Veterans Day: Better Late Than Never

By Pat Browning

Living in California’s Central Valley I got to know several Americans of Japanese descent who were herded into internment camps during World War II. Some of them simply moved on with their lives after the war and didn’t talk about it. Some of them were still bitter. Some of them had worked their way out of the camps by taking acceptable jobs far away. At least one of them had fought with the famed 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the “Go For Broke” regiment.

In 1994, as a reporter for The Hanford Sentinel I interviewed a Valley man who had been taken out of a camp in Arkansas because he could speak and read Japanese. Dick Kishiue was chosen as one of the top-secret “Yankee Samurai” who served as interpreters in the Nisei Military Intelligence Service with army and navy units from the Aleutians to the far islands of the South Pacific.

According to Kishiue, each one traveled at all times with two armed guards so that nervous GIs wouldn’t shoot them by mistake. When the translators were discharged at the end of the war they were told never to talk about their service, and for 50 years they didn’t. At a reunion in Hawaii their astonishing stories finally began to come out.

Kishiue was a farmer, as were so many of the Valley’s Japanese Americans. He was a modest, unassuming man but he was proud of his wartime service. At the time of our talk he still made regular trips to the Bay area for dinner with some of his wartime buddies. He was active in Japanese-American veterans affairs, both locally and statewide.

My feature story won an award in the 1995 California Newspaper Publishers Association contest. It was my fourth CNPA award. In a long lifetime I haven’t come up with much to brag about, but I’m perfectly happy to settle for bragging rights in the case of those awards.

In October, 65 years after World War II ended, President Barack Obama signed legislation awarding the Congressional Gold Medal to the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and the 100th Infantry Battalion, known as the "Go for Broke" fighting units, as well as the 6,000 Japanese-Americans who served in the Military Intelligence Services during WWII. The medal will be on permanent display at the Smithsonian Institute.


The award comes too late for Dick Kishiue to enjoy it. I did a Google search and up popped his obituary. He died in May of this year. May he rest in peace.

The 1951 movie ‘Go For Broke” is in the public domain and you can watch it on You Tube. It’s in black and white and there are a couple of commercials so brief you won’t even have time to get a cup of coffee. There are some familiar movie cliches but when you think about it, war itself is the biggest cliché of all.


Although the movie can be seen on You Tube, that web site is shirty about links. My links come up with an error message. You can go to www.youtube.com and search for “Go For Broke” to find it.

One URL that does work with no problem is the link to Classic Free Movie Downloads -- http://www.classicfreemoviedownloads.com/movies4.htm

You’ll find three largely forgotten films from the 1950s at the site. “Go For Broke” is one. The other two are “The Big Combo” (1955) starring Cornel Wilde in a crime film, and “Vengeance Valley” (1951), a western starring Burt Lancaster and Robert Walker. Just pick your movie and click on the Download Movie link.

“Go For Broke” is a good movie, with music guaranteed to stir the blood, and it’s funny, too. A running joke is the commanding officer’s tour leaflets touting the glories of Italy and France as his men slog from place to place.

Which brings me to TALLGRASS, a novel by Sandra Dallas about the effect of a Japanese internment camp on both the internees and the residents of the nearby town.

The place: The fictional small town of Ellis in southeastern Colorado. The year: 1942. Not really a crime novel despite two killings, and not really a war novel despite the time frame, TALLGRASS is a story of relationships, personal and communal, with a bit of mass hysteria thrown in for good measure.

A snowstorm sets the scene for murder: “The snow, which had started before Christmas, continued all night, a hard, stinging snow brought by a wind that swept a thousand miles across the prairie.” The morning after, a young girl is found frozen in a haystack behind her father’s barn. She has been raped and murdered.

The narrator is Rennie Stroud, 13 years old when the story begins. She draws me into her life and times as easily as if we were sitting at a table in Lee Drug, gossiping while we drink Coca-Cola through our straws.

After the snowstorm murder, local residents are quick to blame someone from Tallgrass, a Japanese internment camp outside of town. Resentment of the “Japs” has run high since a large group arrived and was whisked off to barracks surrounded by barbed wire fences and observed by armed U.S. troops in high watchtowers. Never mind that the internees look and dress like ordinary Americans from California, they are regarded as enemies, possibly even spies.

In spite of its Norman Rockwell landscape, this is no namby-pamby novel. Townspeople find all kinds of ugly if mostly non-violent ways to make the internees unwelcome. One of the best scenes depicts a hostile gathering outside the Tallgrass camp gates that is quietly defused by Rennie’s mother. The solution to the first murder is a bit of a dull thud, but the solution to the second killing is both practical and disturbing. The epilogue moves the story forward to 1974, with a bittersweet ending.


The author recreates small-town America in the 1940s just as I remember my own upbringing. Reading it brought back a lot of memories.

Tomorrow: Introducing author Susan Santangelo, new blogger at Murderous Musings.
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**“Go For Broke” photo from Classic Free Movie Downloads;
**Japanese American family awaiting evacuation in Hayward, CA 1942, photo by Dorothea Lange, Wikipedia.
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My Life Between Covers

By Pat Browning


Answering the age-old question: What’s a nice girl like me doing in a place like this?

My first mystery started out as FULL CIRCLE in 2001, and became ABSINTHE OF MALICE in 2008. It’s a long, twisted story but here are questions people are most likely to ask.


What is your book about?
The logline: It’s just another Labor Day weekend in the small California town of Pearl, until discovery of a skeleton in a cotton field leads to murder ... and romance. It’s about small town secrets and getting away with murder when you have money and power.


The working title changed as the story changed. The first title was ROOM THIRTEEN. The second was SKELETON CREW. For a long time the title was MURDER IN THE ROUND. In 2001, about a week before I uploaded the manuscript to iUniverse, I changed the title to FULL CIRCLE.


Then Krill Press came along in 2008 and republished it as ABSINTHE OF MALICE, and I ended up doing some tweaking and revising one more time. It’s beginning to feel like my life’s work.


What inspired you to write a mystery?
About 1995, while I was working for The Hanford (California) Sentinel, the managing editor suggested that I write a book column. I went to the library and walked along the shelves pulling out books that looked interesting. Most of them turned out to be mysteries.


After a few weeks I decided to write my own. I actually said, "How hard can it be?" Five years later I could have written a book on just how hard it is. Through it all I was taking online writing classes, asking questions in chat rooms, lurking on listservs, trying to learn everything I could in the shortest possible time.

FULL CIRCLE had more lives than a cat, with different titles, different characters, different plots and subplots. I think I ended up with nine or ten "final drafts," each time thinking that I finally got it right. Eventually I had to say, "Stick a fork in it, it’s done."


After it was published I still couldn't tell people what it was about because I didn't know. After I heard enough questions and did enough presentations I finally figured out what I had written. It all came from real life -- setting, characters, everything except the plot, which was pure fiction.


How long did it take you to publish your novel?
I probably spent a year writing a few query letters and talking to a couple of agents and editors, but I'm too long in the tooth to spare that kind of time. I had been checking out the new print-on-demand technology via the Internet, and iUniverse seemed to be the best game in town. Not only that, I could publish for $99. It was quick, and I liked the idea of total control over my book. I found Ariana Overton on the Internet, and she designed a beautiful cover for $100. Best $100 I ever spent. So, I formatted and uploaded my book about July of 2001, and by the end of August the finished product was in my hands


A major factor in my decision to go that route was my husband's health. I had given up the newspaper job to be at home with him. So there I was, sitting at the computer for hours at a time, days on end. He was patient, interested, supportive. He kept saying, "When are you going to let me read that book?" Once I decided I’d taken it as far as I could, I let him read the manuscript, then I contacted iUniverse.


He was so proud of that book that he told everybody he met about it. I don't know whether he generated any sales, but it gave him such a kick to talk about it. I never regretted publishing it myself. It was a gift to both of us.


When your husband died, prompting your move from California to Oklahoma, how did you cope? Did writing help?
Ed died 7 years ago this month. It's a terrible experience to sit in a hospital room and watch someone you love slip away from you, and know there is nothing you can do to hold them here. I've done that twice, and the second time was worse than the first. You'd think you'd get used to it. You don't. Another piece of your heart breaks. You can fall on the floor, or you can get up and go home.

My second book was off to a good start but it went onto a shelf while I got my life in order. Fortunately, I had a logline and an outline, so it wasn’t a total loss. An odd thing happened. Going through Ed’s files I came across a snapshot taken in 1937. At the time he was a teenager living in rural California, but I would have known him anywhere.

He hadn’t changed at all. He just got older. I realized this is true of real people and just as true of characters in a book. There’s a lot of talk in writerly circles about characters “growing” and changing, but I’m not quite sure what it means. People – or characters – don’t change, except perhaps superficially. They just get older. What binds us to them is their dependability; that is, they usually do what we would expect them to do. It’s who they are, and that doesn’t change much. Sooner or later they come up against a problem that challenges them but their response is true to their character.


The best example I can think of offhand is Scarlett O’Hara in GONE WITH THE WIND. From the first page to the last she never wavered in two things: her pursuit of Ashley Wilkes and her determination to save the plantation Tara.


What conflicts does your protagonist Penny Mackenzie face in your second book?
Here’s the logline: Small town reporter Penny Mackenzie tracks an offbeat Christmas story and finds herself in the middle of a murder and the mysterious desecration of an old Chinese cemetery.


Penny wants to solve the mystery of a long-dead Chinese man, whose records seem non-existent, and she wants to find out who murdered someone who seemed to have no enemies. On another level, she’s resisting marriage to the man of her dreams (and occasional nightmares) because she doesn’t quite trust him.


Someone who read my first book complained that there were no children in it. True. My characters are the people I know best, baby boomers and their elders. Unless I change the ending, the only character with a speaking part who is younger than 40 is a parrot.


How would you sum up your experience as an author?
Here's a quote from Jonathan Harrington, who wrote the Danny O'Flaherty mystery series. In an online interview with Charlotte Austin, he said:

"When I am gone, all that will be left are the stories I tried to tell in my writing. When the world is no more, all that will be left is a story that begins: Once upon a time a group of people lived on a place called Earth ... We are writing the story of our existence. When everything else is gone, all that will remain is the story of who we were."


Today's writers have computers and word processing software, but in a sense we are still drawing pictures on the walls of the cave, leaving proof of our existence and the way we see the world around us.

What are your future writing plans?
Finshing that second book. Beyond that, I have notes—bits and pieces really, and research notes—for a third and possibly fourth book in the Penny Mackenzie series. There's another possibility, too, for a standalone set in some interesting place I've visited, such as India. Whether it happens remains to be seen. Remains to be seen. Sounds like a good title for a mystery, doesn't it?

Summer Shorts: Love Is So Grand, Life Is So Daily

Photos: Tangier, May 1978

By Pat Browning

“When Ed and I decided to get married and live in his house, I wondered what to do with my camel.”

So begins a column on later-life marriage that I wrote for The Hanford Sentinel in the mid-1990s. My old friend and road buddy, Marlene (on the right in the photo), came across the clipping recently and sent me a copy. It brought back a lot of memories. The camel was a special souvenir from our 1978 trip to the Costa del Sol, with a side trip to Tangier.

We were at the dock in Tangier, ready to board the boat for the trip across the Strait of Gibraltar to Spain, when the camel seller showed up. I had spent all my money. He had a credit card machine. I didn’t have a credit card. We used Marlene’s card, and I hand-carried my souvenir camel all the way home.

Here’s the column as I wrote it about 15 years after the fact.

****
Love is grand, life is daily.

When Ed and I decided to get married and live in his house, I wondered what to do with my camel.

We're talking trivia here. That camel is a souvenir I carted home from Tangier and kept on display to remind me of good times. By the time we moved out some of Ed's belongings, moved in some of mine, and sold or gave away the rest, there still was no place for the camel.

It's in a cabinet in the garage. I see it when I look for the electric knife.

The road to marital bliss is full of potholes at any age. Later-life marriage adds a few of its own. For openers, you have two people who are saddled with the habits of a lifetime.

You hate to get up in the morning, love to stay up at night, You're crazy about cats and like to jet off to exotic places. Why should you change?

Because there's someone sleeping in your bed who's up at the crack of dawn and thinks nine-thirty is the middle of the night, who doesn't even like dogs, and wants to visit a buddy in Oregon.

Not important, you think, but it was a straw, don't forget, that broke the camel's back. Love is so grand. Life is so daily.

For some older couples the jolt of adjusting goes right off the Richter scale. They're in a lawyer's office before the ink dries on the marriage license. Couples who make it are those who care enough to give up some attitudes that probably weren't important in the first place.

On some issues, of course, you can stand fast. For me, it's ironing shirts. I don't do shirts. Never did, never will. I'm fair, though. I don't do blouses either. If it doesn't drip dry I don't wear it.

My friend Marlene and I hashed all this out last week over a Denver sandwich and a bowl of beef barley soup. We agreed that marriage later in life is special because you're really ready to settle in and grow old with someone.

My camel was small potatoes compared with the furnishings and frou-frou Marlene kept when she got married. In a weak moment, no doubt, Wayne told her she could refurnish his house any way she wanted. Like a flash, she hauled out his stuff and moved hers in.

She sold his patio table while he was sitting at it. When he said, "Whoaaaa!" as she took his favorite mirror down from the wall, she just reminded him of his promise. She has a frog collection you wouldn't believe and dispersed it to every room in the house. Obviously, she married a saint

Couples who make it to their 40th or 50th wedding anniversary often seem so compatible that you assume the marriage was made in heaven. More likely, they just learned early on what they could or couldn't do or have, and decided that very few things are worth a fight.

As someone (Mark Twain, I think) once said, most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.

Younger couples face the daunting task of building a life from scratch, of doing everything for the first time. Older couples are ready to start unloading responsibilities like mowing an acre of lawn twice a week. There are bank accounts, insurance policies and property titles to sort out Grown-up children don't always look kindly on Mom's or Pop's latest adventure.

But some things never change. Love is a wonder at any age. A first date is as nerve-wracking at 60 as it was at 16.

You get married when you're older for about the same reasons as when you were younger: for love and companionship, and someone to care when the world caves in on you.
****

It’s a bittersweet memory. Ed died in 2003. Wayne died in 2006. Marlene still has her frog collection. The camel went out with my other souvenirs in a garage sale before I left California and moved back to Oklahoma.

I have a framed snapshot of Ed sitting at our desk, playing a card game on the computer. In the background, on a corner of the desk, sits a souvenir wine bottle with a menu printed on it. It was a big bottle, either a Double Magnum or Jeroboam champagne bottle, from New Orleans.

That trip was in 1984, long before I met Ed. At some funky place in New Orleans, Marlene and I ordered a meal from the bottle, and then, of course, I bought the bottle. I hand-carried it home. Marlene carried the set of gumbo bowls I bought.

We weren’t even supposed to be there. We were supposed to be in Marrakech. Royal Air Maroc flew from New York City to Morocco once or twice a week. We had plane tickets from Fresno to JFK, through Denver, but when we got to Denver, a United Airlines employee had just rammed our plane with some kind of heavy equipment he was moving.

It was late, and no other airline had a flight that would get us to New York in time to catch Royal Air Maroc. We repaired to United’s Red Carpet club room, looked at schedules, and decided to go to New Orleans because we were wearing summer clothes.

And that is another story.

Copyright © 2009 by Pat Browning