Category Archives: writing & Such

Dog Days Tale: Honesty Is the Best Policy – Mostly

I was ready to cut up columns when Mike nodded at me over the phone receiver again. ”It’s Judy Drake,” he said. “At the Phoenix.”

“Chuck! I got an idea for you!” she said. Judy was one of those people the word “perky” was invented for; but I was glad to be distracted. Judy was the culture editor at the Boston Phoenix, the big downtown weekly paper where I used to work. She got to cover the really big events in town, like new movies, plays, the symphony, and above all, the big-name rock concerts.

When I worked at the Phoenix she doled out free concert tickets like lottery prizes, and we all lapped them up. Boston had a lot of big events. I had seen Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Joni Mitchell, even Johnny Cash this way.

Those giveaways also worked great for the owner of the Phoenix; as long as we kept humming the latest concert tunes around the office, we forgot to notice that he didn’t pay us decent wages or benefits. But heck, who needed health insurance when we had a chance to see Frank Zappa, or The Who, for free? (Ah, youth.)

I was still a sucker. “Do you know,” Judy asked, “about the concert at Boston Garden tonight?”

Did I? Didn’t everybody? It was Sly and the Family Stone, who were still hotter than a firecracker after their many hit records, like “Everyday People,” “Dance To The Music,” “Life,” and their show-stealing gig at Woodstock.

Boom-chocka-locka-lockaI hadn’t made it to Woodstock, but I had watched the movie more than once, and their pulsing rendition of “I Want To Take You Higher,” with its “Boom-chocka-locka-locka” refrain was engraved on my brain cells. “Oh, Sly!” was all I could say.

“Sooooo, how’d you like to go?” Judy teased. I could hear her grinning all the way from town.

“Me?” I shouted. “But, Judy, I’m not worthy! So, who do I have to kill?”

Dog Days Stories: Who Needs A Machine Gun?

It was on one of these trips, in one of those big new stores, on a warm spring day in 1954, that I found the most exciting toy gun in the world.

I had lots of toy guns, usually squirt guns or cap pistols. The cap pistols were almost all long-barreled six shooters, like the ones Roy Rogers and the Lone Ranger used in the movies or one TV. The caps for them came in little thin rolls of reddish papers, with a row of dark bumps down the middle. The bumps were the gunpowder, or whatever it was that went BANG when I put them in a cap gun and pulled the trigger.

Caps were always fun, even if my favorite toy gun was broken. I could unroll them on the ground, and take a rock and pound on the dark gunpowder bumps with it. If we hit them just right they’d go POW and make a flash and a little puff of smoke. Sometimes we would find a big rock and smash a whole rolled up roll with it, to see if all the caps would explode at once; but usually they didn’t.

The only trouble with caps was that they got used up fast and didn’t last long. So whenever I found myself in the toy department of a store with a little money, which wasn’t often, I would buy some.

I didn’t have any money at all the day I saw that new gun, and there was only sixty-five cents in my piggybank at home, so I could only look at it longingly.

This was not some glossy cowboy weapon, made to look like it was invented a hundred years ago. No, this was a submachine gun, a weapon of modern warfare, a soldier’s gun. It had a dark blue metal barrel and a wooden stock and a key on one side which I could wind up so when I pulled the trigger it would go rat-tat-tat-tat and shoot a few dozen times like a real machine gun. And I could put caps in it too, so the noise would be really loud.

Spilling The Two Secrets I Know About Garrison Keillor

In Washington DC, after a book party in The big Florida Avenue Friends Meetinghouse there. The book was a collection of stories by Russian and American writers, put together by a joint committee, and supposed to be a contribution to ending the Cold War. This Was just before Gorbachev came in and turned all that upside down. Garrison had contributed a story, and showed up at the party.
After I shook his hand, we both leaned over the refreshment table, and I Saw that it was just the two of us there for the moment; everyone else was in Scattered clusters, many of them murmuring in Russian.
I Figured I only had a couple minutes, so I pounced, and asked the question that had stayed with me all the years I had been listening tomthe show android eading his stuff.
It was the question that he & all U.S. Males of his generation had to answer. Including me. (If you’re of that generation, or think you’re familiar with it (us), think for a minute and see if you can guess what it was . . . .

New: A Religious Autobiography From “Interesting Times”

My friend & colleague Stephen Angell read my new book “Meetings,” and here’s what he said:

A vivid, lively, kaleidoscopic self-portrait of a fascinating Catholic-turned-Quaker journalist, writer and activist. Chuck Fager’s autobiography is one of the best that I’ve seen of an aspiring nonviolent revolutionary’s Life in the Sixties. (The early seventies are covered, too, in which he and other radicals took a more conservative turn.) Fager seems to be everywhere, providing revealing insights from interviews with Phil Berrigan and E. F. Schumacher, among others. He also provides wonderful portraits of Quakers who made their mark on the world and who deserve not to be forgotten, Sam Levering, Morris Mitchell, and Louis Alger, among them. Even topics such as “how I came to love the Bible” are presented in a sprightly and thought-provoking fashion; one of his unforgettable characters, the Prophet Jeremiah, hasn’t been alive in thousands of years!

Spoiler Alert: Atticus Finch Isn’t Perfect. (I Can Live With That. Can You?)

I’ll hold off on a pre-emptive literary judgment on the novel itself til I read it (counting down the hours); but as a slice drawn from actual history & life, the good Atticus/bad Atticus (or as I prefer, the Easy-Simple Atticus vs the Complex-More Human Atticus) is a no-brainer.

See, I’ve Been There – Done That. For instance (one of many) I learned long ago that the Martin Luther King I shared a jail cell with in Selma, Alabama, had earlier faked and plagiarized most of the dissertation that gained him the title of “Doctor.” And further, that this dauntless crusader against the public immorality of American racism & militarism had a private sexual morality that departed widely from his professed Christian values.