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Tag Archives: Washington state

Song of Worry

01 Thursday Sep 2022

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1919, Europe, fears of decadence, jazz, Lonely Are the Brave, popular music, Washington state

Here’s another nugget I uncovered while researching my forthcoming novel, Lonely Are the Brave.

After the Armistice in November 1918, Americans worried that exposure to big, bad Europe would change (corrupt?) their boys. A hit song of 1919 addressed that fear: “How ’Ya Gonna Keep ’Em Down on the Farm (After They’ve Seen Paree)?” In the song, which strikes a lighthearted mood, a farmer grins slyly as he tells his wife their boy will come back restless, thirsting for what he’s glimpsed in France.

Albert Wilfred Barbelle’s sheet music cover, 1919 (courtesy http://libx.bsu.edu/cdm/ref/collection/ShtMus/id/725 via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

But you have to ask whether the father’s good-humored acceptance reflects rural attitudes or those of city slickers who wrote popular music.

The slickers in question were composer Walter Donaldson and lyricists Joe Young and Sam M. Lewis; the publisher was Waterson, Berlin & Snyder Co.—Berlin, as in Irving Berlin, who gave us “Easter Parade,” “White Christmas,” “Cheek to Cheek,” and a bazillion other standards.

“How ’Ya Gonna Keep ’Em” appeared on the vaudeville stage and at the Ziegfeld Follies; an early jazz band, James Reese Europe’s 369th Infantry Band, performed the song regularly and cut a hit record. Two well-known singers followed suit.

But not every soldier thought Europe a swell place (or, as Twenties slang later would have it, the gnat’s eyebrows). In April 1919, the Seattle Times interviewed a Washington infantryman who said he was glad to come home to a “real country” and criticized the Belgians for not “dressing like us” and “clinging to their old ways.”

However, if he ever wished to buy an alcoholic drink or a condom, he might have paused to reconsider Europe’s advantages: Both transactions were criminal acts in his home state.

The 1918-19 pandemic

10 Wednesday Aug 2022

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1918 pandemic, historical background, influenza, Lonely Are the Brave, masks, restrictions, rules against spitting, Seattle, Washington state

Here’s another nugget I uncovered while researching my forthcoming novel, Lonely Are the Brave.

My protagonist, Rollie, returns from war in April 1919 a widower, because his wife has recently died from what people mistakenly call the “Spanish flu.”

The influenza pandemic of 1918-19, which infected some 500 million people worldwide, of whom at least 50 million died, killed 675,000 Americans. According to historical analysis by the CDC, mortality ran high in very young children, adults from ages twenty to forty, and those above sixty-five.

A poster circulated by the Rensselaer County Tuberculosis Association, 1918, Troy, New York (courtesy National Library of Medicine)

The twenty-to-forty age group illustrates how returning soldiers and sailors spread the disease, whether in military encampments or among the civilian population. Washington State was no exception, as two naval training stations and the most important army camp were hotbeds of infection.

Seattle officials at first downplayed the danger, after which they issued ordinances banning social gatherings, shutting theaters, closing schools, and instructing police to enforce the laws against spitting on the street. When these measures failed to slow the spread, the city’s leaders, thundering against the populace, enacted further restrictions and threatened fines for infractions.

For instance, if you wanted to ride a trolley, you had to wear a mask, and the mask must have at least six thicknesses, rather than the usual four. Acid commentary ensued. After all, if nobody understood the disease, how could anyone say how thick the mask should be?

The criticism underlined how powerless medical science was. With typical bravado, the city’s leading health authority trumpeted the effectiveness of influenza serum, which, in fact, provided little or no protection. Further, if the flu virus didn’t kill its victims, opportunistic bacterial infections might, and in those days, no antibiotics existed.

Nevertheless, the infection rate petered out. The disease did rebound in December for another month or two; announcements of weddings and funerals held in homes rather than houses of worship suggest how people coped with the ban on public functions. Toward the end of February 1919, the plague vanished from Seattle, having killed an estimated 1,400 among a population of 315,000, a relatively low mortality rate. Other cities were less lucky.

My debut novel, Lonely Are the Brave

19 Thursday May 2022

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1919, debut novel, gender-role reversals, historical fiction, Larry Zuckerman, noncomformists, premise, small town, Washington state, WWI

I’m delighted to tell you I’ve realized the dream I’ve nurtured for more than a half-century: In April 2023, Cynren Press will publish my novel, Lonely Are the Brave. So, starting next week, in addition to my regular book reviews, I’ll periodically post about the novel’s historical background, with occasional sidelights as to how I incorporated those facts or events into the narrative — or tried to and failed.

But for today, let’s stick with the premise:

In 1919, scandal stirs Lumberton, a small (fictional) logging town amid the evergreens an hour outside Seattle: War hero Rollie Birch, whose wife died while he was overseas, turns at-home father; and Kay Sorensen, the timber baron’s daughter, dares defy her politician husband to pursue a business career.

Almost overnight, Rollie goes from town celebrity to pariah. Nobody will talk to him, gossips snicker that his infant daughter isn’t his, and even his beloved sister wishes he’d give up his crazy idea. Meanwhile, Kay fears her tyrannical husband, running for state legislature, will make her leave the job she loves, and wonders if his bizarre public attacks on Rollie, who served in his platoon during the war, somehow explain what’s gone wrong in her marriage.

Discreetly, she begs Rollie to tell her what her husband did during the war, to which he reluctantly agrees, provided Kay reveal what she knows about his late wife’s possible infidelity.

But trading wartime secrets has unexpected consequences, not least for fragile, lonely hearts and cherished beliefs—and the ensuing public storm threatens to destroy Kay and Rollie both.

……………………….

More to come.

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