Oral Histories

Join us in April as Writer’s Zen celebrates the world of historical fiction, blogging along with the A to Z Blog Challenge. We’ll be posting our way through the alphabet, a letter at a time – every day except Sunday.

If you like historical fiction, there are links at the end where you can follow Pages of the Past on Facebook or sign up for the weekly newsletter. Each week we feature an article about writing historical fiction, spotlight a historical fiction author, and share great reads in a variety of time periods. There are also occasional short story contests and other fun highlights.

Today, introduces the letter O.

Get Pages of the Past delivered to your inbox every Friday!

Join us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/184527085517941/

As authors of historical fiction, often the information we glean during our research phase is from oral histories of people that have first-hand information of people, places, or events of long ago. Following is an excerpt from a class I had on writing your family history that has some tips about interviewing people.

Interviews

Are you interviewing family members for their stories? Do you think about it, but don’t get around to it? Not sure where to start?

Here’s some tips for interviewing people to glean information and tales of the past.

1. Do it now. This is I think one of the most important. Oh, how I wish I could go back in time fifteen or twenty years and listen to more stories from Grandma. I’d listen more intently, not with just half my attention. And I’d take notes. And record her! We think we’ll have time. Next month. Next summer. When I’m not so busy. And then – it’s too late. So do it now.
2. Plan multiple visits if possible. You’re not going to get everything in one visit. You’re not going to cover 60-70-80 years of memories in an afternoon. The best time I had with my mom was when I took a week and flew to California. I picked her up and we drove to Arizona to see my kids and grandkids. We spent several days there and drove back. I took notes the whole week. One memory begets another. It seems that once someone takes a trip back in time, other memories start surfacing over the next few days and weeks.
3. Don’t do too much at once. Plan for breaks. Several hours is a good period. If you try to go all day, it will be fatiguing – to you and to the person you’re interviewing. The visit with my mom worked well, even though it was over a period of many days because we weren’t constantly ‘interviewing.’ It was conversations in between driving, visiting, eating, relaxing, etc. Most likely the person you’ll be interviewing is older, so be considerate. Realize that this process may be tiring for them.
4. Make notes, and record if possible. I didn’t record any conversations with my mom, but I have a legal pad full of notes. Unfortunately, when I go to look at those notes four or five years later, some of my cryptic notes that made so much sense at the time now look like nonsense and I have no idea what I meant by my scribbles. Most people now have phones that can easily – and unobtrusively – record your interviews.
5. Ask ahead of time if there are photographs available that you can look at. If this doesn’t come up until you’re with the individual for your interview session, it may not be possible to access photographs. Often, they’re buried deep in a closet or in a storage bin. If they know ahead of time, it will be easier for them to have photographs available, which are a great source of prompts.
6. Ask open ended questions. Open ended questions, those that don’t require yes or no answers, gather more responsive answers. Instead of asking ‘Did you like being raised on a farm? (Answer – yes or no – and you’re done), ask ‘What was it like being raised on a farm?”
7. If possible, visit at their home. Especially if they’re elderly. They may be more comfortable at home in their own environment. Also, being home may prompt memories that wouldn’t surface if you’re sitting in a loud, busy restaurant for your interview.
8. Be Patient. Many elderly people speak slowly and softy. Some are hard of hearing. In our excitement about getting to the gold nuggets we’ve been searching for; we don’t want to rush full speed ahead. We may need to slow down a notch or two to match their energy levels.

 

The Legacy Project has six terrific questions to ask:

1. If a young person asked you, “What have you learned in your ____ years in this world,” what would you tell him or her?

2. Some people say that they have had difficult or stressful experiences, but they have learned important lessons from them. Is that true for you? Can you give an example?

3. As you look back over your life, do you see any “turning points”; that is, a key event or experience that changed the course of your life or set you on a different track?

4. What would you say you know now about living a happy and successful life that you didn’t know when you were twenty?

5. What can younger people do to avoid having regrets later in life?

6. What would you say are the major values or principles that you live by?

 

Nifty Fifties

Join us in April as Writer’s Zen celebrates the world of historical fiction, blogging along with the A to Z Blog Challenge. We’ll be posting our way through the alphabet, a letter at a time – every day except Sunday.

If you like historical fiction, there are links at the end where you can follow Pages of the Past on Facebook or sign up for the weekly newsletter. Each week we feature an article about writing historical fiction, spotlight a historical fiction author, and share great reads in a variety of time periods. There are also occasional short story contests and other fun highlights.

Today, introduces the letter N.

Get Pages of the Past delivered to your inbox every Friday!

Join us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/184527085517941/

Nifty Fifties

What makes a fictional novel fall into the ‘historical fiction’ category? There seems to be some debate about the time frame that nudges a novel into the historical fiction genre. Wikipedia states:

Definitions differ as to what constitutes a historical novel. On the one hand the Historical Novel Society defines the genre as works “written at least fifty years after the events described”, while critic Sarah Johnson delineates such novels as “set before the middle of the last [20th] century … in which the author is writing from research rather than personal experience.”

If we use the Historical Novel Society’s definition, any fictional tale set before 1970 would be considered historical fiction. I’m not really sure how I feel about using that criteria. Because I could easily write a story set in the 1970s and it would be debatable about whether it’s historical fiction or not. It’s borderline on the cutoff date, but it’s the “writing from personal experience” part that troubles me. I could write a story from personal experience in the 1970s, and what I’m not sure about is how I feel about coming that close to the edge of ‘historical’.

Now the 1950s, or the ‘Nifty Fifties’ as they’re sometimes called, I couldn’t write from personal experience. Granted, I was born then (barely – 1958), but I have no recollections of my first two years of life. Whew! I’m saved on that one. Although those years seem familiar enough that it seems like I lived the 1950s. But I think that’s because of the stories I heard from Mom and Dad about their living through the 1950s – and the massive amounts of Happy Days reruns I devoured as a child.

What makes the 1950s different from other generations or eras?

TELEVISION

A big difference in family life was the popularity of the television set. According to Wikipedia:

The 1950s are known as The Golden Age of Television by some people. Sales of TV sets rose tremendously in the 1950s and by 1950 4.4 million families in America had a television set. Americans devoted most of their free time to watching television broadcasts. People spent so much time watching TV, that movie attendance dropped and so did the number of radio listeners.  Television revolutionized the way Americans see themselves and the world around them. TV affects all aspects of American culture. “Television affects what we wear, the music we listen to, what we eat, and the news we receive.”

MUSIC

Music played a huge part in this decade. Rock and Roll entered mainstream America, much to the consternation of many of the older folks. Elvis Presley, Ricky Nelson, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis…

The new music differed from previous styles in that it was primarily targeted at the teenager market, which became a distinct entity for the first time in the 1950s as growing prosperity meant that young people did not have to grow up as quickly or be expected to support a family. Rock-and-roll proved to be a difficult phenomenon for older Americans to accept and there were widespread accusations of it being a communist-orchestrated scheme to corrupt the youth, although rock and roll was extremely market based and capitalistic.

The American folk music revival became a phenomenon in the United States in the 1950s to mid-1960s with the initial success of The Weavers who popularized the genre. Their sound, and their broad repertoire of traditional folk material and topical songs inspired other groups such as the Kingston Trio, the Chad Mitchell Trio, The New Christy Minstrels, and the “collegiate folk” groups such as The Brothers Four, The Four Freshmen, The Four Preps, and The Highwaymen. All featured tight vocal harmonies and a repertoire at least initially rooted in folk music and topical songs.

This influence of the American folk music revival was a great lead in to the 1960s popularity of that musical style.

FILM

The film industry was booming in the 1950s. Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando, Lucille Ball, Sopia Loren, and more. But who can ever forget the iconic male figure of this time – James Dean?

WAR

The 1950s was a time of conflict referred to as the ‘Cold War’, involving rival superpowers of the United States against Soviet Union influence.

The Korean War, which took place from 1950 to 1953 also affected many families across the nation. Wikipedia reports:

The war left 33,742 American soldiers dead, 92,134 wounded, and 80,000 missing in action (MIA) or prisoner of war (POW). Estimates place Korean and Chinese casualties at 1,000,000–1,400,000 dead or wounded, and 140,000 MIA or POW.

SOCIETY BEGINS TO CHANGE

With all these changes, family life and society also began to change.

An article, The 1950s Lifestyles and Social Trends: Overview, discusses many of the changes that came about in this decade. They write:

The 1950s was an era of great upheaval in the United States. By the millions, Americans who had just survived two decades of economic depression and war left the cities for the greenery and open spaces of the suburbs. Suburban towns sprang up like crabgrass across the country. With these instant communities came a new American lifestyle that included suburban malls, fast-food restaurants, TV dinners, drive-in movies, and an oversized, gas-guzzling car in every garage.

If I were going to be writing a story set in the 1950s, there’s a lot more research I’d have to do. But – I probably won’t be doing this. It’s just too close in proximity to years that I have memories of, and I don’t like being that close to something termed ‘historical’.

Memories and Recollections

Today, introduces the letter M.

Get Pages of the Past delivered to your inbox every Friday!

Join us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/184527085517941/

Memories and Recollections

The excerpt below doesn’t deal specifically with writing historical fiction. It’s from a workbook I created for a class I was teaching on writing your family stories. However, since we often refer to people’s memories of a time past when we’re researching for writing historical fiction, I thought the topic would apply to our roles as historical fiction authors.

Memory

Whether we are writing memoir, historic documentation of a family history, or creating a fictional tale based on true beginnings, we rely heavily on memory – which has been proven to be imperfect.

Our own memories, even though we think we have perfect recall, may err drastically from the truth of what actually happened. The family members that we interview may be spot on in the memories they think of to tell you. Or, those moments may have been distorted by the passage of time and the many experiences that have occurred since.

A lot may vary just because of our own individual perceptions of an event. I was talking to a co-worker about this subject one day. There were three of us in the room discussing some now-forgotten work drama and how another employee’s version of what happened differed so drastically from theirs.

I commented that even if someone came in immediately after our conversation and recorded details about what happened – they’d get three different stories. There may be much in common, but we all pay attention to different details. One will recall the conversation with more accuracy. Another may not remember much at all because their mind was far away, dwelling on one of their own problems and they weren’t paying attention. Another may remember the clothing that was worn, or the perfume that filled the room, while with someone else the clothing or its color may not have even registered.

Next, add ten, twenty, or sixty years to the timeline. How accurate is that memory going to be?

In Writing Life Stories, Bill Roorbach tells a story that his sister likes to frequently re-tell. It involves a younger brother, sucking on a blue toy bolt until it stuck to his lip. The sister finally wrestled it off and when it came loose the younger brother’s lip swelled to tremendous proportions and everyone freaked.

Except…the author claims that his sister wasn’t there. He was. The bolt was yellow, not blue. And he and his mother both laughed about it. He writes,

“Memory is faulty. That’s one of the tenets of memory. And the reader comes to memoir understanding that memory is faulty, that the writer is going to challenge the limits of memory, which is quite different from lying.”

He also writes,

“Even facts distort: What’s remembered, recorded, is never the event itself, no matter how precise the measurement…”

Just be aware that our individual perceptions and the passage of time may alter what we try to convey as historical fact. Sometimes a bit of a disclaimer worked into the narrative may help smooth over some of the possible differences in account.

• As far as I recollect…
• The conversation went something like…
• My ex – let’s call him Doofus James…
• The story of how he got his first job bootlegging may be lost, but one can assume…
• Though the details have been lost through the years, it most likely…

All in all, since we’re most likely not out looking for journalistic awards for this work, the important thing to know is that recording our family’s legacy is what’s important. As Carol Lachappelle, in Finding Your Voice Telling Your Stories, shares: The poet Anne Sexton wrote, “It doesn’t matter who my father was, it matters who I remember he was.”

Librarians on Horseback

Join us in April as Writer’s Zen celebrates the world of historical fiction, blogging along with the A to Z Blog Challenge. We’ll be posting our way through the alphabet, a letter at a time – every day except Sunday.

If you like historical fiction, there are links at the end where you can follow Pages of the Past on Facebook or sign up for the weekly newsletter. Each week we feature an article about writing historical fiction, spotlight a historical fiction author, and share great reads in a variety of time periods. There are also occasional short story contests and other fun highlights.

Today, introduces the letter L.

Get Pages of the Past delivered to your inbox every Friday!

Join us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/184527085517941/

Librarians on Horseback

Most people think of librarians as sedately settled behind their counters assisting patrons, in the stacks shelving books, or in the back office ordering new selections. While we picture them busy working away amidst the silent reams of paper surrounding them, we don’t often think of them outside of the four enclosing walls they work in.

This isn’t always the case. While bookmobiles have been part of a library’s history over the years, with a few still operating, from 1935-1943 the WPA funded a project for the residents of rural Kentucky, where many librarians delivered their printed products on horseback.

Wikipedia reports:

The first Pack Horse Library was created in Paintsville in 1913 and started by May F. Stafford. It was supported by a local coal baron, John C.C. Mayo, but when Mayo died in 1914, the program ended because of lack of funding. Elizabeth Fullerton, who worked with the women’s and professional projects at the WPA, decided to reuse Stafford’s idea. In 1934, A Presbyterian minister who ran a community center in Leslie County offered his library to the WPA if they would fund people to carry the books to people who could not easily access library materials. That started the first pack horse library, which was administered by the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) until the WPA took it over in 1935. By 1936, there were eight pack horse libraries in operation.

Trails could be difficult and dangerous, except where the WPA had completed its farm-to-market road program.

The Pack Horse Library Project was headed by Ellen Woodward at a federal level. The project ran between 1935 and 1943. “Book women” were hired by the WPA and worked for around $28 a month delivering books in the Appalachians via horseback or on mules. They delivered both to individual homes and to schoolhouses. The WPA paid for the salaries of the supervisors and book carriers; all books were donated to the program.

There were around 30 different pack horse libraries who served around 100,000 different people in the mountain areas. The libraries also served around 155 schools in these counties by 1937.

I thought the whole subject of packhorse librarians was fascinating. I saw one historical fiction book on the subject, The Bookwoman of Troublesome Creek. I had it on my wish list, and luckily (for me) a friend bought it and shared her copy with me. Being in my favorite time period, the 1930s, of course I enjoyed the book.

While researching to write this post, I discovered another fictional tale based on the same subject, The Giver of Stars. I also saw that there was some dispute about the second book borrowing many of the concepts and plot points from the first. (Disclaimer: I haven’t read The Giver of Stars yet.) Both books were published in 2019, The Bookwoman of Troublesome Creek in May, and The Giver of Stars in October.

A post that goes into detail about the similarities is here. I have to admit, there are a few instances cited that seem specific and the odds of them being coincidences seem slim. But yet, others, don’t seem to be copying at all. For instance, both ladies receive a quilt for a wedding present. In 1930s Kentucky? What couple didn’t receive a quilt for a wedding present? Another example is that patrons in both books ask the librarian for issues of Woman’s Home Companion. One of the most popular publications in that time, and a hand reference for women? That point doesn’t convince me either.

But looking closer at some of the claims, the while timeline issue, as a writer, doesn’t concern me. Yes, Richardson, author of The Bookwoman of Troublesome Creek, began her research and writing earlier (researching in 2015 and first manuscript to her agent July 2017).

By then, Moyes, author of The Giver of Stars, was already researching and writing. She reports that she saw a 2017 Smithsonian article about the packhorse librarians that prompted her to write her book. By July/August 2017 she was already writing and by the time the November 2017 book description was published, Moyes already had done research trips and made a Facebook post about her newest work.

So, what does all of this have to do with us as historical fiction authors? Naturally, it can nudge us to be careful with our work, so we don’t end up in the same dispute. But for myself, I think the most important part is to document, document, document! Keep records of your research. Keep records of your trips. Make public Facebook posts that can document that you’ve been working on this, even as another book on the same topic is being released.

There are no new topics. There are no new main plots. Now, the twists and turns and they way we deliver the stories – yes, those are ours.

Despite the dispute between the two authors, and yes, I still want to read the second book, and despite my cautions to be careful to document my research in the future, the subject of packhorse librarians is still fascinating.

You can read more about them, and see some fabulous vintage photographs on these two sites:

The Fierce Female Librarians Who Delivered Books On Horseback During The Great Depression

 

Horseback librarians during the Great Depression

 

Killers of the Stealthy Kind

Join us in April as Writer’s Zen celebrates the world of historical fiction, blogging along with the A to Z Blog Challenge. We’ll be posting our way through the alphabet, a letter at a time – every day except Sunday.

If you like historical fiction, there are links at the end where you can follow Pages of the Past on Facebook or sign up for the weekly newsletter. Each week we feature an article about writing historical fiction, spotlight a historical fiction author, and share great reads in a variety of time periods. There are also occasional short story contests and other fun highlights.

Today, introduces the letter K.

Get Pages of the Past delivered to your inbox every Friday!

Join us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/184527085517941/

Killers of the Stealthy Kind

I made my list of A to Z topics in January, way ahead of when I needed them so I could be working on my posts slowly. Looking for a difficult K word, I came up with this title – intending the post to be about smallpox, influenza, and tuberculosis in a historical sense, since we are thinking about topics in the contest of writing historical fiction.

I did NOT expect to be quarantined under Stay at Home orders because of the Coronavirus by the time I needed to post this K blog! A topic that seemed to be historical in nature is now current daily news.

Jude Knight writes about smallpox on a post entitled: The Greatest Killer

For at least 3,000 and perhaps as much as 6,000 years, smallpox was one of the world’s deadliest diseases. In countries where it was endemic, it was a disease of childhood, killing up to 80% of children infected. A person fortunate to escape infection in childhood who then caught the virus as an adult, had a 30% chance of dying. Either way, those who survived the disease were left with lifelong scars but also with lifelong immunity, so they could neither catch the disease nor transmit it to others.

Transmission was from person to person, including from droplets in the air from sneezing, coughing, or even breathing. Worse, body fluids on things like clothing or bedding could carry live viruses.

Tuberculosis had its own reign as a killer to be feared. Fortunately, for those of us living today, although the disease does still exist, it is rare and mostly treatable.

History of TB in the 17th Century

Although Tuberculosis was present in Europe in the middle Ages, it was in the seventeenth century that the disease reached astounding epidemic proportions. By the mid seventeenth century it was recorded in the London Bills of Mortality that one in five of the deaths in the city was due to consumption. From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century in England, like the other great towns and cities of Europe and America, it swept on in a continuing epidemic of such monstrous proportion, the disease was called the White Plague of Europe. But the history of TB is that in the later part of the 17th century Tuberculosis mortality slowly decreased.

In 1650 doubts had been expressed as to the contagiousness of phthisis, by the faculty of Paris. Soon TB spread over Northern Europe. Northern physicians seem to have been led to believe that the disease was due to a constitutional hereditary defect rather than due to contagion by the fact that it was particularly common and severe in certain families.¹⁰

In 1679 Sylvius de la Boe, an Amsterdam physician, in his work Opera Medica, was probably the first to use the term tubercles in phthisis of the lung which he called tubercula glandulosa. In addition Sylvius described the association between phthisis and a disease of the lymph glands of the neck called scrofula.

When I was researching for Fat and Sassy, I found where the flu epidemic in 1918 closed churches, schools, and libraries. In Glendora, California, all library books returned from infected homes were wrapped and stored for one year without being touched. I thought this was fascinating. I wanted to include it in my book, but my timeline was more 1940s, not 1918. So, I created a scene where my mom’s class took a trip to the library. (The joys of the fictional part of historical fiction!) The librarian then mentioned these facts in the talk she gave to the class. (You can read that snippet on a blog post here.)

I have since discovered that while reading about this situation several years ago was fascinating, I’d much rather READ about something like this than to LIVE it.

Journals of the Grapes of Wrath

Join us in April as Writer’s Zen celebrates the world of historical fiction, blogging along with the A to Z Blog Challenge. We’ll be posting our way through the alphabet, a letter at a time – every day except Sunday.

If you like historical fiction, there are links at the end where you can follow Pages of the Past on Facebook or sign up for the weekly newsletter. Each week we feature an article about writing historical fiction, spotlight a historical fiction author, and share great reads in a variety of time periods. There are also occasional short story contests and other fun highlights.

Today, introduces the letter J.

Get Pages of the Past delivered to your inbox every Friday!

Join us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/184527085517941/

Journals of the Grapes of Wrath

If you asked me what my favorite book of all time was, you’d get an answer of one of two books. It depends on which day you asked me the question. One is Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand, and the other is Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck.

John Steinbeck originally wrote seven articles, published in the San Francisco News, from October 5-12, 1936. These articles focused on the migration in the post-Depression years, primarily from the Dust Bowl to the agricultural oasis of California. He interviewed many sharecropper families and wrote the articles from the information he obtained from so many down on their luck families. These are available in The Harvest Gypsies. (free) These articles became the early basis for his well-known book, The Grapes of Wrath.

In 1938, from June to October, he furiously wrote what would become his epic novel, earning him a Pulitzer Prize and a Nobel Prize. While he spent huge portions of the day penning his award-winning novel, he also maintained a journal about life and his writing progress. Years after his death, his words were published – Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath.

What I find interesting, as an author that wrestles with self-doubt on an almost daily basis, is that despite the accolades this book would bring him, Mr. Steinbeck also fought with his own doubts about his writing and about his book. On one day he writes:

This book has become a misery to me because of my inadequacy.

On another, as he neared the completion, he wrote:

If I can do that it will be all my lack of genius can produce. For no one else knows my lack of ability the way I do. I am pushing against it all the time. Sometimes, I seem to do a good little piece of work, but when it is done it slides into mediocrity.

Even closer to the end, his self-doubt remains firmly entrenched. He writes:

I only hope it is some good. I have very grave doubts sometimes. I don’t want this to seem hurried. It must be just as slow and measured as the rest but I am sure of one thing — it isn’t the great book I had hoped it would be. It’s just a run-of-the-mill book. And the awful thing is that it is absolutely the best I can do. Now to work on It.

“…..it isn’t the great book I had hoped it would be. It’s just a run-of-the-mill book…” Really? How wrong he was!

Brainpickings, on their post ‘John Steinbeck Working Days’ puts the authors self-doubts into perspective with the success of the book. (https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/03/02/john-steinbeck-working-days/)

“The book, of course, was far from run-of-the-mill. In addition to earning the two highest accolades in literature, The Grapes of Wrath remained atop the bestseller list for almost a year after it was published on April 14, 1939 and sold nearly 430,000 copies in its first year alone. And therein lies the very thing that makes Working Days a necessary creative scripture for anyone laboring in the arts — the journal’s deeply assuring testament to the fact that even those of exceptional genius are plagued by constant self-doubt, and that perhaps the most important quality setting the brilliant apart from the mediocre is their willingness to let the doubt happen but plow forward anyway, not to be shown up by it but to show up doggedly for the day’s task, however monumental its ask and however small its give.”

I know that I’ll never be in the same league as John Steinbeck (hear that ‘ole nasty self-doubt monster rearing its ugly head in my life?), yet, I’m so glad to see that no matter the measure of success he achieved as a highly acclaimed author – the man himself grappled with his own inner monsters. I don’t feel so bad, knowing that I’m in good company.

Intelligence – as in Spies

Join us in April as Writer’s Zen celebrates the world of historical fiction, blogging along with the A to Z Blog Challenge. We’ll be posting our way through the alphabet, a letter at a time – every day except Sunday.

If you like historical fiction, there are links at the end where you can follow Pages of the Past on Facebook or sign up for the weekly newsletter. Each week we feature an article about writing historical fiction, spotlight a historical fiction author, and share great reads in a variety of time periods. There are also occasional short story contests and other fun highlights.

Today, introduces the letter I.

Get Pages of the Past delivered to your inbox every Friday!

Join us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/184527085517941/

Intelligence – as in Spies

Not everything is as it seems. I’m thinking of the spy-world here, but I need an ‘I’ topic for the A to Z Blog Challenge, so I’m going with Intelligence.

Not being a huge reader in the genres that feature elaborate spy or espionage plots, when I think of ‘spy’ my mind goes immediately to one of my favorite shows growing up – Get Smart. I picture good ole Maxwell Smart pulling off his shoe and turning it over to answer a phone call.

Wikipedia reports on some of the many spy devices used in this series:

In Get Smart, telephones are concealed in over 50 objects, including a necktie, comb, watch, and a clock. A recurring gag is Max’s shoe phone (an idea from Brooks). To use or answer it, he has to take off his shoe. Several variations on the shoe phone were used. In “I Shot 86 Today” (season four), his shoe phone is disguised as a golf shoe, complete with cleats, developed by the attractive armorer Dr. Simon. Smart’s shoes sometimes contain other devices housed in the heels: an explosive pellet, a smoke bomb, compressed air capsules that propelled the wearer off the ground, and a suicide pill (which Max believes is for the enemy).

Agent 99 (Barbara Feldon) had her concealed telephones, as well. She had one in her makeup compact, and also one in her fingernail. To use this last device, she would pretend to bite her nail nervously, while actually talking on her “nail phone”.

Other gadgets they report (bringing back many memories) are:

Gag phones also appear in other guises. In the episode “Too Many Chiefs” (season one), Max tells Tanya, the KAOS informer whom he is protecting, that if anyone breaks in, to pick up the house phone, dial 1-1-7, and press the trigger on the handset, which converts it to a gun. The phone-gun is only used that once, but Max once carried a gun-phone, a revolver with a rotary dial built into the cylinder. In the episode “Satan Place”, Max simultaneously holds conversations on seven different phones: the shoe, his tie, his belt, his wallet, a garter, a handkerchief, and a pair of eyeglasses. Other unusual locations include a garden hose, a car cigarette lighter (hidden in the car phone), a bottle of perfume (Max complains of smelling like a woman), the steering wheel of his car, a painting of Agent 99, the headboard of his bed, a cheese sandwich, lab test tubes (Max grabs the wrong one and splashes himself), a Bunsen burner (Max puts out the flame anytime he pronounces a “p”), a plant in a planter beside the real working phone (operated by the dial of the working phone), and inside another full-sized working phone.

While these are all humorous incidents, they’re not that far off-base. Although I don’t read many contemporary novels with spy activity myself, I have been reading some World War II novels from the authors featured at Pages of the Past, and I’ve come to realize how imperative some of these undercover operations were to the success of the Allies during this war.

When I ran across mention of Phyliss Latour Doyle, a young woman who became a British spy and parachuted behind enemy lines in Normandy. She relayed messages about enemy movements and used the guise of knitting to hide her covert operations.

Although not used in the past, there’s a term for people who hide secret data within ordinary pieces of everyday life – steganographers. The phrase is of more modern origin, but the concept is not. The practice of spies using written codes in routine correspondence and female spies transmitting coded data inside the skeins of yarn in their knitting baskets dates back to the American Revolution.

Linda Harris, on her blog Strong Women in History, tells more about Phyllis Latour Doyle, and other women heroes who used gadgets and tactics to relay information.

But, back to Phyllis Latour Doyle. She was a British spy who parachuted into Normandy in 1944 prior to the D-Day invasion. Pretending to be a poor French girl selling soap, she bicycled throughout the area, chatting with the German soldiers. Then she returned to her quarters, knitting Morse code messages into her yarn. The yarn was put into her knitting basket and delivered through Resistance channels back to the British to help pave the way for D-Day.

How does one knit in code?

There are only two basic stitches in knitting: a purl stitch and a knit stitch. The purl makes a stitch looking like a horizontal line or small bump. The knit stitch is smooth and looks like a low V.

By using a single purl stitch and then three in an alternating row together, one can transmit in Morse code of a dot and then a dash. Other knitters tied small knots into the yarn with each knot’s placement denoting a unique code.

You can read more about this topic here:

https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/63516307/pippas-astonishing-story-recognised

https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=25020&fbclid=IwAR0Av5pTzRFynJ2dba3Kbiln2Umwpd7GiiVaValRJQWuURV9SKkfMw2VB-0

For several excellent books about real-life female spies for adult readers, we recommend “Code Name: Lise” (https://www.amightygirl.com/code-name-lise), “Madame Fourcade’s Secret War” (https://www.amightygirl.com/madame-fourcade-s-secret-war), and “A Woman of No Importance” (https://www.amightygirl.com/a-woman-of-no-importance)

 

Humor

Join us in April as Writer’s Zen celebrates the world of historical fiction, blogging along with the A to Z Blog Challenge. We’ll be posting our way through the alphabet, a letter at a time – every day except Sunday.

If you like historical fiction, there are links at the end where you can follow Pages of the Past on Facebook or sign up for the weekly newsletter. Each week we feature an article about writing historical fiction, spotlight a historical fiction author, and share great reads in a variety of time periods. There are also occasional short story contests and other fun highlights.

Today, introduces the letter H.

Humor

When I sat down two months ago and made my list of titles to use for the A to Z Blog Challenge, I had a different word for today. But, by the time we got to April, our world has changed. We’re all coping with something we never thought would turn our world upside down like it has. So, for today, I’m changing what I’d intended to write about and we’re going with humor. Because I think we all need an extra dose of humor in our lives right now.

Get Pages of the Past delivered to your inbox every Friday!

Join us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/184527085517941/

Getting the Details Right

Join us in April as Writer’s Zen celebrates the world of historical fiction, blogging along with the A to Z Blog Challenge. We’ll be posting our way through the alphabet, a letter at a time – every day except Sunday.

If you like historical fiction, there are links at the end where you can follow Pages of the Past on Facebook or sign up for the weekly newsletter. Each week we feature an article about writing historical fiction, spotlight a historical fiction author, and share great reads in a variety of time periods. There are also occasional short story contests and other fun highlights.

Today, introduces the letter G.

Get Pages of the Past delivered to your inbox every Friday!

Join us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/184527085517941/

Getting the Details Right

One of the difficulties in writing historical fiction is getting the details right. Not simply ‘right’ as in accurate, but right as in the amount of detail that you include in your manuscript also.

This is always the challenge. It’s like walking a balance beam between two points. We need to include enough details to bring a sense of the setting and the time into the story. We need enough to make the reader feel that they’re seeing the story unfold before their eyes. We need to make the story authentic and believable.

But we also don’t need to include so much detail that it’s as if we’re writing a non-fictional narrative about the time, including every piece of information that we’ve learned in our marvelous foray into the researching rabbit hole.

Juggling between these two is the where the art of historical fiction lies.

I can’t claim to be an expert on this. I’m learning more. Day by day. Week by week. Year by year. But I am far from the ultimate source of knowledge. Probably twenty years from now I’ll still be in a learning curve.

To explain better, here are some words from Elizabeth Crook that sums up the predicament perfectly. They’re from her article, Seven Rules for Writing Historical Fiction.

Rule #2: Dump the Ballast.
In order to write authentic historical fiction you must know a period of time well enough to disappear daily through a wormhole to the past and arrive at the location of your story. There you must understand the customs and use the manners perfectly enough to be accepted by people walking the streets (if there are streets) and to dress yourself, and make a living. This said, the major trick of writing good historical fiction is not in compiling research or knowing the details, but in knowing the details to leave out. Try to avoid overwriting. Keep perspective on what will interest the reader. Historical fiction writers tend to be overly conscientious and excited by minutia: if you succumb to excess, and put in too much detail, then go back later and take some of it out. Think of your novel as a boat that is about to sink from having too much weight on board: some of the loved items will have to go. Toss them over with impunity! Throw them out! If a rare, surprising statistic, or a moving anecdote, or an obscure reference you saw to an interesting thing that happened in the county adjacent to the one where your story takes place, does not advance your plot or provide your reader with important information about your characters, then it is irrelevant to your story and must go overboard.

Keep in mind that the care, and time, it took to assemble all that you have just thrown out has not been wasted. It was necessary to gather these facts and assess their worth in order to know which ones to save.

One step at a time. One rule at a time. One lesson at a time. Coupled with practice, practice, practice – write, write, write. And we get better with each paragraph, with each page. Our stories become more polished. The details we include become so seamlessly interwoven into our tales and our readers beg us for more. Then…we’ll know we’ve gotten the details right.

Fightin’ Forties – Rationing

Join us in April as Writer’s Zen celebrates the world of historical fiction, blogging along with the A to Z Blog Challenge. We’ll be posting our way through the alphabet, a letter at a time – every day except Sunday.

If you like historical fiction, there are links at the end where you can follow Pages of the Past on Facebook or sign up for the weekly newsletter. Each week we feature an article about writing historical fiction, spotlight a historical fiction author, and share great reads in a variety of time periods. There are also occasional short story contests and other fun highlights.

Today, introduces the letter F.

Fightin’ Forties – Rationing

Wessel’s Living History Farm’s web site is chock full of information and video recordings about farming life in the 1920’s, 1930’s and 1940’s. Here are some snippets of what they have to say about rationing, a wartime part of life that our country had to live with for many years.

If you have internet access, check out their page at:
http://www.livinghistoryfarm.org/farminginthe40s/life_08.html

Just a word of warning, you’ll probably get lost there for several hours reading up on the fascinating tidbits and listening to the live interviews they have on a vast variety of old-time subjects.

“During the Depression of the 1930s, Americans “did without” because they didn’t have jobs to buy food and clothing. During World War II, Americans again “did without,” this time because of the war effort. Rationing affected rural America particularly.

The federal government set up a rationing system in 1942 and limited purchases of sugar, coffee, meat, fish, butter, eggs, cheese, shoes, rubber and gasoline. Silk and newly invented nylon were used to produce parachutes, and so women around the world found it hard to get fashion stockings.

Other commodities were in short supply because trade routes were disrupted. Shellac, for instance, was produced in India and was used for building products and music record discs. Because of the war in Asia, trade with India was disrupted, and so new records were hard to come by.”

“Farm production, however, was vital to the war effort, so farmers got extra rations of gasoline and other staples. Yet, it was hard to get new machinery as factories were retooled to produce tanks rather than tractors.”

“Here’s how rationing worked: Each member of the household got a ration booklet, usually distributed at the local school. Each booklet had stamps in it that translated into a certain amount of the commodity being rationed. For instance, there were only enough stamps for one person to buy 28 ounces of meat per week, 4 ounces per day. Merchants collected the stamps when you bought something, and when the stamps were gone so was the item for that week.”

Get Pages of the Past delivered to your inbox every Friday!

Join us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/184527085517941/