2024: A Year in Review
Quiet, but tragic.
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Four Feet
I have done mostly what most men do,
And pushed it out of my mind;
But I can't forget, if I wanted to,
Four-Feet trotting behind.
Day after day, the whole day through —
Wherever my road inclined —
Four-feet said, "I am coming with you!"
And trotted along behind.
Now I must go by some other round —
Which I shall never find —
Somewhere that does not carry the sound
Of Four-Feet trotting behind.
Rudyard Kipling
I only published one book this year, The Fire Blitz. In the meantime, I started working on two future books, Steele’s Battalion: The Great War Diaries, due nest April, and The Persistent Past: The Steele Diaries, due in 2025 or 2026.
But I lost my first Four Feet…
My mother-in-law, Lucie Wilson, passed away in May after a brief bout of leukemia. Lucie was a bright soul, ten years old and living with her mother and grandmother when the Russians stormed Berlin in ‘45. They all survived, miraculously, but Russian soldiers searched an upstairs neighbor’s place and killed him. Now, perhaps, she will see her father, who marched off to fight the Russians in March ‘45 and was never heard from again.
Then my second…
Our last dog, Max, was a rescue, who someone found on the streets of Tennessee, cleaned up, and brought north. He passed from foster family to foster family in northern Wisconsin, where we got him in July 2014. Max was a bright, friendly beast of at least fifteen (probably older) and having incontinence issues, among other things, when we put him down a week after Lucie passed. Now Max will cross the Rainbow Bridge to be all better, with all his buddies, waiting for us.
And my Max Perkins…
My good friend, editor, epistemological sparring partner and Friday lunch companion Frank DeVoy passed away 10 September after a long struggle with COPD and Celiac disease. I’d met Frank in 1993 working at Trenton Technical, lost touch in ‘94, met up again at Almon Studios in ‘98. He started editing my material in 2007. He leaves behind his gentle wife of 47 years, Joann.
After Hemmingway won a Pulitzer and the Nobel Prize for Old Man and the Sea in, he said it was his last book, because he could no longer hear Max Perkins, his best-known editor, in his head. Perkins died in 1947, never having seen Old Man and the Sea, published in 1952. All the books and many of these articles I’ve published have passed through Frank’s hands. Ironically, I told Frank that story at the last lunch we had together, just before Labor Day, and I told Frank he’d been in my head for a while….
I just hope these Four Feet stay in my head and my heart while I keep writing.
The Fire Blitz: Burning Down Japan
The Fire Blitz started out as a magazine article I wrote in the 1990s (that never sold). It sat around in different versions and iterations, submitted several times, but never quite got off the ground (excuse the pun) but never forgotten, either. Frank and I worked on it, expanded the scope beyond just that bombing to include the woes with the B-29s, and with strategic bombardment theory which most readers, I venture, knew nothing about.
The Fire Blitz that started with MEETINGHOUSE II, or XXI Bomber Command’s Mission 40, and that ended two days before Hiroshima, was a desperate bid for the big bombers to remain relevant in the face of growing skepticism about strategic bombardment and the nature of Japan’s resistance. Available from your favorite bookseller or from me if you want an autograph.
Coming Up…
The Civil War: An Introduction
Calling Time on BC and AD
And Finally...
On 28 December:
1895: Louis and Auguste Lumiere show their movies in the first commercial use of moving pictures at the Grande Cafe, in Paris, France. Using their own camera/projector called a Cinematographe, the brothers showed La sortie des ouvriers de l'usine Lumière (Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory), a 50-second black-and-white film that created a sensation.
1941: With Pearl Harbor still smoldering, Ben Moreell, then Chief of Yards and Docks, requested authority from Chester Nimitz to commission three Naval Construction Battalions, known soon as Seabees. The Congressional authorization came on 5 January 1942.
And today is PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE DAY, commemorating Congressional recognition of the Pledge on this day in 1945. Like everything else, Congress was the last to act on what had been around since 1892.