Things We Never Thought We'd Have to Say

     All of us who are parents know we find ourselves saying things we never thought we'd say. 
     
     Things like, "Why does the cat smell like Johnson's Baby Shampoo?" Things like, No, you can't light votive candles in the attic." Things like, "Dying your hair green for St. Patrick's Day is fine if you use something that washes out. In one shampooing."
     
     But I really never thought I would find myself saying, "Journalists deal in facts. Our currency is the truth." 
  
     I thought everyone understood Daniel Patrick Moynihan's famous admonition, "You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts." 

     Silly me.

     We now live in a world where people think they are entitled to their own "facts," except those are not facts. 

     I never thought I would have to admonish alleged adults that just because someone says something doesn't mean it's true.  That our job as journalists is to seek out primary sources and confirm the truth of what someone says. That the bloated bloviators of radio ranting are not telling the truth, are not doing any research, are not talking to experts. 

    And, I never thought I would see the day when the President of this great country (and it is a great country, it doesn't have to be made great "again.") calls what we work day in and day out to research and write "fake news." Or repeat that Stalinst phrase used by dictators to remove those who didn't agree with them, "enemy of the people," against the watchdogs of our freedoms. 

    I think what sickens me the most is that so many people believe, or say they believe, that what Trump says is true. 

    Just because you don't want to hear something doens't mean it isn't real. Climate change is real. There is no dissension among  scientists. It's real and human activity has exacerbated it. There is no time for useless debate. We need to do whatever we can to remediate it. That's not a political statement. It's a fact. And that's only one example of the public descending into the mire of politically-motivated rhetoric. The press keeps reporting this because it is information the public needs. 

    You trust your doctor to live by his or her code. Well, journalists have a code as well. And we take it very seriously. The Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics admonishes us to "seek truth and report it." That's what we do. 

     That's what we do. Foolishly, I thought people understood that. But now it's become something I'm saying that I never thought I'd have to say that.

     

Jacob's War

       There have always been history junkies. 

       The kid at the Wild West theme park  who announces, unasked, that Kate Fisher actually outlived Doc Holliday and went on to marry somebody else. 

        The Civil War reenactor who spends so much on uniforms his wife threatens to leave. 

         The family members who haven't spoken in years over whether or not Abner Doubleday actually invented baseball.

           But a more serious problem -- unless you're the wife, above -- is getting young people to appreciate history. 

            It's possible. A young man told me recently that while there is a certain amount of bullying and even racism in his high school, there is overall a tremendous sense of community in his town. It's a town with a rich history dating from the American Revolution -- George Washington actually did sleep there, and so did Martha, for an extended period. There are many beautiful old Colonial, Canal Era, Victorian and Arts and Crafts buildings -- Gustav Stickley's school was a few miles away -- as well as examples of mid-century skyscrapers. The historical societies have frequent programs where teens are made to feel welcome and extensive local history archives accessible to students working on term papers -- actual, physical archives, including letters with original signatures. 

             "We're all part of the community, so we're part of it's history," this young Hispanic teen said. 

              He reminded me of a St. Patrick's Day evening some years ago. A group of African-American men in their late teens and early 20s were standing on the sidewalk in front of the Episcopal Church singing Irish songs in perfect harmony. Not just When Irish Eyes are Smiling, more obscure and seriously native songs. As a woman dropped a bill into the baseball cap perched on the hood of a car, she looked quizzically at the tenor. He smiled and said, "This is Morristown, everybody's Irish on St. Patrick's Day."

             Now, Morristown, NJ, is hardly Brigadoon, but somebody must be doing something right reaching young people with local history.  If only we could bottle that.

            A local author and historian, Alex Perriello, made an attempt to do that with his Revolutionary War novel, Jacob's War. 

           At first it seems Jacob's War resembles some of the Rita Mae Brown books that jump back and forth between contemporary Virginia and scenes of the Revolutionary War in the same part of the state. With Corgies. Always Corgies. 

           But Perriello adds another element. Time travel.

            Ok, I admit, this is not my genre. Time travel makes me thing of that Star Trek movie where Ensign Chekov asks some random person on a San Francisco street, "Can you tell me vere to vind the nuclear wessels."

            But, a friend who also read the book pointed out the history is accurate and his audience is young. And young people could probably relate to his narrative.            

            He sets part of the story at the Inn at Millrace Pond in Hope, NJ, practically next door to me. His description of the Inn is pretty accurate. He gets the geography right in a number of other paces, too, although he invents a truck stop, which is nice for a reader who knows the terrain. 

              The overall tale is quite interesting. The protagonist, Jacob Von Etten, is looking for a place to hide from British soldiers when he finds himself in another time. The narrator stumbles upon Jacob in an area where drivers are on the alert for deer, not Revolutionary War soldiers.

              A couple of modern-day history buffs outfit Jacob with some modern equipment and clothing which helps when he gets back to his own time, but, it turns out he needs more support he can only get from the 21st Century. 

              The narrative is handled well and holds the reader's interest. One can only hope it finds a young teenage audience and helps bring them into an interest in earlier times. 

The Cemetery Keeper's Wife

     The murder of Tillie Smith, a kitchen worker at the former Centenary Collegiate Institute, in 1886, is the subject of speculation to this day. 

    Like the Changewater murders 40 years before, Tillie's murder was "solved," but not without suspicion.

    Although it occurred in more recent times, the Tillie Smith murder had less evidence than the murders of John Parke and his family in their home near the Musconetcong River in the 1840's. There wasn't a fortune to be inherited. There weren't myriad relatives. The victim was related to prominent figures, the Smith's of Waterloo, but not prominent herself. There wasn't even a Methodist pastor with a firey delivery.

     Local historian Denis Sullivan wrote a book about the trial of James Titus who was convicted of murdering the teenage Tillie.
But Sullivan concentrated on the trial and Titus. MaryAnn Abromitis McFadden was curious about Tillie herself. And a little angry about why she wasn't the central figure in her own story.

     When the Abromitis family moved to Hackettstown from Brooklyn, MaryAnn went exploring and found Tillie's monument in the cemetery.
Later, as a real estate agent, she found herself in Titus' house.
Other coincidences plus her familiarity with Centenary where she both studied and taught led her to decide to write Tillie's book.

   The author of three novels, McFadden had to decide how she wanted to approach the story. A historical novel? Straight nonfiction?
She settled on a hybrid, a well-researched novelization centered around the wife of the cemetery keeper at Hackettstown Union Cemetery where Tillie is buried.

    Her main character, Rachel, also stumbles across coincidences with Tillie's life, including one very big one. She becomes obsessed with Tillie's life and death, to the dismay of her husband and his family. She can't keep away from digging into the story of what led Tillie to her death on the Centenary campus.

     Which is sort of what McFadden found happening to her. She found more and more reason to doubt Titus' guilt and more interesting facts about Tillie.

    The book took about five years to research, not unexpectedly for this coldest of cold cases.

    McFadden introduced the book, appropriately, in the Victorian parlors of the Seay Building at Centenary, the structure that replaced the original Collegiate Institute that burned on Halloween Night 1899. (Yes, legend has it Tillie's ghost set the fire.) She packed the parlors as she did the Clinton Book Shop a couple of weeks later. 

    The crowds had to do with the popularity of McFadden's earlier books and also with the hold Tillie has on the populace around Hackettstown, especially around the college.

     She may be known as a real estate agent in her brother's firm, but McFadden started her career as a reporter and proved with The Cemetery Keeper's Wife she still knows how to find and tell a good story. 

     The book is compelling. Don't start reading it if you need a early night because you won't want to put it down. I read it with a booklight clipped to the pages during the recent power outages. 
McFadden is a fine writer and a terrific researcher, but most of us knew that from her novels. But this book is on another level. I can imagine how much research went into the effort and I'm not sure I'd take it on.

MaryAnn Abromitis McFadden at the Clinton Book Shop

  As I always say with Mike Daigle's books, I am a friend of the author, but I also know a terrific read when I read it. And The Cemetery Keeper's Wife is more than that. It is the necessary piece in the Tillie Smith puzzle. It is the book that, finally, gives Tillie a voice.

  Only one thing makes me a little sad about the book. A very important figure (besides Tillie) was missing from the exuberant book launch, MaryAnn's mother, Angie Abromitis, who died last year. But Angie was supervising the book and its launch. No doubt about that. 
 
 

A Voice for Tillie

MaryAnn Abromitis McFadden calls herself a former journalist. Sharon Decker, English and Humanities Department Chair at Centenary University takes issue with that because of McFadden's extensive research into her latest book, The Cemetery Keeper's Wife.  I take issue with that because the book does exactly what journalism is supposed to do, it gives voice to the voiceless. MaryAnn proves she's still a reporter.

Since 1886 when Tillie Smith was murdered at the school, then called the Centenary Collegiate Institute, many of the stories have been about the case but not the victim.

To be sure, there are serious questions about the guilt of John Titus and Denis Sullivan's book about the trial was important to the story overall, but McFadden had another goal: to let people know who Tillie was.

Too often, the victim is lost in the sensationalism of a trial. That is exacerbated by the possibility of injustice. Titus wasn't helped by possibly incompetent counsel and yellow journalism that was only too prevalent at the time, but, guilty or not, he was only part of the story.

McFadden chose to tell the story as a novel. She created a modern-day character, Rachel, who auctions houses and discovers Tillie in much the same way McFadden did. Coming to Hackettstown from Brooklyn as a child, McFadden found Tillie's gravestone in the Union Cemetery and was intrigued by this young woman. Years later, while selling real estate, she ended up listing the house where Titus lived. These coincidences sparked an interest in the story and in Tillie herself.

The Cemetery Keeper's Wife was introduced on Tuesday, April 24, in the parlors of the Seay Building at Centenary to a packed house of family and friends as well as fans of McFadden's earlier books.

I can't review the book yet, but I can recommend anything by MaryAnn McFadden, former and present journalist.