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Last Call
Oregon Tale
A genuine American memoir in need of an e-publisher. Anyone interested?
It’s bad form to laugh in front of a casket, so I dutifully suppressed the chuckle. The body of my grandfather Raymond Sylvester Lott was in pretty good shape, considering, but his eyebrows were almost completely gone. As with almost every aspect of Gramps’s life, there was a story there.
His weekend cabin on the North Fork of the Lewis River was heated by a wood-burning stove. He had tried to get some logs to light, but they were too wet to catch. So of course he added gasoline. The flames exploded everywhere. Gramps was lucky the fire didn’t burn the place to the ground. He escaped to tell the tale, but those patches of hair above his eyes that he had used to punctuate so many jokes and yarns over the years were scorched right off.
I have just read dozens of stories from Gramps’s own hand. When he turned 80, my family gave him a notebook decorated in a fishing fly pattern and told him to fill it up with his recollections and cast it back at us. He wrote them up and titled the composition, “The Tales & Yarns of a Life Well Lived.” It traveled with us as we moved from place to place. Finally, this year, I dusted it off and had it transcribed. Now I’m trying to figure out what to do with it all.
Maybe you can help me out, dear reader. The memoir does have some historical value, even in its current, highly subjective form. My Great-Grandparents Charles and Anna Lott came from Illinois on a wagon train headed for the California gold rush, but they didn’t make it all the way. Charles got in an argument (“perhaps shaped by alcohol,” Gramps suggests) with the wagon master and he let them off along the way. Their daughter Ida was abducted by Crow Indians in Montana, but they gave her back in trade for some horses. The family eventually settled down in Oregon’s Willamette Valley in Lowell.
His mother’s family, the Russells, hailed from Texas. They came to Oregon along with the cattle they drove there, though Grandpa Russell caught tuberculosis and returned to Texas where he was “gathered to his ancestors.” Our author puts it like that because Grandpa Russell was one-quarter Indian. “I have always been proud of my 1/16th,” he explains, “but it does me no good whatsoever. It just makes me want to hunt and fish!”
His other passion was electricity. As a child he would tinker with electrical equipment in the basement. When I was young, I asked him for a Transformer toy for my birthday. He misunderstood and gave me an electrical transformer instead. For more than 20 years, he worked for Otis Elevator Company. He believes the company pulled strings to keep him out of World War II. He serviced elevators, but his real job was to find a way to keep problem customers happy. At one point, he bribed a customer with some of Otis’s extra gasoline ration cards to stop bellyaching.
An able storyteller, Gramps includes a few family mysteries here. Great-Grandma and Grandpa Lott were “running from something,” but no one knows what. Charles wanted to tell his kids on his deathbed, but Anna said, “No, Pa, don’t tell ‘em; I’ll tell them later.” She then suffered a stroke “and never awakened!” For my part, I’ve always figured Lott was an assumed name. When he was looking to buy his cabin, Gramps had to scrape $2,500 together in a week. “I can’t tell you where I got the money but I borrowed some of it somewhere,” he teases. I’m guessing, loan shark.
The manuscript is short — a little more than 20,000 words — and it’s not up to professional standards, because it was never meant to be a professional memoir. In the foreword, Gramps warns, “This book will be full of grammatical errors, lousy spelling, and dangling participles!” I wouldn’t release it to the world in its current form, of course. But I keep wondering: What if I cleaned it up a bit? What if I wrote an intro and notes and released it as an e-book? Would anybody be interested?
About the Author
Jeremy Lott is editor of RealClearPolicy.com, RealClearBooks.com and RealClearReligion.org and associate editor of RealClearScience.com.
Letter to the Editor View all comments (18) | Leave a comment
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Bev Gunn| 5.11.12 @ 7:18AM
All Texans love a good yarn. I suspect your grandfather told some good ones. My last aunt died a few weeks ago and I am still sad because of not getting to write down her stories. We had planned this summer, when my husband retired, to go see her and spend days listening to stories. Now, I've missed this and all the good memories her generation made.
Figure out a way to make this an e-book, then let Am Spect readers know. It will be read.
East Texas Rancher
Butch| 5.11.12 @ 5:55PM
Got my Mom on videotape when she was still lucid about a dozen years ago. She and I sitting on the sofa, with me getting her to tell those great growing-up-poor in the depression South stories. About six hours worth. She's gone now, but her grandchildren and great children will enjoy. She was a great storyteller and given to vivid detail. She always had a great memory.
Spent some time in East Texas. Great place.
LindaF | 5.11.12 @ 7:39AM
Sounds like a good idea. Try Smashwords, in addition to Amazon's e-books. I've bought books from both.
JMM| 5.11.12 @ 9:33AM
Try these people . They do an excellent job at a reasonable price and they are closely connected to a legitimate publisher.
They can handle an e-book ( all formats) or a print version.
JMM| 5.11.12 @ 9:36AM
Link didn't print. The name of the company is: We Build Books.Com. ( we build books.com)
WickedDickie| 5.11.12 @ 9:39AM
By all means, tart it up a bit and get it published Mr Lott. My favorite wife just finished a genealogy of my family which contains a lot of holes largely because our sources died including an aunt, aged 93. It's interesting to live long enough to have lived history after reading/hearing it for so long. I've been working on my own personal history and should have gotten some anecdotes from my friends/relatives/wife to flesh it out. I've only been working on it for about 20 years. Last time I wrote anything was in March, 2010 shortly after I almost bled out due to an ulcer. So, even if you think it ain't sucha much, give it a go. Some of my own stuff includes thoughts on some of Mrs. Gunn's comments here. Grand lady in my not so humble opinion.
OregonBuzz| 5.11.12 @ 9:40AM
Since I live in Grants Pass, Oregon history has always interested me. I'm sure there are other Oregonians who would be equally interested in reading such a memoir.
TexasEngineer| 5.11.12 @ 9:43AM
Count me in...and don't clean it up too much. You'll rob it of the Character that Gramps was and put into it. I wish my grandfather had done that. We got his stories as oral history...but they need to be transcribed.
John Q. Public| 5.11.12 @ 11:07AM
Better not do it.
You might find out that like this Oregonian you have Cherokee blood, or maybe even a little Kenyan blood, in "your" history.
Just use "your" imagination, and in "your" mind's eye, see the branching geneology tree going, back, back, back---and, contemplate the cohort of humans alive at various times, who furnished ssperm and egg in "your" past.
So, in 1776, there was this group pf people.
In Jesus time, there was that group pf people.
In prehistoric times, there was another group of people.
Fifteen billion years ago, there was----no people!
LIGHT.
insol| 5.11.12 @ 12:36PM
iUniverse ?
Chris| 5.11.12 @ 12:50PM
yes. I would be interested in buying a kindle version of this book. I'm not a publisher, can't help you there sir... sounds like a good read however.
Carlisle Johnson| 5.12.12 @ 12:34AM
contact Plumsock publishers
Art| 5.12.12 @ 3:06AM
What a great story. My parents moved from Michigan to Oregon during the 20’s. They settled in Grants Pass. I left here in ’62 after HS and moved on. Returned in 2010 and have no intention of leaving again. (Not voluntary anyway). Publish the entire story; others will appreciate your efforts.
Boyd Smith| 5.12.12 @ 8:46AM
I'm the geneologist in my family and am writing stories about the grandparents that I knew and have learned about, and about myself and include pictures if I have them. Whether anyone will want to read them when I'm gone is the question.
It is great that you have this story written by your grandfather in his hand. You should transcribe it for others to read. It is history. I would like to read it when you are finished. I imagine that it will be an interesting and fun read.
I am transcribing some letters written by a friend's great great grandfather to his wife when he was in the Civil War. He wrote to her every day that he could and at least once a week. There is a collection of at least one hundred letters that he wrote detailing his life while at war. These are important historical documents. The discs made from the letters will go to libraries for their collections.
Thomas Bullock| 5.13.12 @ 7:16AM
I published my own ebook at smashwords.com, Montana Memories, recounting my adventures growing up in Montana. Try it out.
jocon307 | 5.13.12 @ 8:56AM
Sure, why not publish it?
I don't know your background, but maybe you could expand it a little bit also, tie your family's experiences into the larger events of those times.
I think if you got started on this project, you'd be surprised at what you'd find and where it would lead you.
And of course, if you do put it out there, but sure to let the readers here know about it.
Bon chance!
Carlyle Smith| 5.16.12 @ 1:57AM
Look, the medium IS the message! I've got a stack of double-spaced typing by my Dad, with any mis-types hand-corrected and some other notes written in. I thought about gussying it up and making it real nice, ready for desk-top publishing; but then I said -- "Nope! This manuscript IS him! I will scan it in, and publish it as an eBook just as it is! It will be him, raw and virile and wise! Let the few readers enjoy his creation exactly as it came from his hand." He himself would have reworked it, but I won't -- it's more real just the way it is, for he passed on before the 70th page got started. Now, if your Gramp's tales are hand-written in a notebook, better yet! especially with the fishing theme! just scan in the pages just as they are, import the images into a MS Word (expensive) or OpenOffice Writer (free), and save it as a PDF document. Then use Amazon's MobiPocket Creator (free) software to turn the PDF into a Kindle eBook, and it's done. And you'll have the real, uncorrupted Gramp's work in the reader's hand, warts and all -- it will have the real, uncut taste! Easy! You can email it as an attachment, or read it in a tablet -- a cinch, and once assembled, permanent. (IMHO)