With Dewey Johnson, author of the coming-of-age novel Summer of Champions
READ THE SHOW NOTES TO DEWEY’S INTERVIEW HERE
DOWNLOAD AND LISTEN TO DEWEY JOHNSON MP3 HERE
Writing Show (WS): This is Writing Show host, Paula B. Experienced writers often counsel write what you know, but it’s difficult to write about yourself or your own experience and weave a compelling story. It’s tempting to throw in too much or to insist that because that was the way it was, that’s the way the story should be. This week, we visit with one author who, in his very first attempt, got it right and produced a riveting coming-of-age story.
Welcome to The Writing Show, where writing is always the story. I’m your host, Paula B., and my guest today is Dewey Johnson.
Dewey Johnson was born in Lubbock, Texas, and grew up in Roswell, New Mexico. He is a pastor, stand-up comedian, and the creator of The High Desert Home Companion, as well as the novel we’re going to talk about today, Summer of Champions.
Welcome to The Writing Show, Dewey.
Dewey Johnson (DJ): Well, thank you. I’m glad to be here.
WS: It’s such a pleasure to have you here. I have to say that unless someone has been holding out on me, you are the first stand-up comic that we have had on the show, and I am just really curious about that. You are a pastor and a stand-up comedian. How does that work?
DJ: Well, one’s on Sunday, and one’s on Saturday night. That’s a large part of it. I have always been interested in humor, and what we did with what we call The High Desert Home Companion, we have a family life center with as large a stage as there is in Albuquerque. I have a whole bunch of people on our staff who are musicians and who also like to act, and basically we produce a New Mexico version of the Garrison Keeler show with all sorts of different aspects. And in addition to that, I have just done stand-up humor, often times for the benefit of Habitat for Humanity. We have done several performances for them. And so I just enjoy that.
WS: That sounds like a lot of fun.
DJ: Thank you. It is.
WS: I would love to talk about your book, Summer of Champions, today, which I loved, and I would also like to talk about just writing fiction in general. So if we could just start with a little background about the book.
DJ: Okay. Well, Summer of Champions is a fictional account of a boy who is growing up in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1956. His dad was killed in the Korean War. He lives with his mother, and he wants to become a champion, this suggested by his fifth-grade teacher as they studied the Greek heroes, etc. And one of the ways that he would know that he had become a hero or a champion is by making the all-star squad, the Little League all-star team, Little League baseball all-star squad that summer. This is actually the one from Roswell that went all the way to Williamsport and won the Little League World Series, so it’s a fictional account backed up against something that really did happen. There are two championship tracks here. One championship track is the boys striving to become the champion, and the other is the track taken by the team.
WS: But there is a lot in the book about the boy, who is Joe Don Miller, right?
DJ: There is about him personally, about his relationship to his mom, about his relationship to his friends. He has a part-time job. Yeah, when people say what’s the story about, I give them the spiel I just gave you, but then, if you want to get on further and further, there is a lot more involved, as you have said.
WS: Yeah. I didn’t really feel that it was a sports story, really. I felt that the sports was sort of a backdrop.
DJ: That was the intent, and I think that’s why it seems to me that women really like this book. And unless they are sports fans, which many of them are not, I think they like the story about the boy and his relationship to his mom and just what a kid is like.
WS: I think it’s a wonderful story of what a kid is like, even though I am not a boy, and I can’t empathize with him, but I certainly enjoyed reading about his thoughts and relationships and experiences. How did you come to write this story?
DJ: Well, I have always wanted to write a story about growing up. And when I looked around, there were, to my knowledge, no stories about growing up in eastern New Mexico, about the ‘50s, and I just thought it would be fun to do that. However, I didn’t know how to do that. And so a few summers ago, I guess it was the summer of 2003, I took a course in novel writing at the University of Iowa Writers’ Festival. And you know how everybody always says, you know, you ought to write a story about that. Well, there are a whole lot of incidents in one’s personal life that you could write a very short vignette about, but to combine it all into a novel or something, you have to know a little bit more. And basically, what I learned was the structure of how to put something together. And so I just said, well, my goodness, now that I know this, I might as well really try it. And I did, and it worked. So I took what I learned in a writing course, combined it with things that had happened to me or that I could tweak in a story I could write from my childhood and made Summer of Champions.
WS: Had you ever written fiction before?
DJ: Not much more than anecdotes. I have tried a couple of short stories that never went anywhere, but this is the first time I ever tried to do a novel.
WS: I am so impressed. This is a first novel. This is a wonderful novel.
DJ: Well, thank you.
WS: One thing you mentioned is something that I would like to explore a little bit, and that is using autobiographical elements in fiction. I know that a lot of times, writing teachers will tell you to write what you know about, and I know also that a lot of times when people make a first attempt, it’s too autobiographical, so much so that it gets boring. But this is not like that at all. How did you manage to integrate parts of your own life with a story and make it actually so compelling and interesting?
DJ: I don’t know. I think what I did was, I took the environment in which I was, I one time lived in, and I got the story started and was just able to, from my own experience and from things I knew, bring them in and stay true to the story as opposed to get sidelined as to the way it was. One of the difficulties I think with doing this is all of a sudden you just start telling how things were that you experienced when you experienced them as opposed to staying with the story, and I was able to stay with the story.
Just for example, that summer of 1956, I was ten years old, and I actually played in this baseball league, but I was not nearly as old and certainly wasn’t as capable as the other guys. I knew what the field looked like, and I knew the players, so I just invented somebody who would be able to play with them who was much more with it. When we grew up, we always had to have a cigar box for our school supplies, and you think back and say, oh, my goodness, that was the great cigar box shortage of 1955, when there were more kids needing a cigar box than there were men smoking stogies. Proof of a baby boom, which nobody ever heard of at the time. So you can just tweak these things like that.
I had two friends, like the two friends in the story but totally different people, and so I just used elements of my life, but I changed them. I think one time the editor and I got into a discussion about…She said, “This is not believable,” and I said, “But that was the way it happened.” And so we changed it to make it true to the story as opposed to the way that something actually happened.
WS: Did you get into more trouble than that with getting–I wouldn’t say confused between your own life and the story–but were you tempted a little bit too much to use your own life, or did you just sit down and say, okay, I’m going to do the story, and I will just consult my own life here and there?
DJ: No, it really wasn’t difficult. I just pretty much sat down and said, “I am going to do this story and consult my life at this occasion.” As a matter of fact, one of the crises as I originally started out was going to be his not making the team, but then as I got to thinking about the stuff that had happened and I wanted to bring in the story, I said, “You know, the better and bigger crisis was his teacher being arrested.” So I took that from my own life and just brought it in at that point.
So it really wasn’t difficult for me. Now, it may be because I write a sermon every week, and I tell stories about myself, and everybody knows that they are probably not true. I have done this for years, so I may have some background that other people do not have at that point.
WS: Do you want to just explain that reference to the teacher for our listeners?
DJ: Yeah. In the book, the boy really likes his fifth-grade teacher and all of a sudden thinks that the teacher is going to marry the fourth-grade music teacher. And then one day he arrives at school to find out the guy was hauled off the previous afternoon in handcuffs and reads in the paper that he was “arrested for molesting minors.” Nobody in the ‘50s really helped you figure that out. You had to sort of figure out that yourself. So his whole world was turned upside down, and he thinks people are conspiring against the teacher and all that sort of stuff. It is still not a real-life incident, but that’s where you can use real life to enhance your story, I think. And also, when you write about things like that, they have a cathartic effect. That’s one of the interesting things is people who grew up in Roswell and read the book, they felt back to that, and they said, “You know, I was just really puzzled by all of that.” Sort of like we were just left out in the dark, and finally, we all started talking about it fifty years later.
WS: You are talking about the teacher being arrested.
DJ: Yes.
WS: You have a very readable style. It’s very breezy. I just want to read a little bit in a second, but I just wondered, well, let me read it, and then I will as you a question. This is from page 51, this is about three or four sentences:
We went inside for a supper of fish sticks, which was one of my favorites. Afterward, we practiced for the city spelling bee. Miss Sherelle had given me a special word list. Mom would pronounce the word and tell me what it meant, most often without having to look it up in the dictionary. Mom graduated from high school, which had only eleven grades at the time, but she was never able to go to college like she wanted.
This is very readable, and I am just wondering if this is your natural style or whether you made a conscious decision to write this way.
DJ: Well, I have been sort of surprised that what I write is breezy and readable. Being my first novel, I am delighted to hear that. I have been thinking about what you say and then also about it being tight at points. I am just wondering if this doesn’t have something to do with my being a public speaker in the sense that I am constantly going over and editing and trying to come up with what sounds really good, something that gets it all into a finite, short format but something that is pleasurable to listen to. I have learned that lots of writers say, “Gosh, if it sounds good to you when you read it, it’s good.” I am not sure that everybody agrees with that, but if it sounds good to me when I read it, that is sort of like I like it. So I think I just sort of write like I would speak and tell the story. Does that make any sense?
WS: Absolutely. Why did you choose to write this story in the first person?
DJ: Probably because of all the public speaking I do and stand-up humor, because to me, that lends itself to easy humor and amusing observations that would be much more difficult for me to handle if I was writing in the third person. For example, let me give you this reading from page 8. This has to do with Joe Don’s hoodlum cousin Greg, who used to make him cry and all this sort of stuff, and so he says:
Greg had made me cry until the third grade, when Mom explained to me that he had been adopted from an orphanage in Albuquerque. I was to pay him no attention, but I found that hard. He could come up with really scary things to think about, so scary that I imagined his real parents were Bonnie and Clyde, the bank robbers, when they were shot to death at the roadblock in Louisiana. Their hoodlum baby Greg was in the back seat in a bullet-proof crib. He was put up for adoption in New Mexico, where no one knew what a public menace he would grow up to be.
You know, you can just make in first person, you can just make observations like that really easily, and that is sort of to me important.
WS: It does make him sound very innocent and not childlike. He’s a little older than childlike but a little bit naïve.
DJ: That’s right. A lot of people really like the voice of the novel, and I think it would have been a very different book if it had been third person. I found that it was very easy to reveal the boy’s naiveté about things and the way he thought using the first person.
WS: This story takes place over a summer, and I am wondering how you decided to pace the story over that time period. Did you have any trouble pacing the story, for example, or did you just know exactly when you wanted it to speed up and slow down?
DJ: The pacing to me, whether it’s good or bad, came easily. I decided that I wanted to start it in January, and I wanted to end it prior to the start of school. And that being the case, I wanted to do a sequel to it. So I just thought about, well, maybe I want to do another story about this character some other time, so I am going to end it before sixth grade starts.And also, toward the end of it, the pacing was depending on almost weekend to weekend as you followed the championship progression of the team. Prior to that, I don’t really recall all of my thoughts regarding the pacing, but I just sort of spread it out over a month. I had a calendar in front of me from 1956, and I just ran the story through it. I may have changed it from one editing to another along the way. I may have moved things around to make the pacing better, but by and large, I didn’t have a great deal of problem with that.
WS: Boy, it sounds like you just really, was this book easy to write? It sounds like it was.
DJ: It was. It was not difficult. Well, I am sure you wouldn’t have wanted to see the first draft, but by the end, I thought it was rather easy, yes.
WS: That’s wonderful. I envy you.
DJ: Well, thank you.
WS: Let’s talk about your characters a bit.
DJ: Okay.
WS: We have met Joe Don a little bit, and we have heard a tiny bit about the hoodlum cousin, Greg, and the teacher, but can you just tell us a little bit, who are some of the other major characters?
DJ: His mom, Lurleen, of course, trying to make it on her own. Grew up on a farm, doesn’t like farm life, doesn’t want to go back to that, trying to find a job, trying to find a means of supporting her and her son. A very religious woman, has a certain sense of morality and duty, and she expects things from Joe Don, and she doesn’t back down from that. His two friends are Jay Bob and Curty. Jay Bob sort of compliments Joe Don. Whereas Joe Don is a reader, Jay Bob doesn’t like to read the newspaper at all, but he is really good with his hands, whereas Joe Don is not, and he builds a soap box derby racer, he can plan capers. He’s very good at organization and always shopping at the Army-Navy Surplus Store for some doodad.
Their other friend is a boy named Curty, whose dad owns a local diner where the politicos of the town meet, and from them talking back and forth, he gets interested in the news, and so he is always telling people what’s going on.
The only black fellow that Joe Don knows in Roswell is a fellow, he has a part-time at Whitman’s Auto, and the delivery man there is very kind to him, a black fellow who is even willing to risk getting in trouble to help Joe Don out, just a heart of gold. Those are some of the major characters or pretty much the major characters.
WS: There are a couple of interesting girls, too, though, aren’t there?
DJ: Alea. Yes, Alea. I got permission to use her real name. Alea is sort of ahead of her time. She doesn’t want to do the housewife thing. She either wants to be a hobo or an engineer, and she has observations unlike most of the girls that Joe Don knows, and he really all of a sudden decides he likes her as a friend, not as a girlfriend, but this is a very interesting person in his opinion.
WS: And then there’s Sherry, too, right?
DJ: Who?
WS: The older girl that has the crush on him?
DJ: Oh, yes, Sherry, Sherry, the girl, pardon me, from the grade higher than that. Yes, a girl who is sort of damaged by life and sort of needs all the attention she can get.
WS: How did you decide on techniques for revealing the personalities of your characters? I don’t mean to make it sound too clinical by saying techniques, but I am just wondering, how do you reveal them?
DJ: Well, this being my first novel, that was problematic, and I was trying to learn as much as I could going along. So up until the last couple of the chapters of the book, when I just got tired of doing it, I kept two journals, one of which was Joe Don, this is the kind of person he is. And I would start going down and writing all the traits for every one of my characters, and then chapter by chapter, I would go look at that chapter, and I would say, “What has this chapter revealed about Joe Don, and is there any conflict between the person that I think that he is and the person on the page?” So I looked at that pretty closely up until the end when I got so tired at looking I couldn’t stand to look at it again.
Along the way, let me give you this one illustration about Jay Bob. Joe Don says, “Oh, Jay Bob likes to plan robberies, although he is really not a crook, he just gets a kick out of that,” but then there’s this time when they want to sneak out at night and go retrieve a magazine from the Dempsey Dumpster, and so it goes likes this:
Jay Bob’s robbery planning experiences served us well. He raised his window while the TV blared in the living room. His parents were watching TV, were watching Perry Como and couldn’t hear us. He unlatched the screen so we wouldn’t make any noise in doing it later when it was quiet. He practiced opening and closing the window. It was remarkably not noisy. We went out to the garage and found batteries for the lights on our bicycles as well as the flashlight that he would carry. I didn’t have gloves with me, and so he liberated a pair from Gerald’s closet. It would be cold. The solution to the mountain of trash that we needed to move was to get out the little shovel that he had bought at the Army-Navy Surplus Store, one used by GIs for digging foxholes. We were ready.
So that reveals a lot about Jay Bob’s organizational skills and how he approached life, just that one segment.
WS: That reveals so much, not just character, but studying. I love the way you almost give your objects a personality. The shovel has a history, and practicing opening and closing the windows, that is such a wonderful little detail. Rather than just saying, he opened the window, it’s practicing, and actually, the practicing reveals character, because he is methodical.
DJ: Yeah. Those things just sort of came to me as I went along and said, “How am I going to tell the reader about Jay Bob?” And some of those things I found worked really well. Plus, you can just impose, also say, “Well, Curty was like this, blah, blah, blah,” but sometimes you need to show them.
WS: How much of character do you think needs to be demonstrated through dialogue and how much through action the way you just described something that was going on in the story?
DJ: I think there needs to be a balance. I think you would get tired if you did it all like I just showed with Jay Bob. I think if you just saw it constantly, you know, every once in a while, you need to sum it up, somebody saying, “Well, he was like this.” So I think there is a balance and probably a little bit more showing through what they do as opposed to telling.
WS: What would be a way not to reveal character? Can you give us, I don’t know, off the top of your head maybe if you can think of something, but like just a glaring mistake?
DJ: I am not sure what you are asking.
WS: Okay, something that would be too heavy-handed, for example. Like if you are trying to reveal something about somebody, and it’s a really obvious thing that you put in a character’s mouth.
DJ: Well, I don’t know that I have a great amount to say about that, but I did go back in the course of editing, and I would look, and I would take things out of people’s mouth because it is evident. He doesn’t need to say that, it’s evident. And so every once in a while, you will accumulate too much, and so you can go through and just cut some of it out and say, “Listen, the reader can figure this out.” You don’t have to tell them everything. I did a lot of that. I just had too much stuff.
WS: What would be an example of that? Are you talking about redundancies or….
DJ: It’s not exactly redundancy. I mean, you could put it in there, but it’s like you don’t have to because the reader already knows. They can tell by the context.
WS: What do you know about your characters that didn’t make it into the book?
DJ: I thought about that question, and I don’t know. I have heard authors talk about that, and whereas lots of authors have to take a lot of stuff out of their books, that’s not so much my problem as just filling the book up. So I really don’t know the answer to that one. I am sure there is something, but I really can’t think of it. I have thought about that ever since Karen gave me your questions. I really don’t know.
WS: Okay. No problem.
DJ: Does anything leap out at you from the characters?
WS: What I was getting at was a lot of times people write a back story and a profile and all this about their characters, and some of it they use in the story, and some of it they don’t, but at least they get a feel for what the character is about from that. And I just wondered if there were things about your characters that you knew that you just decided you didn’t need to use or maybe you are going to use in a sequel.
DJ: Yes, okay. No, I didn’t do that. I just sort of built them up as I went along. A friend of mine, Sandra Scofield, does that wonderfully. She writes these stories about her characters or these, whatever you call those, synopses–this character does all this sort of stuff–and then uses some of it. But I didn’t do it that way.
WS: Okay. Who was the hardest character to write?
DJ: I think it was the mom in a couple of senses. I was there as a kid, and so a lot of these observations were very easy to me. So I had to think about what an adult thought about this.
But the other was, there were in the world I grew up, I almost could say, no single moms. There were families, and if a person lost a spouse, pretty soon they were married again to somebody. That was just our neighborhood. And so number one, we have something that really wasn’t a part of my world in her being single, a single mom, and a mom who is out there having to make a living, find a job. Yes, there were moms at that time that were into the work force but none of them for whom the whole responsibility of supporting the family fell. So she was a woman who is ahead of her time in essence. She didn’t want to have to go back and live with her family on the farm. She wants to make a life, finally gets a good opportunity to do so. What’s her true thoughts about getting married again, all that sort of thing. I just sort of had to feel my way on that.
WS: One of the hardest things about writing, I think, is endings. I am just wondering how you decided on an ending. I don’t want you to give away your ending, but if you could just talk about that a little bit.
DJ: Okay. I just love that question, because I knew in the first chapter how I was going to end it. I was writing along there, and I said, “There is a lot of stuff going to happen here. I am not even sure of all the stuff that is going to happen, but Joe Don will pass this way again.” So I basically had them do that again, and so I knew pretty much the ending before I wrote most of the book.
WS: We had a guest on the show recently, Josann McGibbon Temkin, who was a co-writer of the movie “Runaway Bride,” and she said something very similar. She said it’s easy to come up with the beginning and the end, and the middle is the part that you have a lot of trouble with.
DJ: Well, I would agree with that. I know so many people who approach it the other way: who just get started, and one thing leads to another, and who plot their scenes, “If this person says this and that person responds that way, then it’s going to take me down another road, etc., and how am I ever going to rein all of this in?” But for me, I would be more like her in that. Yeah, I can get it started, and I could bring it to an end. The hard part is what happens in between. I am more like that, yes. I like that.
WS: We talked a little bit about your editing, but I just wanted to focus in on that a little more. Your style is very tight and very clean, and we talked about that a little bit. But I am just wondering if you came up against any particular challenges in the editing process, or again, if it just came naturally to you. You just seem to be a natural writer.
DJ: Well, I don’t know about my being a natural writer. It seems awful hard. But I have noticed when I am around other writers and they talk about my first draft or something like that that their first draft is often times just that. They wrote this part one time, and they went on and wrote the rest of it, and I just, as I am going along, just have to, it’s like a scab, I constantly have to pick at it. I go back, and I look at it, and by the time I come to the end, I have gone over it a jillion times.
In this process, toward the end, I sent it in, a final draft, in about June–no, I got the copy-edited form early summer of 2005–and you know how they do that. They highlight all these things and ask you questions, etc. I responded to that, and some of them, I said, “No, I want it to be. This is the way we used to talk, and this is what I want to say.” Some of their concerns were very good, but then I had a court reporter who likes to write who basically went over the punctuation and grammatical errors and things like that, of which there were quite a number. So she did that, but I would just myself go back and say, “Does this sound good?” And it sounded good enough to submit, so it wasn’t a tremendously difficult process. I had never had any experience, of course, with the copy-edited form. I thought that was sort of neat.
WS: You were actually published by a university press, which I find extremely interesting. How did that come about?
DJ: Well, the teacher of this novel course that I took, she had four of her novels published by Texas Tech Press, and she was very helpful. After I wrote it, I said, “What do I do with it now? She said, “Send it to me.” And she made a couple of suggestions, and then she sent it off to an agent that she knew in New York. The agent said, “There is no market for books about boys” and sent it back to her, and I said, “Could we do this at Texas Tech?” She said, “Sure, and Texas Tech.”
I was just over there recently. They had a celebration of the books that they have put out this year. They have a lot of scholarly works and even some cookbooks, but they like to have a novel in on that, and they regard southeast New Mexico as basically part of their territory. They are sort of southwest-oriented, actually, and so they were very receptive. I am not sure I really understood college presses, though, until I went to their celebration. It’s been a couple of weeks ago, and my goodness, they had a bunch of scholarly books, of which mine was not.
WS: That’s why I find it so unusual, because yours is very much a consumer book.
DJ: And actually here in town, I could have gone the other way. I live in Albuquerque. The University of New Mexico publishes lots and lots of novels, so maybe they are rarities, I don’t know. Texas Tech is my experience, but University of New Mexico would certainly be another alternative for me.
WS: You said one of the New York publishers said there was no market for books about boys, is that right?
DJ: This was an agent. She said nobody is interested in publishing a book about boys. I didn’t figure anybody in New York would be interested, anyway, so I was glad to have it back after it being gone for a few months so that I could actually try to do something with it locally. I didn’t figure that a big press would be interested in it. I figured that I needed to take it to a smaller one, so I was just delighted that Texas Tech was interested.
WS: I am curious about a couple things. First of all, who is in your opinion the audience for the book?
DJ: I got a review the other day in which it was stated, and I was just so happy with that, and this reviewer said, “Anyone who has ever survived growing up.” I was just delighted by that because I meant it to be for everybody. One of the reasons I made Joe Don and his mother a single-parent family was so that kids and adults who read it right now would have some traction with it. It certainly appeals to people in the ‘50s. I get all of these letters and cards and calls from people who say, “Oh, all the memories that you brought back.” But then one of the joys is lots of young people that I know in their twenties and thirties, including young women who have families, they just love it, and it is sort of like, “We never knew about that world, it’s really interesting.” And so I do think it’s basically for anyone who has ever survived growing up, because it contains many of the same issues that everybody has to deal with.
I think one of the strangest things was I was talking to a book club, and there was a lady there who grew up in a small town in New York. So she is talking about her small town in New York, I am talking about my small town in New Mexico, and our experiences were almost identical. I mean, we even used the same language in the two places, so I have enjoyed hearing what people have gotten out of it.
WS: Do you think maybe that agent didn’t know what she was talking about, there is no market for a book about boys?
DJ: Well, yeah, I sort of questioned that, but I always am of the opinion that I am doing good if I get anybody to like it. If you find one person who was willing to publish it, wow, you know, you have solved the problem, so I didn’t figure anybody in New York would be that interested in it. But I did hope that somebody out here in the southwest would or even in California.
WS: Well, I am in California, and I loved the book, so there.
DJ: Yes, yes. See, I was right about that.
WS: Can you give us a little more sample of the book? How about reading a little.
DJ: Yes. How about I read to you, this is from page 39. The chapter is called “Puppy Love,” and there is a whole lot of stuff going on in this, okay?
WS: Okay, Great.
DJ:
Valentine’s Day fell on Tuesday. By the Friday before, my homeroom class had decorated white paper sacks into which the valentines would be dropped. On Monday, the sacks would hang by thumb tacks with care in the hopes that St. Valentine soon would be there. Red hearts and pink cupids and white doilies were the decorations on the sacks, the hearts and cupids made of construction paper.
Mr. Connell made gentle fun of my sack. He said that my heart looked like the rising sun on the Japanese flag and that my cupid had Frankenstein’s facial silhouette as well as a club foot. He was right, but he was a trained artist. Hopefully, no one else would notice. What was most important was that Janet Mitchum, whom I liked with all my rising sun, be pierced in the heart by Frankencupid’s arrow as she read my Valentine, which was no sure bull’s eye.
We all got our Valentines from Allensworth’s stupid little cardboard cutouts, probably made in Japan. Some were of a kid cowboy saying, “Howdy, pardner, won’t you be my Valentine?” Or of Hansel and Gretel saying, “I’d be lost if you won’t be my Valentine.” Or of Humpty Dumpty saying, “I’ve fallen for you. Want you be my Valentine?” It wasn’t even spelled right. Since Mom’s job at Allensworth’s was ringing up valentines at the cash register, I asked her Friday night at the supper table if she sold a more expensive kind. She didn’t. I asked her if Allensworth’s was the only place you could get valentines. If I was going to be Janet’s hero, I would have to do better than a stupid little cutout valentine.
“Lordy no, we’re the cheapest place. If a person wanted expensive valentines, he’d go to Cobb’s.” Cobb’s was the stationery story.
“But why do you want to know? Are you sweet on some girl?” she asked.
I hated being teased about girls. “No, ma’am, I just wondered. This is a really good hamburger, don’t you think.”
“Wondered, my foot. Who is she? Tell me. It’s that Janet Mitchum, isn’t it?”
“Mom, it’s no one. I just thought I would get one for Jay Bob, since he’s my best friend. Maybe Curty, since he’s my second best. Is that okay with you?”
“It’s a crock, Joe Don. In case you haven’t looked up crock in the dictionary, that’s one of the biggest I’ve ever heard, and don’t you clam up on me.”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t you be one of those boys who never tells his mom about what’s going on in his life. I’d hate that. I won’t have it.”
“There’s nothing going on. Do we have anything for dessert?”
“And don’t go trying to change the subject. But yes, there is some chocolate pudding in the ice box. I think Janet Mitchum is about the sweetest, prettiest girl I know, don’t you?”
“Mom.”
“Okay, okay,” she grinned. “Are you going to read tonight?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Well, go get your library book. I’ll do the dishes and get us a bowl of pudding.”
Mom and I often sat on the couch reading library books. The light was better there than anywhere else in the house, except the light by Mom’s bed. Mom had read to me a lot as a kid, and then one day, I took over and had been reading on my own ever since. There were two New Mexicans I have been reading about for years. Both of them were from around Lincoln, which was just up the road from Roswell, Smokey the Bear and Billy the Kid. Everybody likes Smokey the Bear. You would have to be some kind of a villain not to like a baby bear who miraculously lived through the Capitan Mountains forest fire. With badly burned feet, he climbed a tree and hung on until he was rescued by a firefighter. I read everything I could find out about Smokey, who at the time was living at the National Zoo in Washington, DC. Not everyone liked Billy the Kid, but for some reason, I was drawn to him. If he’d killed men, they had most likely needed it, which was something adults said about sorry people. Plus, Billy lived during the Lincoln County war, so it was kill or be killed, just like WW II and Korea only closer. Who I had no use for was Pat Garrett, the sheriff who tracked Billy down and killed him at Ft. Sumner. He had been a buffalo hunter before he was a sheriff, and it was sorry excuse of a man who would kill thousands of buffalo for fun. I considered it an embarrassment to my home town that he had once been a resident. I did like the song his daughter Elizabeth wrote, though, “Oh Fair New Mexico,” which became the state song. I had updated the words to “Oh Fair New Mexico, we love you so, home of Curly, Joe, and Moe, oh fair New Mexico.”
WS: I just love that. There is so much in those passages about your characters, about the setting, about what Joe Don thinks, about what was going on in the time. I don’t even know where to start, but let me just start at the end, where you take the words to a song and, of course, the way a kid would do, change it to something silly, the Three Stooges, Curly, Joe, and Moe. And you have the relationship between the mother and the son. You show what it was like going to school and celebrating Valentine’s Day and how kids were either embarrassed or excited or how they felt about all the awkwardness of being eleven or twelve and celebrating Valentine’s Day publicly. There was one line in there where she said, “Oh no, if you wanted the expensive ones, you would go to such and such a store.” And that says his mother didn’t work in the expensive store, but there was another store in town that was a little more upscale and everybody knew about it. I am just so impressed with the way you handled all of that.
DJ: Gee, thanks.
WS: But it’s so compelling. It’s so interesting, and it flows so well. He goes from one thing to another–I hate the word “seamlessly,” but I will have to use it– seamlessly talking about Smokey the Bear in the state anthem and just to the Three Stooges, like a kid would do.
DJ: Well, that’s what I tried to convey when I set out,. I said, this is going to be fun because as I remember being a kid, my mind just wandered through anything it wanted to at a moment’s notice, and some of the book is sort of like that. There is not a definite transition between this and that, you just go into it, and that’s what being a kid was like to me.
WS: Well, you obviously remember it very well.
DJ: Well, I do. I am writing the sequel to this, but it’s set in mid-high [school], and one of the points he makes is that he could remember all the things that had happened to him in elementary school, because you had time to think about your life. But when he got to mid-high, everything was so fast-paced that he couldn’t even remember what had gone on the year before. It was just a blur. That elementary school was nice and slow-paced, and he had time to think about things and do nothing, and then when he got to junior high, which was what we called it, everything became scheduled, and everything becomes a blur. And that’s exactly how I remember it. Elementary school, we just had enough time to play, and nobody scheduled us in the summer, and we just got to think about our lives, and I remember it, whereas I don’t remember junior high and high school nearly as well.
WS: So I imagine the pace of your sequel is going to be different from the pace of the original story.
DJ: Well, yeah. I have just begun it. It’s pretty much, you just finish up your homework and start something else. I was a product of Sputnik, which is what I am trying to write about, and all of a sudden, they decided we needed to do math and lots of it.
WS: Is there anything that I haven’t asked you about that you would like to mention?
DJ: No. I have enjoyed your questions, more so than anyone else I have interviewed with. They are so to the point. Actually, I need to make a speech to the Southwest Writers here in town, and all of a sudden, you have given me some material to talk about.
WS: Oh, good.
DJ: I really appreciate that. I was going to be pretty boring before that, but now I think I will say, “Golly guys, have we ever thought about this?” So no, I think we have talked about a lot of it. I have just really enjoyed this interview. Thank you so much.
WS: Oh, me, too. I just wanted to mention one thing myself, and that is about the food in the story. I have to say that it sounds somehow like vegetables hadn’t been invented in the ‘50s. I know there were, and you do mention them occasionally, but the foods are so much fun. You have bologna, you have pudding, you have….
DJ: When you go to the grandparents’, oh my gosh, you can’t even rest your arms on the table because of sausage, patty sausage, link sausage, ham. Oh, yes, food was a big deal back then. And you are absolutely right, little mention if not no mention of vegetables because we didn’t like vegetables other than mashed potatoes swimming in gravy.
WS: I loved thinking about all the foods we ate in the ‘50s that you never hear about any more.
DJ: Well, that’s right. There’s an email going around that I have used in several of my speeches. We ate mounds of mashed potatoes swimming in greasy gravy and this, that, and the other, and we really weren’t very overweight because we played from morning until night and rode our bicycles and didn’t come home until they turned the street lights on and all that sort of stuff, which is basically true, but we used to eat a lot.
WS: Dewey, do you have a Web site?
DJ: Yes. It’s a cached page of the church Web site, which is Sandiapres.org, and if you get that far, there is a link.
WS: To Summer of Champions?
DJ: Yes. It’s a cached page.
WS: I have enjoyed this interview so much, Dewey, and really, I am so glad you had a chance to spend time with me today.
DJ: I am just delighted.
WS: I wish you the best of luck with Summer of Champions. Just to remind people, that’s Dewey Johnson, Summer of Champions, Texas Tech University Press, published 2005…. What month was it?
DJ: Yeah, it came out last November, November 2005. About the one place you can count on finding it is Amazon.com or BarnesandNoble.com and Texas Tech Press.
WS: Wonderful. Thank you so much, Dewey.
DJ: Paula, thank you so much. It’s a delight knowing you.
WS: You, too.
