Subj: Re: from Alex Haley's story
Date: 12/13/1999 10:53:02 AM Pacific Standard Time
From: WCGreayer
To: Hhs 5
As I write, I marvel that anyone makes a living at this profession. Of course I began writing when there was no need to make a living at it. It started quite by accident. In 1994, Susan, and I traveled to Britain for a vacation. Our visit coincided with their fiftieth anniversary celebration of World War II D-day, the day the allies invaded Normandy. Since I had flown thirty-five combat missions as a tail-gunner over Nazi Germany with the 493rd Bomb Group, we took one day of our tour to visit the site of my old airbase. Our British host took us around the crop land near Debach, England, where our base had been located, and provided me with copies of records detailing all the missions flown by the 493rd.
Upon returning home, I rummaged in the attic looking for a box that had remained unopened for fifty-years. It contained memorabilia, all innocent looking stuff: a 1939 high school annual, some track medals, old photos, military records, Air Medal citations, and over five-hundred World War II vintage letters. They were buried skeletons, forgotten nightmares, locked up memories of lost youth, hope, and joy. Lost sweethearts spoke to me and smiled up at me. Hundreds of comrades killed in that war, lived again. Tears I should have shed fifty years ago, flowed down. My lost emotions took command and wracked my body, my soul. As a means of putting my demons to rest, I began writing a memoir. Finally, I realized I had an epic W.W.II romance in the making, and who better to write it than one who had lived it? In the past five years I have written a novel titled, The Box in the Attic. I wrote the story as a novel because you can tell more truth in a book posing as fiction than you can in a memoir masquerading as fact. (Of course, you can also invent a lot of stuff to make it more the way you wish it was.)
The writing has put my demons to rest. It was a substitute for the Psychiatrist's couch. I no longer cry in the night. And Alex Haley's story doesn't tell of the joy of creation. In the last five years I have enjoyed my labor more than at any other time in my life. But, I'm glad I waited until the end of my life to do it. Meanwhile I have been a messenger, a bank clerk, a machinist, a pilot, a tail gunner, a carpenter, an auto mechanic, a house painter, a salesman, an architect, and an engineer. As a rookie engineer at Northrop Aircraft Corporation, I wrote an unsolicited proposal for a short track acceleration sled to test missile components to their launch environment. The USAF awarded Northrop a contract and I headed the team which designed and built the facility. On May 24, 1954, I was featured in an article in LIFE Magazine titled, Missile Man's Magic. Later that year I was interviewed by Bob Barker on his TV program, You Asked for It. This program was rebroadcast hundreds of times throughout the world. This led to a position as head of the proposal department at Coleman Engineering, where I wrote hundreds of proposals over a five-year period. All of these activities used other creative talents that I would never have used had I simply become a writer right after the war. And writing is much more comfortable with a full belly.
Wes.
Upon returning home, I rummaged in the attic looking for a box that had remained unopened for fifty-years. It contained memorabilia, all innocent looking stuff: a 1939 high school annual, some track medals, old photos, military records, Air Medal citations, and over five-hundred World War II vintage letters. They were buried skeletons, forgotten nightmares, locked up memories of lost youth, hope, and joy. Lost sweethearts spoke to me and smiled up at me. Hundreds of comrades killed in that war, lived again. Tears I should have shed fifty years ago, flowed down. My lost emotions took command and wracked my body, my soul. As a means of putting my demons to rest, I began writing a memoir. Finally, I realized I had an epic W.W.II romance in the making, and who better to write it than one who had lived it? In the past five years I have written a novel titled, The Box in the Attic. I wrote the story as a novel because you can tell more truth in a book posing as fiction than you can in a memoir masquerading as fact. (Of course, you can also invent a lot of stuff to make it more the way you wish it was.)
The writing has put my demons to rest. It was a substitute for the Psychiatrist's couch. I no longer cry in the night. And Alex Haley's story doesn't tell of the joy of creation. In the last five years I have enjoyed my labor more than at any other time in my life. But, I'm glad I waited until the end of my life to do it. Meanwhile I have been a messenger, a bank clerk, a machinist, a pilot, a tail gunner, a carpenter, an auto mechanic, a house painter, a salesman, an architect, and an engineer. As a rookie engineer at Northrop Aircraft Corporation, I wrote an unsolicited proposal for a short track acceleration sled to test missile components to their launch environment. The USAF awarded Northrop a contract and I headed the team which designed and built the facility. On May 24, 1954, I was featured in an article in LIFE Magazine titled, Missile Man's Magic. Later that year I was interviewed by Bob Barker on his TV program, You Asked for It. This program was rebroadcast hundreds of times throughout the world. This led to a position as head of the proposal department at Coleman Engineering, where I wrote hundreds of proposals over a five-year period. All of these activities used other creative talents that I would never have used had I simply become a writer right after the war. And writing is much more comfortable with a full belly.
Wes.
