A Reader's Place

On April 11th I’ll be interviewing author Marnie Mueller on Zoom at 7pm EDT. Marnie’s new book is a surprising story, a combined memoir and biography (maybe a new genre?) about her own life and a life-changing friendship. Here’s a link to register; it’s free.

I met Marnie a few years ago, and she kept me posted about the book she was working on. It always sounded fascinating, so when it was published, I bought a copy. The full title is The Showgirl and the Writer: A Friendship Forged in the Aftermath of the Japanese Incarceration (Peace Corps Writers Press). It’s a great story and I knew right away that I had to write about it for this blog and interview her as well. Sometimes a book deserves to be read by a wide audience. As you can tell from the subtitle, it’s not a novel, but a memoir plus a biography. Keep reading…

Marnie tells the remarkable true story of two women, one white (herself) and one Asian (Mary Mon Toy), who forged a deep friendship based on the secrets they carried. Marnie, a Caucasian, was born in a Japanese incarceration camp during World War II because her parents had moved there to help make life more tolerable for the internees. Later, when her family moved to New England, Marnie learned that it was not a good idea to say she was born at Tule Lake Japanese Incarceration Camp. Many people didn’t know about the camps and were confused, convinced this little girl was fantasizing. It wasn’t much better to admit that you were Jewish. After the War, rampant anti-Semitism marked her in another way as an outsider. What experiences defined Marnie? It was hard for her to know. After college, she spent two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Ecuador; worked in New York City as a community organizer; spent time as a folk and rock concert promoter; and was the program director for WBAI. She married and did her best to move on despite a persistent feeling of loss and disorientation.

In 1994, Marnie attended a meeting of a Japanese-American cultural organization where she met Mary Mon Toy, who had a successful Broadway and nightclub career as a Chinese actress and singer. Mary was beautiful, ambitious, and determined. Their friendship, born of shared experiences, was life-changing for both women, a chance to learn about each other and maybe to heal. Marnie became Mary Mon Toy’s friend and caregiver in her last years but as much as she thought she knew, there were secrets Mary kept even from her. The last section of the book reveals those secrets and the research journey that led Marnie to uncover Mary Mon Toy’s real life as the survivor of a Japanese internment camp who “passed” as a Chinese woman to avoid discrimination. 

You may not know much about the incarceration of the Japanese population on the West Coast during World War II. This shameful episode is not generally taught in American history classes. Maybe you read about it in Snow Falling on Cedars or Farewell to Manzanar. Concentration camps in the U.S.? Unthinkable but true. Join me on April 11th and learn more.

After I wrote that last blog post about Rita Dove’s poem for the Folger Shakespeare Library, I started thinking about the quote that I love on the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. Dove’s words about crafting a poem that would be inscribed on stone rather than read on the page made me see that BPL poem in a new light. It’s a perfect example of what she spoke about, how writing within constraints can produce something wonderful.

I first saw the poem when I was in high school and started visiting the main library to do research. The entrance to the building is so dramatic, taking charge of a busy corner on Grand Army Plaza. It’s still such a handsome building. There are several poems on the front–this one is on the right-hand side. When I read it, I had shivers, right from the first line. I was a voracious reader in my teens and it spoke to my love of literature. It made me feel that just by reading I was part of something important.

“Here are enshrined the longings of great hearts

And noble things that tower above the tide,

The magic word that winged wonder starts,

The garnered wisdom that has never died.”

—-by Roscoe C. Brown, a Trustee of the library

I was at an exhibit a few weeks ago at Morven–the historic house and museum in Princeton–to see an exhibit about the Bell Telephone Company, whose history is so much a part of twentieth-century New Jersey. The exhibit was especially focused on Bell Laboratories, the R&D arm of AT&T, which has a distinguished history of innovation in the field of telecommunications. Having lived in Monmouth County for many years, I was very much aware of the presence of Bell Laboratories locations all over the county and the milestones in telecommunications that took place there. The first ship-to-shore transmissions took place near the shore and the first transatlantic telephone call was made from Deal Test Site, now a park where you can see the remnants of the old buildings where the research was done. Marconi ran tests in transatlantic radio telegraphy from Atlantic Highlands at the northern end of the Jersey Shore.

Like many large companies in the previous century, diversity in hiring staff at Bell Laboratories was not company practice. No Jews were hired until after World War II and no Blacks were hired until the 1970s. (Bell Laboratories was founded in 1925.) The exhibit at Morven had several panels about the diverse staff who enriched the company’s research and culture. I was very interested in one particular panel about Marion Croak, a Black woman who joined the Labs in 1982. It is quite astounding to me that her name is not more well-known. Here’s the blurb that was next to her photograph:

“Marion Croak began her career at Bell Labs…in the Human Factors research division. She became interested in converting voice data into digital signals, which would allow people to speak via the internet instead of telephone lines. This Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology allows the videoconferencing that has become commonplace. Today she is a Vice President of Engineering at Google. She holds over 200 patents.”

So there’s no specific book attached to this post, but just a reminder that women’s contributions, and minority women in particular, rarely get the attention they deserve. Lately, there have been a number of books reminding us of this. I probably don’t have to mention Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race, and there’s been a spate of books recently about women spies in World War II: American, British, French, and Russian. In researching Marion’s biography, I found that she was inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame, a site worth looking at.

Correction: The first Black employee at Bell Labs was the engineer W. Lincoln Hawkins. He was hired in 1942.

Here’s a short bio of his career there; the link to the bio is at the end.

“The first Black scientist at Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1942, he had a long and distinguished career as a chemist. His most important innovation was as co-inventor of an additive to stabilize the plastic protective covering of telephone cables, a process that has saved billions of dollars for telecom companies around the world. In addition to 14 U.S. and 129 foreign patents, Hawkins was the first Black inventor to be inducted into the National Academy of Engineering and received the 1992 National Medal of Technology. Hawkins long served as a mentor to young minority researchers. He retired in 1976.” https://life.att.jobs/article-distinguished-black-inventors-history/#:~:text=Lincoln%20Hawkins,distinguished%20career%20as%20a%20chemist.

The other day I was taking a drive with a friend back to my old neighborhood and we passed a sign, one of those huge LED signs powered by a generator, that announces upcoming roadwork or detours. As I approached it and passed it, the sign broadcast only one message: “FIND ALTERNATE ROUTE.” Was it trying to tell me something?

“Find alternate route” certainly could be the mantra for the main character in Till the Wheels Fall Off by Brad Zellar, a book that takes a deep dive into the insomnia- and ADHD-raddled brain of Matthew Carnap, from childhood into adulthood. When the book opens, Matthew has returned to his dying hometown, Prentice, Minnesota, after trying his luck in the Twin Cities and not doing so well. Matthew’s father died in Vietnam before ever seeing his son, and Matt’s been raised in Prentice by his single mom, with help from his Dad’s brothers, especially Rollie Carnap. Matt’s mother has never recovered from the death of her husband and is well-meaning but inattentive. The heart of the novel is the five years in the 1980s that she spent married to Russ Vargo, who owned Screaming Wheels roller rink. Matt and his mother moved into the small apartment behind the rink. Claustrophobic, certainly, but Matt and Russ developed an intense bond over the music at the rink.

Russ is obsessed with the music of the 70s and 80s, making mixtapes and playing them from the High Tower above the rink and after hours as well, skating late into the night to the sounds of his favorites. He can’t get enough. The nine-year-old Matt, happy to have someone paying attention to him, becomes Russ’s disciple; the music becomes his obsession as well. That’s not a bad thing but it does prevent Matt from thinking about what his life might be like after high school. He hangs around with a stoner named Greenland but manages to avoid trouble. Russ and his mother divorce, leaving Matt feeling stranded and alone once again After high school, for five years he takes to the road in his uncles’ business servicing coin-operated condom machines around the Midwest before giving up the “rubber route” and landing a writing job in Minneapolis.

When he returns to Prentice in his late twenties, empty-handed and depressed, Uncle Rollie sets up an apartment for him in the press box of the high school football stadium. It’s a good start for Matt in putting his life back together. I won’t tell anymore about what happens in the last third of the novel. The writing is wonderful and evocative, nostalgic and full of longing. The Kirkus reviewer said it had “lots of sentence-level snap” and I agree. It was a pleasure to read.

There isn’t much plot until the end and the novel is filled with playlists and Russ’s judgments about which bands are worth listening to. I’ve rarely read a book that does such a good job of conveying the power of popular music on our brains. High Fidelity by Nick Hornby comes to mind, of course, but also Daisy Jones & the Six by Taylor Jenkins-Reid. And especially the memoir Love is a Mixtape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time by the music critic Rob Sheffield.