No News from Doodlebug Island, by William F. Jordan
One of the more fascinating aspects of being in the newspaper editing and publishing
business is that it provides a ring-side seat to the news or to the lives of those who make
the news. Equally interesting is the business of publishing biographies, but either or both
of these fails to rise to the interest level involved in publishing autobiographies. Here are
recounted not only the factual results of someone’s life but his or her more intimate
feelings, reactions, and attitudes about those results. More intimate yet are the regrets,
blunted dreams, wishes unrealized, achievements missed, or ambitions unfulfilled It is
these, I’ve found, that are better descriptors of character than all the achievements,
successes, or notoriety that fill most of the pages within an autobiography.
Veoma Shoup, for example, writes poignantly about having fallen in love at sixteen
with a young man struggling to become a successful musician. Knowing how strongly
her father objected, she eloped with the young man, and, at the end of the month it took
her father to find her and have the marriage annulled, she was pregnant. Destitute, she
had little choice but to return home where, in the course of things, she gave birth to a
baby girl who would one day become as handsome as she.
“I bitterly mourned the loss of my child’s father, my darling Cole,” she writes. “I’m
sure he wrote, but letters to me were intercepted and destroyed. Only the presence of our
daughter kept me from harming myself. I lived for her. Eventually, I married a man twice
my age, one whose successful automobile dealership provided financial security, but the
truth was Cole remained my life love.”
It appears the choices we make or that are made for us have a binary effect in that they
establish a path along which life flows. Choosing a career, a partner, a location closes the
door on other careers, partners, and locations Born, perhaps, from the limited time given to a single life, it becomes
incumbent to decide on a career, a life partner, a location, or whatever else, and that at the very time an
individual has unlimited choice in each of these things. Or does he? Actually, one would
appear to cancel out the other. And, whether the result is regret or remorse, most people
feel in their heart an almost nostalgic lack of complete fulfillment wondering about the
roads not taken, or those blocked to them.
Jim Perkins confesses in his account of his life that as a child he was endlessly
fascinated with the study of geography and planned a career in cartography. His father,
however, arranged an appointment to West Point for him where, upon graduation, Jim
found himself a frontline officer facing German Panzers in the Second World War. His
leadership and bravery won him advancement and citations together with an eventual
Pentagon position in Strategic Services where his talents landed him in Procurement. “It
was the sort of job you get caught up in because needs and innovation change everything
so quickly.”
But there had been a wistfulness in his voice, so I waited for him to continue. “One
day during the period we were carpet bombing Vietnam, I became aware of the
endlessness of my situation, the wasted effort and wasted materiel for which I and my
colleagues were responsible. I resigned and took a job with GE. Looking back, I don’t
know whether or not I would have contributed much to the world of mapping, but I
would have found that part of myself—perhaps the most important part—that seems to
cast a melancholy shadow on my life.”
In something of a variation of that theme, Brad Peterson writes in his autobiography
that acting as a trail guide taking dudes muleback to the bottom of Grand Canyon was an
absorbing if not altogether satisfying job in that it put him around livestock and other
cowboys. “The old-fashioned ranch life was what I and those other waddies wanted,
bustin’ broncs, herdin’ range cattle, ropin’, brandin’, castratin’, gitten bucked off, broken
up. But that kind of life was used up and gone, so we made do with mules and dudes, and
each other.”
An Island dentist, Glenn Rhymer, who is popular with children because he’s good at
allaying their fears and making them laugh, has written, “From my earliest memories, I
always wanted to run away and join the circus where I could be a clown. Soooo, if I ever
turn up missing . . .”
It isn’t given me to know if there’s anything to notions regarding reincarnation, but
judging from the secret or thwarted ambitions of people whose autobiographies I publish,
such a thing as living multiple times would be a grand idea, that is, if a person could
come with a check list and a tickler file!