When I first sat down to write the children’s book that ultimately became Madame Charmaine (of course I had no idea that would end up being the title) my thoughts went directly to my childhood in Nebraska.
It was a wondrous time in that small town in the northeast corner of state. I had a freedom in those early years that I have never experienced since. Returning to those years, even though it was a reunion only in my mind, was a most joyous occasion. I’ve never had so much fun writing a book.
When I say “small town,” I am talking about a population of 700 at most. Everybody in that town knew everybody else. Literally. And that meant you could roam the town at will and at all hours, parents permitting, without fear of being mugged or kidnapped, raped or robbed.
(Your dog could roam with you. There were no leash laws back then, no requirement that your pet must have a rabies shot or even a license. Talk about freedom …)
And that is pretty much how the four main characters in Madame Charmaine – Sheldon Beasley, Tabby Moore, Bull Evenshot and Jimmy Blaze – lived. It truly was the age of innocence.
Now, when you take that idyllic picture and contrast it with the outside world and all the evil, violence, fear and dread that it can bring, you have the makings of a gigantic conflict.
And that is what happened in Madame Charmaine. These four innocent kids, off on summer vacation, when they lived entirely in the moment and their only thought was having a little fun, suddenly bumped up against the “real” world in the form of a couple of carnival workers.
Carneys, those rough and tumble guys who would as soon slit your throat as look at you. (The Urban Dictionary defines a carney as “a desperate person who survives through trickery and the eating of human flesh. They have no life or soul and can be found in trailers, carnivals, and on a couch drinking GO2 Cola.”
Well, I was born in the same house in Nebraska that I lived in for the first 17 years of my life. Sheldon, Tabby, Bull and Jimmy are composites of kids I grew up with. And, I confess, there is a bit of the young David Tish in all of those characters.
The same is true of the various townspeople in the book. They are based on people I knew back then, in the 1940s and ’50s.
I even had a close encounter one time with a carney when I was a boy. He approached a friend of mine and me as we walked down the carnival midway and stopped us and said he had a joke to tell. He put one arm on my shoulder with his hand on my neck, and did the same with my friend with his other arm. The punch line of the joke, as best I can recall, was “Glad to meet you.” And when he said it, he tried to knock our heads together. It didn’t work – my reflexes at that age were a lot faster than they are now. But it was a good lesson learned.
The autobiographical flavor of Madame Charmaine also appears in the description of day-to-day life in rural Nebraska all those decades ago. The pancake-eating contest, for example, which is told in great and, I hope, hilarious detail in the book, actually took place. So did the building of the raft that Sheldon, Bull and Jimmy took out on the Missouri River.
As one reader and lifelong friend, Jo C., put it:
"The escapades David and his friends came up with are remembered in our small town to this day. My sister and I tagged after them just to be close to the excitement."
Now for the boring stuff:
I graduated from the University of Missouri in 1965 with a Bachelor of Journalism degree and went to work as a reporter for the Lincoln, Neb., Journal.
A year later I accepted a job offer from the Omaha World-Herald, where I worked until 1971, when I made an abrupt, albeit brief, career change and moved to Washington, D.C., and went to work for a U.S. senator.
I spent two-and-a-half interesting years in the nation’s capital, but in the end I missed writing so much that I left and went back to The World-Herald. Then, two years after that I got a job as a reporter with The News-Review in Roseburg, Oregon. I stayed at The News-Review until 1990, ultimately becoming managing editor.
On Halloween night of 1990, my EFL (Editor for Life) Mary Reynolds and I climbed into a rental truck and drove to Seattle, where we lived for the next 17 years. During that time we both worked for newspapers in the Seattle area. We also were married in 2003. And I spent the final five years of my journalism career as a copy editor at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
I retired in 2007 and Mary and I moved to a place in the country just outside of Tieton, a tiny town in south-central Washington. We have four acres, plenty of room to set up a dog agility course to exercise our four dogs and ourselves, plenty of room for a few chickens, and plenty of room for a large garden.
And, most important, plenty of quiet time to devote to writing. My love of writing did not retire when I retired. It continues to this day.
During my newspaper career, which spanned 45 years, I won numerous news writing and editing awards. I even stepped outside of the news business and wrote about a dozen plays, four of which were given full stage productions.
I loved being a newspaper reporter. I loved the people I worked with. Newspaper people are smart, skeptical, full of good humor and exceedingly dedicated to their profession.
So … when retirement came along, I looked for a new outlet for my passion. As a father of four boys and the grandfather of nine, I decided that writing children’s books might fit the bill perfectly.
Actually, the paragraph above is a bit misleading. The fact that I have four sons and nine grandchildren had little to no effect on my decision to write children’s books.
My own childhood had everything to do with it.
In any case, you, the readers, will ultimately be the judge of whether I made the right decision.
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