrity (JH): When the courthouse book came out, there was talk of it being made into a movie, what happened to that?
A: Two gentlemen contacted me shortly after the book came out, one a film and book publisher, the other an agent. It proved just a fishing expedition and went nowhere.
Linda Casey (LC): How did you acquire so much information of the courthouse book, which was nearly sixty years before?
A: Between 1993 and 2003 when the book was published, I made twelve trips to Clinton from Tampa, spending from a week to two weeks each time, interviewing more than 100 people who were youths in the 1940s, spending countless hours viewing microfiche of The Clinton Herald of that period at the Clinton County Library, walking around haunts of the time that still existed, taking pictures of St. Patrick’s Catholic Church, that no longer exists, Riverview Stadium, downtown Clinton and uptown Lyons, Clinton High and Lyons High, and many of the other splendid Protestant Churches of exquisite architecture, acquiring and reading The History of Clinton County Iowa (1978) published by CCHS, walking everywhere and talking into a handheld cassette recorder to the hilarity of many young people along the way.
LC: You’ve paid special tribute to the late Clinton principals, Gary Herrity and Stanley Reeves in your writing. Care to comment on that?
A: Gary Herrity was instrumental in not only providing me with data, but pointing me in the right direction. He introduced me to Stanley Reeves, who wrote a long reaction to my manuscript for The Worker, Alone! It was so good that I included it as a conversation between us.
Beyond that, Carole and Gene Gilbert, Ray Gilbert and Ron McGauvran not only provided valuable data, but distributed some 750 preordered autographed copies of the courthouse book. We celebrated that feat with a dinner at a La Claire restaurant, the hometown of Buffalo Bill of legendary fame.
Ron McGauvran also penned an essay on the flyleaf of the book to give the reader a sense of the compelling difference between Clinton in the 1942 – 1947 period with 2003.
Pat Waddell (PW): You should tell everyone that you read the dictionary as a boy.
A: True. I did. I erroneously thought a huge vocabulary was necessary to be a writer, forgetting our greatest writer, Mark Twain, wrote simply.
Ron McGauvran (RM): Anyone who reads your e-mails suffers for that early addiction.
Thank you all. I would like to add a final thought about writing. A friend of mine said his brother ran into Chuck Holm, an original Courthouse Tiger, at a mall in Missouri, and asked for his autograph. Stunned to find someone so far from Clinton, Iowa should know of this book, much less his role in the period, Chuck shook his head and gave the young man his autograph.
It is that connection between reader and the written word that makes writing worthwhile.
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