The Writing Life - A Daring Reporter & A Gutsy Reinvention

This episode opens with Jack Torry, author of "The Last One Out," a new book chronicling the life of Yates McDaniel, a daring reporter in World War II.

McDaniel was a foreign war correspondent for the Associated Press who took enormous risks to provide newspapers with accurate and riveting firsthand coverage of the war. He's considered the equal of legendary World War II correspondents Theodore White of Time Magazine, George Weller of The Chicago Daily News, Cecil Brown of CBS Radio, and Ernie Pyle of Scripps-Howard. The Associated Press boasted that during the war, McDaniel was the first “to arrive and last to leave.” 

As a war correspondent, McDaniel was known all over the world. Yet when he died in Florida in 1983, "few outside his family paid much attention," Jack says. "At age 76, he seemed like just another white-haired retiree whose final years passed with little notice amid so many other senior citizens in Florida. The only hint of his fame came in a brief obituary buried on the inside pages of The New York Times." 

In this interview, Jack talks about McDaniel's reluctance to write his memoirs or tell spellbinding stories, which is why he was forgotten by 1983 and why his name is rarely mentioned in the pantheon of war correspondents. In his book, Jack tells those spellbinding stories for him.

Published by Schiffer Military Publishing, "The Last One Out" is Jack's third book. He's a former Washington bureau chief for The Columbus Dispatch and Dayton Daily News, where he covered politics, Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court. A journalism graduate of The Ohio State University, he's also the author of “Endless Summers: The Fall and Rise of the Cleveland Indians” (now the Cleveland Guardians) and “Henderson’s Light: Drinking, Driving and a Deadly Encounter.”

Kate and Jack have known each other since their Ohio State days, and they've kept in touch over the years. Jack lives in Leesburg, Va., with his wife, Saundra Torry, a former reporter for The Washington Post and a retired editorial writer for USA Today.

This episode also includes a short segment about reinventing oneself.  In it, Kate interviews another longtime friend, Joy York, who embarked on her own reinvention and eventually realized her dream of becoming a writer. Like Jack in the previous interview, Joy is a published author.

Joy enjoyed a long and satisfying career in retail management, but she knew that the time had come to prioritize other parts of her life. So she took a big leap to spend more time at home with her family, do community service and pursue other interests including fulfilling her goal of becoming a published author.

Joy is the author of "Genuine Deceit: A Suspense Novel," her first adult fiction book, and the young adult novel "The Bloody Shoe Affair." You can learn more about these books on Joy's website. 

This is Kate Jones. Thank you for listening to The Gale Hill Radio Hour!

The show is available in Apple and Google Podcasts, Spotify and other podcast directories. Also on Substack and YouTube; Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to The Gale Hill Radio Hour. I'm your host, Kate Jones. In this episode, I have the pleasure of interviewing Jack Torry, a longtime journalist and the author of “The Last One Out,” the new biography of Yates McDaniel. He was a war correspondent who in his time was internationally famous for being one of World War II's most daring reporters.

Jack and I have known each other for a long while, having met decades ago at The Ohio State University back in the day when it was known simply as Ohio State. In our conversation, Jack talks about his career path since college, including his decades covering Capitol Hill; his two previously published nonfiction books; and, of course, his latest book about Yates McDaniel.  

We’ll begin with a question I posed to Jack about why hardly anyone today has heard about this once famous figure: 

Would you start out today with how relatively unknown this war correspondent you wrote about was for much of his later life?

Jack: 
Well, Yates McDaniel, during the Second World War, was one of the best-known reporters in the world. He had written about the fall of Singapore to the Japanese in 1942, the fall of Nanking to the Japanese in 1937, and he had covered the retaking of Manila in 1945. And unfortunately for him, after the war, like for a lot of war correspondents, it was tough to find a niche for him.

There were a number of these guys and women who were war correspondents. And when you took them off the battlefield and put them in an office, it wasn't always a good fit.

And he was used to being right in front of the action. After that, he just didn't have the same impact stories. The Associated Press assigned him first to Detroit as the Bureau Chief there and then moved him in 1949 to Washington to cover the Pentagon.

And he stayed on the Pentagon beat for about a decade. But you know, by the end of his time at the Pentagon, it was like they weren't quite sure what to do with him anymore. So he ended up ironically covering things like one of the ones that just sort of blew me away. He covered the White House Easter egg hunt.

Kate: 
Oh, my gosh. From war to Easter eggs!

Jack: 
Yes. I was never able to find out if he got that assignment because he simply drew the short straw because a lot of times when a bureau is covering events, everybody is eventually going to get one clunker to cover. So it may just have been that. But he was not covering the big stories.

He had a peripheral role in the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 when the U.S. nuclear submarine Thresher sank by accident off Massachusetts in 1963. He didn't have a big role there. And it was almost like, you know when President Nixon announced in 1971 that he would visit China the following year, I can't find any record at that time that McDaniel wrote any of the stories that came out of the AP bureau that night in spite of the fact that he, along with Theodore White and a gentleman at The New York Times, probably knew more about China than any other reporters in the world.

Kate:
Wow. He had become irrelevant for that sort of thing, I guess.

Jack:
I guess you could say that it was very, very, very hard. I mean I think most of the people he worked with are now dead. So it's hard to understand what happened. But I did talk to a couple of them, and they both basically said that nobody knew that this white-haired guy who was off in the corner at the AP had done all these things in World War II. First, because he didn't talk about them. And secondly, he just didn't seem to quite fit. And this is not unusual. I also suspect there's a high rate of burnout among reporters. At some point, they just go, "Oh, my God, I can't do this anymore." And it may have been in his case, he was burned out.

I was never able to track that down for sure. But I do think that it's fairly safe to assume that by the time he was in D.C. in the ’50s and ’60s, he just wasn't quite doing the same things. I mean, he would appear on "Meet the Press" and be on a panel there, but it wasn't the same thing. And as a result, by the time we got into the ’60s, people had completely forgotten about it.

Kate:
Right. At some point moved to Florida. That's where he passed away at age 76 in 1983. In the obituary, there was some small hint of his fame. So then what happened? How did you come across him?

Jack:
Well, actually there's a book that came out in 1961 written by John Toland called “But Not In Shame.” It's about the first six months after Pearl Harbor, and I read that when it came out. I don't know if I was 10 or 11, and I just devoured it. And he did six long interviews with Yates, who was then in Washington.

And Yates described for the first time in 20-odd years his escape from Singapore, the rescue ship he was on that had sunk, and what it was like to cover Singapore. And I just was fascinated by the whole story. And as the years went by, I often wondered about William Shearer and Edward R Murrow and those people who were very well known from the Second World War, and there was Yates who just sort of faded away.

And I found it really interesting because in reality, he really should not have lived very long. He took so many risks. I mean, he was lucky to be alive when he got to Washington in 1949.

Kate: 
So in that book from 1961, there are stories and interviews with him, but the entire book, was that about him? 

Jack:
No, it was about the entire war effort. He takes up about 78 pages in a 500-page manuscript.

Kate:
Oh, that's interesting. Are there any other books about him? Apparently no movies. That's a lot of the reason that he hasn't been remembered.

Jack:
One of the things Toland did was donate all of his papers to the Library of Congress. And I went through all of his interviews with McDaniel, and they really tell you a lot because he spoke of things that he had rarely ever spoken about. And so once I looked at those, I said, "I can make this a book. This can be done." 

Because he was an Associated Press reporter, literally, every story he wrote can be found on newspapers.com. The other thing that happened was in 19... I'm going to get the year wrong ... in 1995, 1996,  Iris Chang, a Chinese-American writer, wrote a book called "The Rape of Nanking," which took place in 1937.

The Japanese captured Nanking, which was then China's capital, and they murdered about 300,000 people and raped untold thousands of women. It was just one of the worst atrocities of the Second World War, if not the worst. And the reporters who were there were the Western reporters who stayed in Nanking. One of them was Yates. Iris Chang wrote a little bit about each one of them.

And on the memorial to the Nanking Massacre, in what is now known as Nanjing, they quote one of Yates' stories, which ends with: "My last memories of Nanking are dead Chinese, dead Chinese, dead Chinese."

Kate:
Oh, my gosh, what a sentence that is.

Jack:
He was a great writer. I mean, when he was in Singapore, he was the last Western reporter to leave. And, you know, there he is, sitting there in his hotel room in Singapore. He's got a British censor next to him who's having a breakfast of biscuits and brandy. And he's got another PR guy next to him, saying, "Come on, we've got to get going. We've got to get going." 

And Yates writes what became known as his Goodbye to Singapore story. And the opening line is "The sky over Singapore is black with a smoke of a dozen huge fires as I write my last message from this once beautiful, prosperous and peaceful city."

Kate:
Oh, that's quite beautiful. And it does sum it all up, doesn't it?

Jack:
It does. It's a great story. And every now and again, it pops up. Robert Weintraub who used to be at The New York Times, wrote a book about a British officer who escaped from Singapore and was in large part saved by his dog, whose name was Judy. 

The book is "No Better Friend: One Man, One Dog, and Their Extraordinary Story of Courage and Survival in WWII." It's a really good book. I would recommend it highly. But in there, he mentions Yates, who was at that time in Singapore. And he quotes from the Goodbye to Singapore story, which was printed all over the world in British, American, Australian papers.

Yates was like this international star at that time. And he was on his escape from Singapore in this rickety old Yangtze River steamer. The boat was sunk by the Japanese, and about 132 survivors got to a deserted island, and they waited for a rescue ship and that's where the cover photo comes from. Yates sitting on a fallen log, taking his notes. It's just an incredible story, and like I said, he should not have survived.

Kate:
How many times do you think he escaped death? Do you have any idea from from your research?

Jack:
He joked about it during the American and Australian landing in the Philippines in 1945. He writes a letter to his wife, Natalie, who still lived in Australia and he says had one of my narrow escapes last night but a Japanese show it just missed the ship. But if you look at Nanking and Kingston which was which was sold in the Japanese in 1937 and Hankow in 1938 and Singapore in 1942, he was pretty lucky to survive.

I mean he does this escape from Singapore. It is first on a Yangtze River steamer, it gets there, then picked up by a Malaysian planters boat and they have this incredibly high-risk, high-sea escape to Sumatra where they then hire a bus and they travel up the mountains of Sumatra and down until they reach until they reach the port of Amazon which was a Dutch port on the western coast of Sumatra.

They managed to get on a British destroyer there, and they reached Java, which he then has to quickly leave because Java's falling into the Japanese and they get he gets on a old cattle book, which made about seven nights, which is probably eight miles an hour. And they have to go all the way from Batavia and Java to Perth and Australia, which is a couple thousand miles. Nobody thought they were going to live. 

Kate
He loved to tell about it. He loved to write about it.

Jack: 
Yes. Now, there's a funny thing, too, because he dies of lung cancer. He was a heavy smoker like a lot of reporters there. And when he's cleaning out his apartment in Singapore, he takes two cameras a typewriter, binoculars, his credentials, and three big tins of camel cigarettes Yeah. If I'm going to be stuck someplace, I'm going to have to smoke.

And he you know, so he was a lifetime smoker. And he was diagnosed with lung cancer about two weeks before he died. And that was it.

Kate: Yeah. Wow. So you mentioned briefly his wife, Natalie. She was instrumental in in his work, wasn't she? I mean, they had a very modern marriage.

Jack:
They exactly had a modern marriage. Yates had grown up in China and Soochow, which is outside of Shanghai, his parents were very strict Southern Baptist missionaries. And he goes to the United States to Richmond College in the University of North Carolina for his degree. And he's the only one of the kids who comes back to China and he decides to become a reporter there.

00:15:39:12 - 00:16:16:15
Jack
Well, Natalie, McDaniel was wife. Her name was Natalie Isles. She was an Irish Catholic woman from Boston who had grown up in Japan and was working in China in the US consulate in in Nanking or Shanghai. And he couldn't have brought home anybody that would have shocked his father more. I mean, you know, he it's just like here comes this worldly woman from, you know, who is Catholic.

Jack:
I mean, this is like, you know, everything else. And her favorite saying was something in fact, it's 5:00. Time for a drink and badly needed.

Kate:
Missionary parents work, you know.

Jack
His father just completely had a cow. And he said at one point, well, she's not welcome in my house. And Yates responded, "If she's not welcome, I'm not welcome." And and for years, they were estranged. They did not go to his wedding, which was in Japan. And  there's no mention of Yates' name in any of the letters.

Kate:
Huh? Really? You know, put them off for a period of time.

Jack:
They did. But it was funny. Nanking brought his his mom's name was Nanny Annie and Ivy and it gets a little confusing because you have Natalie, a nanny, and nanny was, if anything, just as strict as Yates' father. Well, when Yates is in thinking, he's, you know, they're there. Natalie is in Shanghai waiting for him to find out if she gets out and she's staying at a at the Cafe Mansions, which is an upscale apartment rental place in Shanghai.

Jack
And of all people, her mother-in-law stops in to wait for Yates to get out of banking. And when they Yates finally calls she says, I'm down at that. I just got to the office here in Shanghai. I've got to write something, and then I'll be over there. Natalie starts crying And so her mother-in- law, Nancy, picks up the phone, talks to Yates, hangs up, and she says, "Now, dear, normally I don't believe in spirits, but this could be one of those moments where it might be good for both of us to have a drink."

Kate
Oh, isn't that wonderful?

00:18:26:02 - 00:19:05:18
Jack
It she Natalie was. You're right. It was a modern marriage. They she spoke fluent Japanese, so she served as an interpreter for him a lot She took notes, he typed out stuff. She was part of this. And, you know, they when they were in handcuffs in 1938, a number of Japanese soldiers had been captured. And she, he brought Natalie along to serve as the interpreter when they interrogated the Japanese prisoners.

00:19:06:19 - 00:19:30:05
Jack
And, and there's a funny story where in 1936 Franco Shirk, who was the Chinese leader at the time he was kidnapped And it was a big, big story. Well Yates had a horrendous ear infection and was bedridden in their house in Nanjing. So he says, well I got to get up and cover this. And he says, no you're not.

00:19:30:12 - 00:19:56:03
Jack
And he says, yes I am. Oh you're not. And she won. And so she says, I'll do it for you. Okay. So she goes and starts interviewing all of his sources and and then she goes back with the information she is. He dictates the story to her. She tapes it up, sends it down to the cable shop, comes back and.

00:19:57:05 - 00:20:00:12
Jack
And so essentially, without her, he couldn't file the story.

00:20:00:18 - 00:20:01:11
Kate
Right.

00:20:03:02 - 00:20:33:12
Jack
And and he also, although he wanted her around a lot when they were both in Nanjing, and it's it's it's late October, the Japanese are about a month away from capturing the city. And he could tell where this is going to end. He asks her to go to the safer place of Shanghai. So to get her out of Shanghai, they had to put her aboard a river steamer which is heading down the Yangtze River to Shanghai.

00:20:34:01 - 00:20:48:20
Jack
They limited her to £40 of luggage. And so now she's got a problem. How do I get my two dogs, Lassie? And Sandie in my lovely suits and my kind of coats and my jewelry and the £40.

00:20:48:22 - 00:20:50:04
Kate
Oh, my gosh.

00:20:51:04 - 00:21:06:14
Jack
So she wraps the dogs around here. Oh, so she could only have, like, one suitcase, wraps the dogs around her, puts two or three of the suits on covers with the tarp coats, puts her jewelry in her pocket. They board, and she boards the steamer.

00:21:06:18 - 00:21:09:01
Kate
Where there were real dogs.

00:21:09:11 - 00:21:11:11
Jack
Yes, Lassie and Sandi, they were Scotties.

00:21:12:08 - 00:21:14:05
Kate
And she wrapped them around her.

Jack
Her neck. She would have one in her lap and one around her neck. And she just, you know, she was a very resourceful person. So they're going down the river and it's cold. There's no heat. There are wooden benches. There are about as uncomfortable as could be The sky is lighting up from Japanese artillery flashes. And then they they switch to another boat, which is carrying a load of pigs and which you can only imagine what that was like.

And she finally got into Shanghai, ran an apartment at the cafe and and wait for Yates to get there. So it was she was a very resourceful, courageous woman. They were partners. And he he literally did not like being away from her when he was in Nanking. The Tiger Letter that he wasn't even sure she would ever get.

00:22:12:23 - 00:22:22:20
Jack
He said, I'm terribly lonesome without you in my imagination. I take you around with me everywhere I go and actually find myself talking out loud. You when driving through the streets.

Kate:
Oh, I bet that melted her heart when she did it.

Jack:
It did.

Kate:
Well, their relationship must have sustained him in all those years of not, you know, no longer doing the kind of work that he excelled at.

Jack:
Yeah. And it's a little difficult to tell. I don't know if she was all that upset by it because she admitted they were exhausted after they left Asia in 1946 to move to Detroit. The AP made him the bureau chief in Detroit, which nobody was ever quite able to figure out because he had never set foot in Detroit in his life and he had never covered the auto industry.

But she sort of was happy they had a nice apartment in downtown Detroit and it was quiet and they were finally able to settle down a little bit. I mean, they had literally came back the United States with no furniture, no memories, no nothing. Everything has been taken up by the state twice. Their stuff was taken by the Japanese. He lost a car to the Japanese. 

But he when he's away from her, the letters he writes, and I'll just read you a little bit here. He's in Tientsin in July of 1937: 

"This is the longest I've ever gone without hearing from you and for that matter, without ever knowing where you were. I don't like it a bit. I do love you so much. You may not realize how deeply I love you and how utterly lost I am without you. I'm not going to go moping around or worrying my heart on my sleeve. But that does not mean you aren't the one and only girl I love and always will be.

Kate:
Wow.

Jack:
Well, that works and she figures out how to get to him. She was in Japan and she got on a boat, sailed to Tientsin, and and the two of them were contained, some before it was captured by the Japanese. So it was like, you know, this is a very interesting relationship.

Kate:
No kidding. So, Jack, why do you think Yates McDaniel's story is important?

00:24:39:12 - 00:25:12:22
Jack
Well, part of it is just because it's just so blasted interesting. I mean, it's fun to write about people who largely receded from the public eye but second of all, it talks about a period that of journalism and history that really doesn't exist anymore. I think there are very few newspapers today that have foreign bureaus. Cable TV is far too often more talking heads than it is actual news.

When he was in Nanking, they had reporters there from The Chicago Tribune, Chicago Daily News, The Times of London, Reuters, AP, United Press. I mean, people from the United States, Great Britain and Australia. They really believed in foreign news and they thought it was very, very important.

Kate:
And they were knowledgeable.

Jack:
Yes. And, you know, their stories got great play in newspapers back home. And I just think that it's an interesting period of journalistic history that really doesn't exist anymore. The other thing is, Yates was a very, very neutral give-me-the-facts writer. Now, he wrote some great first-person pieces, but it was always, here's what he had seen. He was telling you, the reader,  what he had seen.

Kate:
And so he did not editorialize.

Jack:
He didn't editorialize too much. I mean, you hear every now and again, you could see now when he was interviewed, he did he was very opinionated when he was interviewed, but he wasn't so much when he wrote his stories. And it was, you know, if you read his material in China in the thirties, you you kind of knew where this is headed, that the United States was going to end up in a war.

00:26:42:05 - 00:27:11:13
Jack
And you know, it was a war that Yates didn't want. He didn't think that it was a good idea for the United States to get involved in the war against Japan. A view he later changed but it was if you read his stories, you find out what the Japanese are doing, how aggressive they were, and you know, their reasons for, you know, taking over north China and just killing tens of thousands of innocent people.

00:27:12:00 - 00:27:35:00
Jack
I mean, this is the part of the book that's a little painful because today's Japan has nothing in common with the Japan of 1938. I mean, now it's a vibrant democracy. They're a staunch friend of the United States. They don't like to admit to what happened in Nanking. They just don't do it. And their, their history books are a little.

00:27:35:00 - 00:27:41:17
Jack
Do they go lightly on it? They have scholars who insist that what happened in Nanking didn't happen as well.

00:27:42:06 - 00:27:46:19
Kate
Because kind of familiar in other realms, you know.

00:27:47:13 - 00:28:16:04
Jack
They didn't quite call it fake news. But the problem is you have all these Western reporters writing the same thing about the brutality of the Japanese when they marched in there. And and, you know, they were just just looking at a part here where he's walking around the city. And at one point he drives to one of the city walls Nanking, like a lot of Chinese cities, have these long walls surrounding them.

00:28:16:20 - 00:28:37:03
Jack
A Japanese soldier, what's his rifle ends if McDaniel McDaniel opens up his car door, holds up his hands, and that soldier then permits him to continue while he walks through and finds dead Chinese all through the streets. They head over decapitated. Chinese man plopped on top of the barricade with a biscuit. 


00:28:38:14 - 00:28:56:07
Jack
And I mean, it was brutal. It was beyond they there was they would see the end of horses and humans were all over the city. And there was a Japanese army colonel raced through the gate. The driver just rolled right all over the bodies. 

00:28:56:07 - 00:28:58:14
Kate
My goodness. Wow.

00:28:59:11 - 00:29:29:10
Jack
And it just was it was and it wasn't just Yates. This guy named Kurt Steel of the Chicago Daily News wrote this piece that he managed to get out. It's the streets throughout the city were littered with the bodies of civilians and abandoned equipment, uniforms. He watched a band of 300 Chinese being methodically executed before a wall near the waterfront he said, you know, a couple of days later, he saw the Japanese beating and jabbing helpless civilians, the dead scared.

00:29:29:11 - 00:29:57:15
Jack
I mean, the stuff is graphic. It's brutal. And it's necessary. And there were American physicians and missionaries injured in Nanking. And as the reporters one by one starting to leave. They they handed their notes to the reporters so that they could tell them what they had seen to and one of a missionaries gave Yates an envelope as he was the last one to leave there.

00:29:58:02 - 00:30:07:09
Jack
And, you know, it was just brutal. Brutal.

00:30:07:15 - 00:30:13:16
Kate
My goodness. So how did Schiffer come to publish this biography?

00:30:14:14 - 00:30:46:09
Jack
My agent was shopping this around and they were interested. And Schiffer is a medium-sized publisher in Philadelphia. And they do a lot of military books, history books, these types of things. And they're a good, solid publisher. And they can get the book out the market. The problem, of course, is with COVID, we don't know. It's tougher to figure out if you'll be able to promote the book through book signings and things like that.

00:30:46:09 - 00:30:52:11
Jack
I did book signings with the first two books. You just don't know. The second thing is there's fewer bookstores than there were then.

00:30:52:18 - 00:30:58:01
Kate
Yes. Yes. You're you're in Leesburg, Virginia. 

00:30:58:01 - 00:31:21:20
Jack
Leesburg is what we would call and Exurb of Washington. It's about 30 miles outside, maybe 35 miles outside city. And we've lived here for 20 years because we just like it out here. It's my country and it's not far from Middleburg, and it's a really nice place to live and, and I enjoyed out here. I still miss Ohio though.

00:31:21:21 - 00:31:28:21
Jack
I mean, I'm, I've got Ohio in my blood and that's never going to change. But you went.

00:31:28:21 - 00:31:43:13
Kate
To the Washington area. You're the former Washington bureau chief for The Columbus Dispatch, then Dayton Daily News. And you covered politics. Congress in the U.S. Supreme Court for how long did you do that?

00:31:44:08 - 00:32:24:17
Jack
Well, for The Dispatch, about 20 years from 2000 from the end of the 2000. I just joined the dispatch right after the 2000 presidential race and I are a retired on in 2019 and before that I was in the Washington bureau of the Toledo Blade and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and I was there for 15 years and before that I was a reporter with the now defunct Columbus Citizen Journal where I covered for sports and then I covered politics.

00:32:24:17 - 00:32:26:02
Jack
Yes, and so.

00:32:26:02 - 00:32:31:07
Kate
How long have you been in the in Washington now in D.C. or that area?

00:32:31:17 - 00:32:35:17
Jack
I first came here essentially it would be the beginning of 1989.

00:32:35:19 - 00:32:36:17
Kate
Long time.

00:32:37:01 - 00:32:40:16
Jack
It is a long time. I still I've got a lot of Ohio left in me.

00:32:40:17 - 00:32:52:04
Kate
Well you're a graduate in journalism from The Ohio State University. When we were there, it was just Ohio State.

00:32:53:21 - 00:33:17:02
Jack
I had one of my editors at the Dayton Daily News. He was a very good editor, but he'd gone to the University of Minnesota and he said, I want you to understand one thing. The word the Ohio State University is not permitted in our paper. I said, Oh, really? I said, and I would good naturedly say, well, you know, that is the proper name, so I don't care.

00:33:17:02 - 00:33:23:13
Jack
It's Ohio State University. So every now and again, I would kind of sneak it in there just to see if he was paying attention.

00:33:24:03 - 00:33:42:19
Kate
That's funny. So do you want to mention your other two books, Endless Summers, The Fall and Rise of the Cleveland Indians being the first one and Henderson's light drinking, driving, and a Deadly Encounter. So what would you like to say about those books?

00:33:43:17 - 00:34:14:22
Jack
Well, endless summers I wrote in 19 from 1993 to middle of. It took me about a year and a half to do that. And it was about I was sort of because I had been a sportswriter and my beginnings at the Columbus Citizen Journal. I was always interested in sports, but the business side of it as well. And I was particularly interested because the Indians were moving into their new ballpark in 1994.

00:34:15:16 - 00:34:18:11
Kate
Right. They were field now progressive.

00:34:18:21 - 00:34:45:12
Jack
Field that is correct. Yes. And I was particularly interested in the fact that I thought this is going to be a really big time in Cleveland baseball history, that this has been a terrible team since 1954 World Series and that this would be a turnaround. And so I that that's what got the book going and I had a very tough time selling that thing because.

00:34:46:02 - 00:34:47:09
Kate
Because who cared right.

00:34:47:21 - 00:35:18:23
Jack
Well who cares. It's a terrible team. Well blah blah blah and the whole bit and and when the book came out it came out in August of 1995 which was the first year the Indians were going to go to the World Series since 1954. And all of a sudden I mean I'm in the New York Times is reviewing it and, and it's in the Sporting News and I was on CBS Evening News, CNN, I mean it just was like the perfect timing.

00:35:19:07 - 00:35:33:00
Jack
So I had a small publisher in Indiana which did baseball books, sporting books. They printed about 10,000 hardcovers and I think they sold out every one of them. So I did quite well in that. The second book.

00:35:33:01 - 00:35:35:06
Kate
Lucky, Lucky Timing.

00:35:36:21 - 00:35:41:18
Jack
The second book was more of a labor of love. I knew it was not going to be a big seller I had.

00:35:41:20 - 00:35:44:10
Kate
It's a tough, tough subject.

00:35:44:20 - 00:36:09:04
Jack
It is. And but it was about it was that the inspiration behind it was this took place in the Detroit suburb of Birmingham in 1965 and it was a big, ugly, drunk driving crash. A drunk driver smashed into a car with five teenagers and he killed three of them and he died. And so and it was a big story.

00:36:09:04 - 00:36:29:04
Jack
And then as all stories like that, we move on and I started thinking about 30 years later I thought, gee, whatever happened to those people? So I wanted to find out the long term impacts of this drunk driving crash. Part of it was the fact that no matter what high school anybody ever went to, they had a story like this.

00:36:29:08 - 00:36:40:07
Jack
There was always a drunk driving crash in most high school. Secondly, these were some of the most popular kids. They hadn't done anything wrong. They had been out having pizza and Coca-Cola and.

00:36:40:22 - 00:36:41:01
Kate
It.

00:36:41:05 - 00:37:07:18
Jack
And they're driving the speed limit and they had a turn in the road and and the other guy comes in the other direction at about 90 miles an hour. And that said, the kids were very popular one of them was a guy named Rod Henderson who was he was a championship swimmer. I think he would have made the Olympic team in in 1968.

00:37:07:18 - 00:37:38:10
Jack
That's how good he was. And I was surprised because I thought well you know what Jack, you're going to start this and nobody, nobody will, will be interested in talking to you. It was the biggest surprise my life. Not only were people interested in talking, they just talk and talk and talk. It was clear that they had not moved on from that crash.

00:37:39:04 - 00:37:40:23
Kate
And this is 30 years later.

00:37:41:07 - 00:38:02:17
Jack
Actually, by the time I got around to it was closer to 40 years. Wow. I was starting to do interviews around 2005. The crash took place in 1965 and you know, it was like this crash ruined people's lives. I mean, they just, you know, one father who had been a torpedo bomber pilot in World War Two, you know, his daughter was killed.

00:38:02:17 - 00:38:19:15
Jack
He just never got over it. And, and it was, it was horrendous. And it, you know, the publisher printed about 2,500 books and I think we sold about 1500 of them. And I probably broke even on it, but I wanted to do it because this was just a topic that I thought was interesting.

00:38:19:15 - 00:38:30:07
Kate
And it was a story that needed to be told. And the people you interviewed needed to talk about it. That is quite a service you provided.

00:38:31:01 - 00:38:45:09
Jack
I like I said, I was flabbergasted. I thought, you know what, you're going to end up doors will be slammed in your face and you know, you'll feel like a jerk. And the fact the matter was people wanted to talk about it.

00:38:45:11 - 00:38:59:23
Kate
Yes. So all three of your books are nonfiction. What is it about nonfiction? IIs it your journalistic background? Is that what attracts you to doing those kind of books?

00:39:01:01 - 00:39:26:07
Jack
Well, I guess I enjoy the reporting I enjoy digging out digging out stories, particularly story. You know, the in each of the books, there were a lot of documents, letters, and things of that nature. And I always enjoyed that part. You know, the the first two books, most of the characters involved were alive. So I did tons of interviews.

00:39:26:07 - 00:39:50:11
Jack
I think I interviewed about 128 people for Hendersons, like for "The Last One Out." Most everybody's dead right Yeah. And so it was harder, you know. You had to rely on documents. And one of the things, as you know, as a reporter, sometimes you just get lucky. I just kept checking around trying to find relatives, and I ran across Natalie's niece.

00:39:51:00 - 00:39:51:16
Kate
Oh, wow.

00:39:52:02 - 00:40:37:19
Jack
I know. And I called her. She lives in New York. I called her up there, turned out she had a scrapbook kept the letters that Yates had written to Natalie. And those provided a huge, huge break for me because I was able to piece together their lives in a much more riveting fashion. And and so you're able to one of the things that when you do more reporting, you do, the more you can actually create a scene And that, to me is what makes a book good, that you can sit there and suddenly the reader is transferred back to Singapore in 1942 and, and you know he's, you know, he's, he's sitting there writing his story

00:40:37:19 - 00:40:54:15
Jack
and you know, the lights are on because the smoke from the city is so dark and, and he's got a British press officer saying hurry up, hurry up, we've got to get going. And another one's, you know, drinking away his is Brandy and. Which is a great way to have breakfast.

00:40:55:06 - 00:40:59:07
Kate
Some might consider that a great way.

00:41:02:10 - 00:41:06:13
Jack
And so I mean you actually can see Yates in that room typing.

00:41:06:22 - 00:41:07:20
Kate
Oh wow.

00:41:08:04 - 00:41:34:16
Jack
And so you know when they're on the when their first board the Yangtze River steamer you know they're there in the harbor of Singapore. The Japanese are bombing the place and they're looking at all the smoke and the fires. It's midnight. And, you know, you can you know, the more reporting you do on it, the way you find out that people could see the glow on their faces and something of that nature.

00:41:34:16 - 00:42:02:19
Jack
So it was it's like, I want to paint the story, but I want the story to be true. And and I have gone through the footnotes on this so many times because I my always greatest fear is there's just something there that, you know, how did it get on page 200? Where the hell's that from? And, you know, so I managed to, you know, triple check, quadruple check every fact in there.

00:42:02:19 - 00:42:06:14
Jack
And I feel, you know, I feel very good about it.

00:42:06:17 - 00:42:17:17
Kate
That's terrific. So now that this one is in the bag. Yes. Do you have another idea percolating?

00:42:18:13 - 00:42:59:09
Jack
I do, but I don't think it's going to end up working because it's just I haven't been able to figure out a narrative on it. It is I've always been fascinated by the 1920s in New York. And one of the things that happened in the 1920s was this was the first real revolution for women. If you look at women before the First World War, they're dressed in these, you know, high long skirt, long dresses, things buttoned up the top, very bottom.

00:42:59:18 - 00:43:22:17
Jack
Yes, God knows what they were wearing underneath, but it couldn't have been very comfortable. And they had these gigantic hats that Coco Chanel said look like, you know, lemon meringue pie on their heads. And the federal government, infinite wisdom decided it would be a good idea to ban the sale of alcohol. Therefore, people will stop drinking. 

00:43:23:14 - 00:43:25:16
Kate
And that certainly happened, didn't it?

00:43:27:05 - 00:43:54:08
Jack
Well, in New York, thousands of speakeasies were founded. And so so I was interested. There were two people in particular. I was interested in writing about. One of them was an actress named Kay Francis, who later went to Hollywood and became a big star at Warner Brothers. And the other was a woman at The New Yorker, Lois Long. They were roommates at one point, and they were very fashionable.

00:43:54:18 - 00:44:23:07
Jack
You know, the skirts were short the hair was short, the necklines were low. They drank like men. They smoked like men. They had sex. You know, with guys they barely knew half the time. I mean, you know, it's just it was the first free time for women And then the depression, sort of such everything back Wall Street crash in 1929.

00:44:23:13 - 00:44:48:06
Jack
And by the thirties, women have settled back into a more traditional role. And you don't see major changes until the sixties. And so it but I haven't figured out a narrative and I don't feel like, you know, knocking myself out on something if I can't figure out why this is important and other than the fact that it's a century ago.

00:44:48:06 - 00:45:14:17
Jack
I mean you know Lois Long started writing this column for The New Yorker. She does it all the speakeasies and write about them under under the name Lipstick. And sometimes Kay Francis would go to a separate place, take notes and give them to Lois so she could write them in her story. And so they were they were known as very symbolic of the Jazz Age.

00:45:15:11 - 00:45:22:22
Jack
And if you ever look at the photos, they were called flappers, I'm sure you know.

00:45:23:03 - 00:45:23:22
Kate
Yes. 

00:45:24:09 - 00:45:26:03
Jack
And you know why they called them flappers?

00:45:26:19 - 00:45:27:06
Kate
Why?

00:45:27:23 - 00:45:47:18
Jack
It wasn't because some derogatory term, you know, it was because there they would wear shoes or galoshes with flaps on them. And to be cool, you wouldn't you wouldn't buckle the flap. So it would flap as you walk. And that's how you got to be known as a flapper.

00:45:48:11 - 00:45:50:05
Kate
That's interesting.

00:45:50:09 - 00:46:06:01
Jack
Yeah. And it's just a fascinating time. And it is. But but the problem is it's not like they're admirable people. They just drank a lot, smoked a lot, slept around a lot. And after a while, you kind of go off.

00:46:06:02 - 00:46:07:21
Kate
And, you know, wait, what's your point?

00:46:08:02 - 00:46:12:16
Jack
What's my point? Right. I mean, I don't know. I haven't figured out the point.

00:46:13:10 - 00:46:20:21
Kate
I'm kidding about it not being a virtue doing all those things.

00:46:21:17 - 00:46:25:07
Jack
Given the freedom, they started making all the same mistakes that men made.

00:46:26:11 - 00:46:36:10
Kate
And that's interesting. I think you'll figure out something, Jack. You're resourceful. 

00:46:36:14 - 00:47:07:14
Jack
Yeah, but they were. They were characters guarded. They lived, you know, sleep was like you didn't sleep. You know, they they they would get home about five in the morning, and she would write a story and collapse in her apartment. And, you know, she would be getting. Frances left a series of diaries at at Wesleyan University. And they're very frank, if you want to know every one of her lovers and how they performed.

00:47:07:14 - 00:47:08:22
Jack
It's all in there. I mean.

00:47:09:12 - 00:47:11:11
Kate
Yeah, that could be fascinating.

00:47:12:09 - 00:47:17:21
Jack
Yeah. It's like, okay, do I need to know this piece of information?

00:47:22:12 - 00:47:47:18
Jack
But the downside was she probably had about 14 abortions. She became an alcoholic. And, you know, Lois, on the other hand, didn't have any of those things, but her her heyday was 20. She then became a fashion critic for New Yorker and just a brilliant writer, a fun person to read her stuff and very sarcastic and very, very, very funny.

00:47:47:18 - 00:47:54:05
Jack
I just I just. But I don't again, I don't know where I'm going with it. So, I mean.

00:47:54:18 - 00:47:56:08
Kate
You'll figure it out, Jack.

00:47:56:08 - 00:47:57:07
Jack
I'll figure it out.

Kate:
Well, this is been absolutely wonderful talking to you.

Jack:
Well, it's been terrific. And, you know, I love talking to you.

Kate:
I hope you do great with your book, "The Last One Out." And and I do hope you come this way for book signings.

Jack:
I'm looking forward to that as well. I always enjoy seeing you::.

Kate:
And bring Saundra, your wife, too.

Jack:
Yes. 

00:48:20:23 - 00:48:34:00
Kate
Saundra is a former reporter in her own right. She worked for The Washington Post. And she's a retired editorial writer for USA Today. So a journalistic power couple.

00:48:34:21 - 00:48:40:16
Jack
She is. She's a former president of the Republic Committee for Freedom of the Press. She's very active.

00:48:40:16 - 00:48:45:23
Kate
Yes. Yes, both of you are. So, anyway, Jack, thank you. Thank you.

00:48:46:04 - 00:48:47:19
Jack
Thank you. I appreciate this.

00:48:48:14 - 00:49:03:09
Kate
This is Kate Jones. We'll be right back with the closing segment of The Gale Hill Radio Hour, during which I'll be talking with another longtime friend and writer about how she reinvented herself and the courage it took to do that.

00:49:10:23 - 00:49:35:12
Kate
Hi. This is Kate again, this time with Joy York, who like Jack, is also a published author. Joy had a long and satisfying career in retail management. Still, a number of years ago, Joy knew that the time had come to prioritize other parts of her life. Here's a short interview with Joy about why she took that leap and how it went Hello, Joy.

00:49:36:00 - 00:49:42:04
Kate
So why why did you leave your lucrative career? And what did you decide to do instead?

00:49:43:00 - 00:50:08:01
Joy
Well, at a time, a very difficult time in my son's life in middle school. And it's a very emotional age and it's very difficult for kids to fit in. And because my husband and I both had very equally demanding careers. My son felt like he was being slighted and which compounded some of the issues that And he couldn't participate in sports and other activities that he really had an interest in.

00:50:08:02 - 00:50:32:22
Joy
And so that guilt just consumed me. And is is very, very hard to leave a challenging Fast-Paced career and a really secure salary. But but I had to do it for him to be there for him. And, you know, one of the big adjustments is I was in a 90 mile an hour career. So I just I'm like, what am I going to do?

00:50:32:22 - 00:50:57:12
Joy
I have to do something. I mean, I have talents that are that I've learned from my career. Maybe there's something I can do. So I started mentally doing a list of what's important to me, what I would really be passionate for me to do. And the two things that came to mind with me were the education of children and activities that enrich children in our community.

00:50:57:23 - 00:51:33:07
Joy
So I scoured the newspapers and the ah, the local newspaper who had the most information Internet searching for local nonprofit organizations that maybe I could fit my skills into. And since I'm not a crafty person or a baker, I have administrative skills that maybe I could help some nonprofit organization or maybe in some kind of leadership role So I looked and I found local organizations and I met with board leaders and to to try to find a place.

00:51:33:07 - 00:51:58:06
Joy
And I ended up serving on the board of a PTA that surfaced, serviced all of the schools in the district and and then I started going to all the Board of Education meetings to see if I could find committees that I could work on. And I started learning about you know, the curriculum and the and how they did those and the finances.

00:51:58:06 - 00:52:24:05
Joy
And I started working on levy campaigns and things I never would have imagined. And then some community leaders at the ask if I would be interested in running for the election for the Board of Education, which was a four year term, something I never in my wildest dream would have imagined. And I ended up running with four, three positions with six males.

00:52:24:05 - 00:52:45:03
Joy
And I got one of those positions. And I serve three of the four years I served as the VP and two years as the president. And that that would even have been in my imagination. I mean, every step I was like, I thought oh my gosh, I've never done this before. But, you know, I had to take the risk.

00:52:45:03 - 00:53:05:13
Joy
And because I wanted it so bad to be productive, and I do and I could visually see every time I got into one of those roles that I could see results that was really helping someone and that really helped me mentally and it helped my confidence.

00:53:06:02 - 00:53:09:21
Kate
And also expanded you so much to yes.

00:53:10:01 - 00:53:31:16
Joy
Yes, it did. And that's when I also started pursuing my my passion for writing. And, you know, I, I had to start from the ground, find writers, organizations find local contexts and local writers groups and, and find local workshops so I could learn about it and network and read and all of these things that I was doing at the same time.

00:53:31:16 - 00:54:01:13
Joy
And until I started writing and have ended up publishing. And I had to at one point go back to work when my son went to college and when I retired after he after he got out of college, I, you know, had developed tools that I could really take my passion of writing and write full time. And I think that's you know, you're at a first absolute loss of what am I going to do now?

00:54:01:13 - 00:54:11:10
Kate
That's true. You are and you flounder a little bit, but it's all worth it because you have to kind of you dig down inside of yourself. To figure out the way forward.

00:54:12:09 - 00:54:39:08
Joy
Yes. And it's the hardest thing is taking a risk. And but with today's age of technology and information there and the sharing of information, there are so many things out there that you could do. And I've known people with very lucrative careers that have been as high as vice presidents that are now, you know, have a wood carving business because they took a chance on something they had a passion for.

00:54:39:18 - 00:54:55:09
Joy
And I just think that people can flourish, flourish and grow. And and you just have to take that first step because it's just an open possibility of of what you can do and what's out there for you, for you to grow.

00:54:55:23 - 00:55:12:11
Kate
See what's out there. I love that question and having the courage to entertain the question, who knows what else is out there? Because when you really dig down inside of yourself, then you can find out so often that something very good is there is out there for you.

00:55:13:18 - 00:55:15:14
Joy
Yes, I love out there.

00:55:15:20 - 00:55:31:18
Kate
Yes. That is wonderful. Joy, thank you so much for sharing this. This is Kate Jones with the Gail Hill Radio Hour. Until next time. Thanks for joining us. Please remember to subscribe, like and share. It's greatly appreciated. Thank you.