9/11 and Dorothy Day

 

I'm backing into this one.

My mother, daughter of Irish immigrants, was from Brooklyn. I lived in Manhattan most of the time from 1974 to 1982, then moved upstate to be a daily newspaper reporter. I love the city.

I got married, and we took my first child, a daughter, down to a Long Island church to be baptized; then at my mother's house she was held in the arms of her great-grandmother, Mary Gaffney.

Also at that celebration was a friend of mine from the city and her husband. It was one of the last times I saw her because we were drifting out of touch, as people do -- except on 9/11 when I called her house. I don't think it was when I was writing the editorial for the 9/12 Schenectady Daily Gazette, but later, when I got home. I called because she worked for Dean Witter, had survived the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, and was still employed there.

By 9/11, Dean Witter had become part of Morgan Stanley, and its offices were in the second tower to be hit, between the 43rd and 72nd floors. You may have heard of the company's security chief, Rick Rescorla, one of many true heroes that day. The plane, United Airlines Flight 175, hit between the 77th through 84th floors. It made an enormous noise and swayed the building, my friend told me, as she and her colleagues were walking down underneath.

The aforementioned daughter joined the US Army as a private, married a soldier and started a family, retiring after 16 years with two deployments in Afghanistan and one in Iraq. I am in awe of her achievements and honorable service.

Dorothy Day died in 1980, almost 21 years before 9/11. I was thinking about writing a post here about the latest bureaucratic step toward her possible canonization, but lacked enthusiasm. Not that I oppose the process. While Dorothy was famously dismissive about people calling her a saint, in the non-official sense she obviously was one, as a faithful Catholic and transparently good person.

Opinions are -- steering into safe cliché to avoid a more scatological one which comes to mind -- a dime a dozen. My editorial about 9/11 was conventionally hawkish. I wrote a column I liked better, about the hundreds of firemen and cops who died. In 2003, the Gazette downsized me out of the Opinion Department back to the news side of the operation, where objectivity was my goal.

It can be a sketchy business to declare what a dead person would have thought or done about this or that, but I think a couple of uncontroversial statements can be made about a hypothetically living Dorothy in the 21st century, and specifically how she would have responded to 9/11.

She would, like almost everyone else, have grieved for the dead and their families, especially in the city that was her home, and admired the courageous rescuers. She would have done what she could to help -- which would not have involved changing a lifelong habit of declining to vote for presidential candidates. Nor would she have supported any of the wars.

I am still not all the way won over to her pacifism. But observing the history of this century from the Mideast to Ukraine, the case I think she could have made is overwhelming my defenses. Not entirely. When I hear of African Christians being massacred by jihadis, I think they have the right to defend themselves, their families and neighbors. But my increasing instinct, argument, hope and prayer is to avoid war -- including civil war -- and make peace.   

How Newspaper Journalism Shaped "The Detective and Dorothy Day"

 

The guy in the middle hosts an annual picnic in the park at this time of year, where we three friends often meet up, and did yesterday. We got to know each other 21-plus years ago as reporters for the Daily/Sunday Gazette of Schenectady. I'm the one on the right, a generation older. The other two were single then, but are now married fathers -- as am I, though my children are long grown up. I spent most of my 21 Gazette years at the Opinion department and copy desk, moving on to reporting for the last few years as that and other papers hemorrhaged jobs. Or back to reporting, as I'd done the job for four years in the 1980s at the Glens Falls Post-Star, while also organizing and leading a labor union, part of The Newspaper Guild. None of us works for a newspaper now.

As mentioned here, the first draft of The Detective and Dorothy Day was written almost 40 years ago as a straight detective story in which Dorothy Day did not appear. I rewrote it in recent years to include her (whom I'd met at the Catholic Worker farm in the 1970s), while cutting and reshaping other stuff. The book was/is very much a product of newspaper experience, especially those first four years in Glens Falls, but also my later career as I kept finding out how the world works.

My wife Barbara, who took the photo, dubbed us the three amigos on Facebook. That's the name of a not-bad 1980s comedy, and a good deal less pretentious and stolen-valor-like than the lines which come to my mind about the reporters' trade, "we happy few, we band of brothers."

Albany Times Union Reviews 'The Detective and Dorothy Day'

 

Thanks to Jack Rightymer for a positive review of The Detective and Dorothy Day in the middle of a round-up in the Albany (NY) Times Union's print edition this morning. (It came out earlier online. The bottom half of the short review is at the top of one of the columns in photo.)

I'm part of Book Fair at Brew Pub

The event is this Sunday, July 26, from 11 to 3 at the Common Roots Brewing Co., 62-58 Saratoga Ave., South Glens Falls -- which is by the Hudson River, across which in Glens Falls my wife Barbara and I lived for many years and raised our family.

This is in part a fund-raiser for the Rainbow Division Veterans Foundation, which is connected to the 42nd Infantry Division, an Army National Guard unit headquartered in Troy, NY.

I'm bringing all four of my books to sell, the first three Civil War-related ones at discount prices. And the new hardcover historical novel, The Detective and Dorothy Day, is only $20. Stop by, grab a bite and say hello.

@valenzapublishing

@commonrootsbrewing 

My Background Story of "The Detective and Dorothy Day" (with Juneteenth update)

I arrived uninvited at the Catholic Worker farm in Tivoli, NY, on March 19, 1974, one week after I turned 20 years old. At dinner there was plentiful meat -- which they good-naturedly told me not to get used to, because it was to mark the feast of St. Joseph. I stayed until late summer, then lived and worked in Manhattan through the winter, returning to Tivoli the following spring. I moved to Missouri the next winter (1975-6), and worked in a lumber yard. Then with three other people whom I'd met at Tivoli, we bought 40 acres of cheap woodland in the Ozarks. I was still clinging to the fantasy we were hippie peaceful revolutionaries. None of us or our descendants still lives on the property (but I think it's in good hands).

I also thought that way in Tivoli. It would have made more sense, given my actual skills and how my career would work out (mostly at newspapers), to have gotten involved with The Catholic Worker paper. But I did farm work instead, and was distracted with new friends and experiences, e.g. falling in love for the first time. Nor did I go to Mass, despite my Catholic upbringing, only returning to the church after I got married at age 30 (to someone I'd met the year before). 

The dedication of my 2026 novel The Detective and Dorothy Day, says: "For old friends from the Catholic Worker, living and dead. Most of whom knew Dorothy Day much better than I did." Dorothy was not at Tivoli a lot when I was there. Her daughter and grandchildren were in Vermont, and she herself lived mostly in New York City. When she was at the farm, I made no effort to hang out with her, thinking it would be a phony thing for me to do. I only recall one brief conversation, about selling out, a fictionalized version of which is in the novel.

It was not included in the book's first draft, written almost 40 years ago, and nor was Dorothy. That was a straight detective novel told in the first person and influenced by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, especially the latter. It was based on my four years as a reporter, labor organizer and leader at The Post-Star in Glens Falls, NY.

Much later, I wrote my first three published books, all focused on the American Civil War. Only one of these was a novel, The Last Circle of Ulysses Grant, which is written from the perspective of multiple historical characters, and is technically more sophisticated than the first-person narrative of The Detective and Dorothy Day.

I rewrote the detective story's 1987 draft, moving it back 12 years to add Dorothy, who gives it needed moral ballast. Among the things I cut were some but not all of the conversations about Grant and the Civil War. What stayed got amended and included in Dorothy's pacifist vision, which partly becomes the detective's. Grant, too, in his way, became a man of peace.

Update: The above was written June 17, and today, June 19, I get more reminders of America's lack of historical knowledge, as commemorators of the holiday keep insisting Gen. Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston on today's date, when in fact he got there two days earlier but issued his crucial order June 19th. My first book was a 2013 biography of Granger, and the publisher reasonably put quotes around Juneteenth in the subtitle because most people were unfamiliar with the word. In 2022, when my third Civil War-related book was published, I wrote an essay here about the holiday, to which I link below.

BOOKS BY BOB : Juneteenth as a Hopeful Symbol of National Unity

Grant the Writer

 

The image of Grant from the cover of my 2018 novel is derived from a famous photo of him on the porch of the cottage at Mount McGregor, a few weeks before his death. It was taken by an otherwise unidentified person named Howe, who apparently sold the rights to Mark Twain, publisher of Grant's Memoirs. Here it is below (aged into a brownish color): Grant, as you can see, is intently working on the manuscript of the book which Twain would publish. I think it was taken early in the morning, before Julia was up, as she would probably have preferred to see her beloved husband more properly dressed, in suit and top hat, as he appeared in most of his postwar photos including others taken at Mount McGregor. The earliness of the hour, along with the considerable weight loss Grant experienced as his health deteriorated, might also account for why he was so warmly dressed in summer. But the flap on the right side of his face was not so much as to protect against a gust of wind as to conceal the tumor which was rapidly killing him from throat cancer. Grant's book, his first, turned out to be a masterpiece. Not as long as originally planned, it left out his political career. But he got up to the end of the war, and wrote a conclusion.

This Saturday June 13 is Community Day up at the cottage, with various free family events "to celebrate the 250th anniversary of our great nation." I made arrangements to be a vendor selling my four books, but now that they've put me in the Visitor Center next to the gift store, I realize I can't be competing against that store and selling the two books of mine they have. So I'll just put one copy each of the Grant novel and Gordon Granger biography out, directing potential customers to buy them in the room next door. And I'll sell copies of my two other books, the James Montgomery biography and the new historical novel, The Detective and Dorothy Day. You might think the latter has nothing to do with Grant, but that is not the case. There are a couple of conversations about him in it, and also mention of the Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest. There was even more about Grant in the first draft, written almost 40 years ago in the 1980s. But I cut some of it, since the other three books are focused on the Civil War and this one is set a century later, and added the nonviolent radical Catholic activist Dorothy Day. 

Come on up and I'll tell you some stories, maybe of Suye Narita Gambino, who spent most of her long and remarkable life -- as inspiring, in its way, as Grant's -- at the cottage. Her husband Tony gave me and my girlfriend (now wife) Barbara our first tour of the place in 1983, while Suye (as with Barbara's help I figured out years later) was working in the garden. The Gambinos are buried nearby, in Gurn Springs Cemetery on Ballard Road in Wilton.

War and Peace

 

I'll be representing Grant Cottage (ie not selling my own books) at this event tomorrow in the Saratoga Springs Public Library (see this link for details about programs cut off at the bottom of the image).

Then on Sunday May 24 I'll be a tour guide at the cottage, maybe taking in a program by my fellow old-timer Steve Trimm. On June 13, Community Day at the cottage, I will be selling my own books and doing some more volunteering on the side. 

Even though my new historical novel, The Detective and Dorothy Day, is partly about a somewhat famous pacifist, I remain connected to the community of local historians and people interested in the American Civil War, which was the main subject of my first three books.

And I remain formed by the Catholic Worker, where I briefly interacted with Dorothy in 1974-5, as the Vietnam War came to an end. Since then, the United States has involved itself in many other conflicts, mostly in the Middle East. 

Ulysses S. Grant avoided foreign wars as president, and had a peace policy with the American Indians -- although it fell apart in 1876. He also, as readers of his Memoirs can attest, was a blunt, honest and forceful critic of the Mexican War, in which he had fought hard as a young officer. Grant, like Washington and Eisenhower, was obviously no pacifist, but I think all three would be almost as appalled as Day at the routine involvement of our country in a seemingly endless series of wars over the past several generations, with a potential all-destroying world war an ever-present possibility.

The remains of 44 people, mostly young soldiers of the Continental Army, are being reinterred this weekend in Lake George. They were veterans of that army's disastrous Canadian campaign of 1775-6, and very likely died from smallpox. It is proper and poignant for their bones to be laid to rest at Lake George Battlefield Park, and for us to remember, celebrating 250 years since the nation's birth, how the turning point of that war came only 30-odd miles south of Lake George. It was the year after their deaths and the Declaration of Independence, when the Continental Army won the battles of Saratoga. 

But I can't help thinking of Iran, how easy it is to start an unnecessary war expecting easy victory, only to become immediately responsible, through an apparent targeting error, for the deaths of many schoolgirls. Easy, too, to get ensnared in escalation when things go wrong instead of cutting losses, theirs and ours.