Wordcraft – Big D Reads: the diary of a young life cut short

“On Friday, June 12^th, I woke up at six o’clock and no wonder; it was my birthday,” begins the diary a 13-year-old girl named Anne Frank began in 1942. Although eager to open her birthday presents, she had to wait an hour for her parents to get up before she could open the gifts, including the diary (actually an autograph book she had requested after seeing it in a bookstore near her home in Amsterdam). “The first (gift) to greet me was you, possibly the nicest of all …we’re going to be great pals!” she tells the diary, which she would soon name “Kitty.”

Anne had only three more years to live. A few months after receiving her diary, she, her family and business associates of her father and their family members – eight people in all – went into hiding in the sealed off upper rooms of her father’s company’s building.

After the family was discovered in 1944 and deported to Nazi concentration camps, loose pages of Anne’s diary were rescued and returned to her father Otto after the war. He was the only one of the eight people in those upper rooms to survive.

Anne’s diary, translated in English as Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, would remain as the record of one life lost too soon in the concentration camps of World War II.

Fittingly in a year more than usually marked by racism and religious intolerance, by war and persecutions and refugees left in the wake of war, Big D Reads, a community service project that every April immerses Dallas in a shared reading experience, has chosen Anne Frank’s diary as its book for 2016.

Special events inspired by the book opened with readings April 1 at the Dallas Holocaust Museum Center for Education and Tolerance. Other events include age-appropriate readings, interactive programs exploring Anne’s life an introduction to creating diaries, movie screenings, and more designed to explore the themes of diversity and tolerance. For a complete list, see the Big D Reads site here.

For younger children, Big D Reads suggests Dr. Seuss’s similarly themed The Skeetches and Other Stories. For teens and adults wanting more information about the period, suggested books are Number the Stars, by Lois Lowry, and In the Garden of Beasts, by Erik Larson.  

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In addition to Big D Reads, other local April literary events include:

April 9 – North Texas Book Festival, 9 a.m. – 4 p.m. in the Patterson-Appleton Center for the Visual Arts, 400 E. Hickory St., Denton. Meet and buy from more than 60 Texas and Oklahoma authors. Free, except for all the books you buy!

April 23 – North Texas Teen Book Festival in the Irving Convention Center, 500 W. Las Colinas Blvd. Free. Last year this event was so packed, I had to park miles away. This year, I’ll take DART.

April 23 – North Texas Book Reviewers Preview, Dallas Library Central Branch, 1515 Young St., Dallas. Meet more than 30 local book reviewers at this free event, starting at 1 p.m.

April 23-24 – DFW Writers Conference , Fort Worth Convention Center, 1201 Houston St., Fort Worth. See the site for details and registration. Or consider pre-conference workshops on April 22.

April 30 – Dallas Book Festival, 10 a.m. – 6 p.m., Central Dallas branch, 1515 Young St., Dallas. After a couple of admittedly lackluster years, the lineup for the 2016 festival looks amazing, with nine speakers, including Pulitzer Prize winning Lawrence Wright. (Personally, I’m looking forward to hearing Joshua Hammer, author of The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu.) At least two dozen additional authors will be on hand to sign and sell books.

Wordcraft -- The somewhat true story behind ‘True Grit’

Does indefatigable Dallas actress turned book reviewer RoseMary Rumbley know her books? That’s like asking if teen heroine Mattie Ross of this year’s Big D Reads book, True Grit, has a slight disagreement with a pit full of rattlesnakes. The answers in both cases are, you bet your boots they do. And Rumbley was in full swing during her recent presentation at the Lakewood branch of the Dallas Public Library in support of the Big D Reads selection.

Big D Reads is plugging the 1968 Western novel turned movie as a young people’s read (courtesy of its 14-year-old narrator, Mattie), but movie watchers may remember it better for the character of Mattie’s sidekick, Reuben “Rooster” Cogburn. The role of over the hill, one-eyed U.S. marshal Cogburn was made for scenery chewing. Aging tough guy actor John Wayne played Cogburn in the original 1969 movie, winning the only Oscar of his career. Jeff Bridges reprised Rooster in the 2010 remake.

The novel’s author, Arkansas writer Charles Portis, deftly wove his state’s history into the story of a teen’s search for her father’s killer. There really were outlaws like the murderous Tom Chaney, who fled into the borderlands of the Oklahoma Indian Territory, beyond the jurisdiction of state sheriffs. (Only federal law enforcement agents like Cogburn’s marshal character had the authority to arrest felons within Indian Territory.) And there really was a “hanging judge” Isaac Parker of Fort Smith, Arkansas, thirsting for outlaw blood.

But, Rumbley asked, “where did he get Rooster Cogburn?” Surely Portis must have conjured such an over the top character from whole cloth. Not so, says the man who claims to be the great-grandson of the real Rooster, Brett Cogburn.

The true life Rooster Cogburn, Rumbley told us, was actually named John Franklin Cogburn, earning the nickname “Rooster” for his combativeness at an early age. But the real Rooster Cogburn didn’t do any of the feats of his fictional namesake. Far from being an officer of the law, he was a bootlegger and outlaw who ended his lawless career by shooting a sheriff.

But when the real Rooster finally appeared before Judge Parker, “Isaac Parker had had a liking for the moonshine too,” Rumbley said archly, letting Rooster off with only two years’ imprisonment, giving him time to marry and have children, and grandchildren, and great-grandson Brett.

Brett Cogburn has told his great-grandfather’s story in Rooster: The Life and Times of the Real Rooster Cogburn, and in “The Real Rooster Cogburn,” available online at True West magazine (www.truewestmagazine.com/).

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Rumbley’s appearance was sponsored by the Friends of Lakewood Public Library. More Big D Reads events are scheduled daily through April, including tonight’s free screening of True Grit at 8 p.m. at Main Street Garden, 1902 Main Street, Dallas. Get in the mood early by celebrating “National Grits Day” with free grits and toppings from noon to 2 p.m. at Thanks-Giving Square, 1627 Pacific Avenue. 

Saturday, April 18, Dallas Heritage Village, 1515 S. Harwood, will bring the Wild West of True Grit to life with shootouts (with blanks!) at noon and 1 p.m. Entry to the village and its collection of vintage buildings is free Saturday to anyone who brings a copy of the book, available not so coincidentally at the movie screening and other sites. For more information and Big D Reads events, see http://bigreaddallas.org/. 

Wordcraft -- The need to belong: drinking the Kool-Aid

Warning—this is the writing post that’s not about writing. But the story Dr. Vance Dell brought to this month’s meeting of the Dallas branch of Mystery Writers of America was so shocking, even years after the events he described, that I have to share it. Use it as an opening for a mystery, thriller, military fiction, even a space opera, or just to bring a critical eye to the groups you and your kids belong to. And never to forget the Kool-Aid.

One late night in November 1978, Dell, then the 28-year-old Chief of Aeromedical Services at the Air Force base in Charleston, South Carolina, got a phone call to report “ASAP, wearing either a flight suit or fatigues.” Why? Nobody would tell him or any of the men waiting at the hangar to get pre-mission medical and other checkups.

Jonestown aftermath

Medical checkups? No problem. Dell was a doctor. He’d been stationed in East Asia. Could there possibly be any immunization he hadn’t already had? “It really hit more that this was not a drill when they gave me a shot I had never had in my life,” he said. “I’m not sure whether it was yellow fever or what, but I was pretty sure then that we weren’t going to Omaha.”

The mystery of their mission deepened when he was handed a weapon. Given a handgun and holster, he tried to beg off, saying, “I’m a doctor. I don’t need this.”

Even surrounded by Pararescuemen (P.J.’s), the Air Force’s elite combat rescue personnel, “all armed to the teeth,” their pre-flight briefing only told the group that “a large number of American citizens are at an encampment and they’re being poisoned.” Unknown to the medical personnel on board, they were going to an encampment known as Jonestown in the South American country of Guyana to rescue members of the Peoples Temple, the religious group whose charismatic leader, Jim Jones, had ordered them to commit mass suicide.

The P.J.’s exited the plane once it touched down in the South American jungle, leaving the flight crew and medical personnel to wait. “It did not pass our minds that there were no P.J.’s around, only a bunch of doctors with guns,” Dell said, “and that this aircraft could become Fort Apache.”

At the time, none of the group realized that the only survivors would be the very few who managed to resist Jones’ brain washing and escape the armed guards assigned to kill anyone who couldn’t or wouldn’t comply with his crazed demands. Or that the massive doses of antidote their plane carried would be useless against Jones’ poison of choice, soft drinks (both Kool-Aid and another brand, Flavor-Aid) laced with industrial grade cyanide. The nearly 1,000 people at Jonestown who ingested the potion died within at most a couple of minutes.

Rescue personnel would return bearing only four plywood coffins with the bodies of California Congressman Leo Ryan and his companions, whose investigative mission to the Peoples Temple site triggered the final act of madness. And left Dell to wonder what could provoke such a tragedy.

"Psychologists say that the two strongest human drives are to belong and to matter. As I grow older, I’m reminded of what’s happening today, in the Islamic State, and even with street gangs,” as young people search for a group to belong to a a purpose in life. Is there, he asked, any stronger way for people to demonstrate that they belong and that they matter than to die with a group, and for a cause?

For more information about the Dallas branch of Mystery Writers of America and its meetings, see http://dallasmysterywriters.com/. The photo illustrating this post is from The Jonestown Institute, a survivors’ clearinghouse for information about the tragedy.

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If you want to be part of the Big D Reads program this month (which I’m pretty sure doesn’t involve ingesting dangerous substances), check out the program tomorrow, April 8, at the Lakewood branch of the Dallas Public Library, 6121 Worth Street in Dallas. Local reviewer Rosemary Rumbley will discuss the 2015 Big D Reads selection, True Grit, and its film incarnations. The program starts at 2 p.m., but arrive early, because the house is always packed for Rumbley’s performances. 

Wordcraft -- It takes grit to get the word out on Big D Reads

True Grit

by Charles Portis

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If somebody offers you a free book next month, take it. Take it, that is, if it’s Charles Portis’ classic, True Grit, because that’s the 2015 pick for Big D Reads, the annual event that aims to put a classic novel for young people in the hands of every ninth-grade student in the Dallas Independent School District during the month of April.

Last year, volunteers book bombed copies of the 2014 Big D Reads pick to DART passengers. This year, the organization plans to distribute 20,000 copies of the current pick, True Grit, to students, DART riders, visitors in hospital waiting rooms, and at all branches of the Dallas Public Library system.

The event starts with a Paint the Town Well-Read light show in downtown Dallas beginning at 8 pm. Wednesday, April 1. Look up, take a picture of the city skyline as the Omni Hotel, Bank of America, Reunion Tower and Hunt Building participate in the light show.

Then check out Dallas library branches for additional activities during the month. Guess the number of grits, check out books, pick up some great recipes for grits, and more. See http://bigreaddallas for a complete schedule of activities.

Need more incentive? The Alamo Draft House in Richardson, Texas, will offer a $4 showing of the 1969 film based on the novel, Monday, April 6, at 7:45 p.m. See http://drafthouse.com/dfw for ticket reservations.

Big D Reads is underwritten by D Magazine and organized by its arts leadership group, D Academy to address a national decline in literary reading, especially among young people. D Academy has raised enough money to buy 17,000 of the books it hopes to distribute this year. It’s hoping for donors, through the Big D Reads site, to pledge the $5 it takes to put a book in the hands of a Dallas student.

Arkansas journalist/novelist Charles Portis’ True Grit is the story of 14-year-old Mattie Ross, seeking to avenge the murder of her father at the hands of outlaw drifter Tom Chaney. Mattie arrives in Fort Smith, Arkansas, in the late 19^th century to claim her father’s body and track down the killer. It was Mattie’s perseverance¾ her grit¾ and the exploration of what “true grit” means, that prompted its pick for this year’s Big D Reads.

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Well, that’s the good news on the reading front in Dallas. The bad news is that the city is losing still another independent book store venue, Lucky Dog Books. After losing the lease at its Oak Cliff location, 633 W. Davis, the store needs help packing its thousands of books on its last day of business¾ today. For every half hour of work, Lucky Dogs will offer a $5 in-store credit good at the Oak Cliff location or either of its two remaining outlets, 10801 Garland Road in Dallas and Paperbacks Plus, 108 E. Davis in Mesquite. It’s open until 9 p.m. today. For more information and ways to help, see
www.luckydogbooks.com/.