For Veteran’s Day: Free Oral History of Black Korean War Soldiers This Weekend Only
Posted on November 8, 2019 at 12:00 pm
Copyright 2015 Miniver Press
To honor our veterans this weekend, John Holway’s oral history ebook, Bloody Ground: Black Rifles in Korea, is available at no cost all weekend.
Korea is “the forgotten war.” But to those who fought in it, it was the “unforgettable war.” If the names of all those killed were put on a wall, it would be larger than the Vietnam Wall. And Korea lasted only three years, Vietnam about ten. The agony of the winter of 1950-51 is an epic to compare with Valley Forge and the Bulge.
Korea was also our last segregated war. This is the story of the black 24th Infantry Regiment, told in the words of the men themselves. Like all black troops since the Civil War, they were reviled by whites and their own commander for “bugging out” – running before the enemy. The charge can still be read in the Army’s own official histories. Yet the 24th left more blood on the field than their white comrades – if they did bug out, they must have been running the wrong way.
It’s a good thing we weren’t with Custer,” one black GI muttered – “they’d have blamed the whole thing on us.”
The 24th won the first battle of the war, won its division’s first Medal of Honor, and guarded the shortest and most vulnerable road to Pusan. If the port had fallen, the war would have been lost, leaving a red dagger pointed at Japan. It did not fall.
That winter, after the Chinese attacked, the entire American army bugged out in perhaps the worst military disaster in American history. “That,” said another black veteran, “was when I learned that whites could run as fast as blacks.”
This is the story of those unsung heroes, who helped turn the Communist tide for the first time. The men bring that forgotten war and their own unsung bravery to life in their own sometimes funny, often heart-breaking, and always exciting words.
What do “Wall Street” and the “Star Wars” saga and, seemingly, about half the movies ever made have in common? They are about fathers. In “Wall Street,” Charlie Sheen plays the ambitious Bud, who respects the integrity of his blue-collar father, played by his real-life father, Martin Sheen. But Bud is dazzled by the money and power and energy of Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas). The movie will up the ante with Bud’s father’s heart attack as we see him struggle between the examples and guidance of these two male role models.
In “Star Wars,” Luke (Mark Hamill) does not know until halfway through the original trilogy that (spoiler alert) the evil Darth Vader is his father. He was raised by his aunt and uncle, who are killed very early in the first film, but the father figures who are most meaningful in his life are the Jedi masters Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda. Like Bud in “Wall Street,” Luke must choose between the good and bad father figures. Like Luke, Harry Potter is raised by an aunt and uncle, but he finds a true father figure later. For Harry, it is headmaster Albus Dumbledore. In opposition is He Who Must Not Be Named. Like Luke, Harry has the opportunity for great power on the dark side, but he lives up to the example set for him by Dumbledore.
The first stories ever recorded are about fathers. The central human struggle to reconcile the need for a father’s approval and the need to out-do him is reflected in the “hero of a thousand faces” myths that occur in every culture. In Greek mythology, Zeus is the son of a god who swallowed his children to prevent them from besting him. Zeus, hidden by his mother, grows up to defeat his father and become the king of the gods. Ancient Greece also produced the story of Oedipus, who killed his father and married his mother, and The Odyssey, whose narrator tells us “it is a wise man who knows his own father.”
These themes continue to be reflected in contemporary storytelling, including films that explore every aspect of the relationship between fathers and their children. There are kind, understanding fathers whose guidance and example is foundation for the way their children see the world. There are cruel, withholding fathers who leave scars and pain that their children spend the rest of their lives trying to heal. There are movies that reflect the off-screen real-life father-child relationships. Martin Sheen not only played his son’s father in “Wall Street;” he played the father of his other son, Emilio Estevez, in “The Way,” which was written and directed by Estevez, and which is about a father’s loss of his son. Will Smith has appeared with his son Jaden in “The Pursuit of Happyness” and “After Earth.” John Mills appeared with his daughter Hayley in “Tiger Bay,” “The Truth About Spring,” and “The Chalk Garden.” Ryan and Tatum O’Neill memorably appeared together in “Paper Moon.” Jane Fonda produced and starred in “On Golden Pond” and cast her father Henry as the estranged father of her character. Jon Voight played the father of his real-life daughter Angelina Jolie in “Tomb Raider.” And Mario Van Peebles, whose father cast him as the younger version of the character he played in “Sweet Sweetback’s Badasssss Song” made a movie about the making of that film when he grew up. It is called “Badasssss!” In the role of Melvin Van Peebles he cast himself.
Director John Huston deserves some sort of “Father’s Day” award. He directed both his father and his daughter in Oscar-winning performances, Walter Huston in “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” and Anjelica Huston in “Prizzi’s Honor.”
Some actors known for very non-paternal roles have delivered very touching performances as fathers. Edward G. Robinson is best remembered for playing tough guys, but in “Our Vines Have Tender Grapes” he gave a beautiful performance as a farmer who loves his daughter (Margaret O’Brien) deeply. Cary Grant, known for sophisticated romance, played loving – if often frustrated — fathers in “Houseboat” and “Room for One More.” “Batman” and “Beetlejuice” star Michael Keaton was also “Mr. Mom.” Comedian Albert Brooks is a devoted father in “Finding Nemo” and “Finding Dory.”
There are memorable movie fathers in comedies (“Austin Powers,” “A Christmas Story”) and dramas (“To Kill a Mockingbird,” “Boyz N the Hood”), in classics (“Gone With the Wind”), documentaries (“Chimpanzee,” “The Other F Word”), and animation (“The Lion King,” “The Incredibles”). There are great fathers (“Andy Hardy”) and terrible fathers (“The Shining”). There are fathers who take care of us (“John Q”) and fathers we have to take care of (“I Never Sang for My Father”). All of them are ways to try to understand, to reconcile, and to pay tribute to the men who, for better or worse, set our first example of how to decide who we are and what we will mean in the world.
Nat Gertler on the Story Behind the Real Green Book
Posted on November 30, 2018 at 3:34 pm
Nat Gertler’s About Comics is the publisher of the reprinted Green Book, the travel guide that inspired the title of one of the year’s best movies. It listed hotels, restaurants, and other businesses that welcomed Black tourists before the 1964 Civil Rights Act required public accommodations to be open to everyone. In the movie, Black musician Don Shirley was restricted to modest-to-shabby Green Book-listed businesses while his white driver stayed with the other members of the trio at whites-only hotels. In an interview, Gertler explained the history of the Green Book andhow the reprint became one of his most popular publications.
How did the Green Book get started and who published it originally?
Victor Hugo Green started the annual series in 1936. He was a mailman, delivering the mail in Hackensack, New Jersey but living in Harlem. The first year’s book just covered the New York area, but the demand for a national book was quickly apparent.
How did people buy it? Bookstores or through the mail?
The Green Book was available through the mail, and some Black organizations made it available to their members. And some of the locations listed in the book got copies to distribute — after all, if you were staying at one hotel that accepted Black customers, odds are you were going to do some traveling and need to stay somewhere else. Some years’ editions had cover versions with places for those hotels to stamp their names and addresses. But perhaps the most interesting source was gas stations — specifically Standard Oil stations (that was Esso then, Exxon now.) Unlike other major gas chains, Standard Oil allowed African Americans to own station franchises. In the 1949 Green Book — that’s one of the eight editions that I’ve reprinted so far — there’s even an article by Standard Oil’s special representative to what was then called the “Negro market.”
Who vetted the hotels and restaurants? Were most of them black-owned?
The Guide tries to make clear that the listings aren’t endorsements — a normal listing isn’t mean to guarantee the quality of an establishment, that it just indicates that they were willing to take travelers of color…. although at times they created the implication that businesses that went beyond the simple listing and bought an ad were, of course, particularly good places to stay. Some businesses submitted themselves for listings, some were submitted by customers, but one particularly good source were African American postal workers, just like Green himself. After all, mailmen travel the neighborhood, they know what’s going on.
How does a business with a name like “About Comics” end up publishing something so non-comic as the Green Book?
About Comics is a small company… just one guy, that’s me. If you hear me saying “we,” that’s the corporate “we,” much like the royal “we.” And most of what I’ve published over the years have been comics or at least comics-related, but I’ve got no boss I have to convince when I want to try publishing something else. A lot of what I did is simply driven by my curiosity; when I get to wondering about something, trying to publish it is my way of doing research.
Maybe about three years ago, I read a couple articles about the Negro Motorist Green Book, and it immediately caught my curiosity. It linked to some things that my stepmother had told me. My stepmother, Poco, is half Black, half Cherokee, and when she was in high school she’d be going to one of her athletic competitions, but the bus would leave all of her teammates, all white girls, at one of the hotels in town and then have to drive Poco out to someplace beyond the city limits where she could stay. The sweetest woman you can imagine — I didn’t know her as a teen, of course, for all I know she was a hellion back then, but that’s neither here nor there, that’s not what she was being judged on. Still, to know she was treated like that.
So I was curious about the Green Book, decided to get one for myself so I could experience it… and then found that they were collectors items, museum pieces really. Museums were paying tens of thousands for one. That wasn’t in my budget, at least not just to satisfy my curiosity. But hey, why not see if I could republish it? If there was enough demand for the original editions to send the price that high, maybe I could sell a couple hundred copies of a facsimile edition and make it worth the time I put into reprinting it… and if not, hey, at least I’d have satisfied my own curiosity. And, lucky for me, it turned out that I was not the only one curious about it.
What surprised you about what it included?
I kind of expected it to be a book filled with anger, with screeds against discrimination and with warnings about the horrible things that might happen to you in certain places… but what I found was a very practical document. Just listings of places that were willing to take you as a customer, and maybe some articles, travelogues or other travel advice. And in a way, that was even scarier, even more horrible, because the practicality of it all just lets you know how damnably rote this all was. Green didn’t need to explain to the reader what the problem was, his readers knew what problem was being addressed. And he didn’t need to warn against going certain places, just let you know where you could go… and the sparseness of locations at time told a story. The first volume I reprinted — the 1940 edition, still my best seller — for the entire state of New Mexico, there’s only one entry, just one place to stay. And it’s listed as a “tourist home”, and what that meant was that this wasn’t a hotel, this was just some Black family that was willing to put you up for the night on your trip, kind of the AirBNB of its day. Now, this might not have been the only actual relevant business in New Mexico, the Green Book was still growing and learning about the places that were out there… but if it wasn’t listed in the Green Book, how were you going to find it?
When did you get started in publishing? What have been your most popular titles?
This year is About Comics’ 20th anniversary. At the moment, the 1940 Negro Motorist Green Book actually is our biggest seller — it sells well through Amazon, and we sell a lot of copies to museum gift shops. In terms of comics material, our best sellers have been our books of the stuff that Charles M. Schulz did besides Peanuts, like the book we have out collecting his other newspaper series,It’s Only a Game, which he did for newspapers in the late 1950s. But we’ve also had really strong sales on things we do aimed at aspiring comics creators.Panel One, a collection of comic book scripts by big comic book names like Neil Gaiman and Kurt Busiek, and even filmmaker Kevin Smith, has been perennially strong. and our Blank Comic Book Panelbook series, which is literally just books filled with empty triangles for kids to draw comics in, has done surprisingly well.
What’s coming next?
Copyright About Comics 2018
You know how I said that publishing is often my form of research? Well, about a year ago I discovered the odd world of 1950s Catholic cartoon books. These are books mostly of single panel gag cartoons about nuns, and there were dozens of them, some selling in the hundreds of thousands of copies. It’s this subculture that I haven’t really seen anyone try to cover. Anyway, I launched a line on April Fools Day, trying to get everyone to believe that I was only kidding about suddenly publishing a pile of nun cartoon books, when in reality, I was! By the end of the year, I’ll have published two dozen books of these cartoons. The one I’m laying out now is monk and nun cartoons drawn by an actual monk. If folks are interested, I suggest that they follow @dailynun1 on Instagram or Twitter — they’ll get a different nun cartoon in their feed every day, plus they’ll see announcements when I have new volumes out.
Happy Hannukah 2018/5779: All of a Kind Family Hannukah
Posted on November 30, 2018 at 8:00 am
Copyright Schwartz & Wade 2018
One of my favorite book series for kids is Sidney Taylor’s All of a Kind Family, the story of a big, loving Jewish immigrant family around the turn of the last century. Based on Taylor’s own family, the title comes from the five sisters who were “all of a kind” until a brother arrived.
Copyright Schwartz & Wade 2018
And now Emily Jenkins continues the series with All of a Kind Family Hannukah, with inviting illustrations by Caldecott Award winner Paul Zelinsky. It’s a delight for any family.
is FREE through Father’s Day
The Green Book
