From the Top of the Hill # 8: December 11, 1947

Another installment of John D MacDonald's Clinton Courier newspaper column. Here we can see what was possibly the first sentiment of dissatisfaction with the family's newfound home town: the local water supply. 

What we are about to discuss is an old and sore subject in Clinton. Many opinions have been kicked around -- but there has been a startling absence of facts to back up these opinions. We are talking, of course, about the Clinton water supply.

In this column we intend to present a few facts. That's all. Just facts. The facts presented have been extracted from an article in the November issue of The Hotel Monthly, which, in turn, was based on a survey report by Edward Engle, a graduate of the Department of Hotel Administration at Cornell.

In Mr. Engle's classification, 0 to 3.5 grains of hardening minerals to one gallon of water results in soft water. Anything over 20 grains of minerals per gallon is extremely hard. The Clinton rating is 39 to 40 grains per gallon. It is a fair guess that there is no other community in the United States with harder water.

What does this mean to you? What does it mean to Mr. and Mrs. John Doe and their two kids in their house on Kellogg Street?

Mrs. Doe knows that she has to use a great deal more soap than her Utica friends. She doesn't know why. Before soap can do a cleaning job, it has first to coagulate and precipitate out the hardening mineral salts in Clinton water. In effect, all the water she uses must first be softened by soap before it can be used to clean. Soap is about the most expensive and least effective softening agent available. Mrs. Doe has to use so much soap to soften the water that it forms unpleasant, sticky curds which float and attach themselves to whatever she is cleaning.

Mrs. Doe has to scrub finished surfaces harder in order to get them clean. the finish doesn't last as long.

Her kids and her guests use cake soap at an alarming rate.

When she rinses her sheets and pillow cases, she leaves a mineral deposit on the threads of the fabric. When they dry she has a harsh rough surface which tends to become dull and dingy. In addition, after the mineral salts dry on the fabric, the threads are weakened and her linens have a short life.

Mrs. Doe has a pretty rough time in the kitchen. The lime action in the water wrinkles the skins of peas and beans and toughens them. The fresh green color of other vegetables is affected. Longer boiling is required and the consequent loss of vitamins and texture results in overcooked food which lacks proper nourishment factors. The tea and coffee she serves are muddy and unpalatable and she doesn't know why. Mr. Doe has long since stopped complaining about the coffee. Her baked goods have a definite texture and taste loss. Her china, glass and silver are dull, spotted and streaked. Her pots and pans have white line rings boiled onto them.

Mr. Doe thinks that Clinton winters are getting colder. He uses more oil every year in his hot water system. He doesn't know that mineral deposits on the inside of his boiler and pipes form such an efficient insulating device that he is losing up to sixty percent of the original efficiency of the heating system. Three years from now Mr. Doe is going to have to replace a lot of pipes. The bill is going to be steep.

The daughter in the Doe family is fifteen. She has hair of that auburn shade which should be very lovely -- full of copper highlights. But when she washes her hair, she rinses it in Clinton water. When it dries, there is a deposit of lime and calcium which dulls those gleams and makes her hair lifeless. The Does don't care. They don't know how good that gal's hair could look.

Mr. Doe spends a great deal of money on various kinds of shaving cream. A tube lasts him about half as long as it lasts his Utica friends. In spite of all the shaving cream he uses, the razor still feels as though someone had used it to sharpen pencils. He goes to work every morning in a foul mood, his face smarting because hard water wouldn't soften his beard.

Mr. Doe washes his own car. But it never looks right. He can't seem to get all the pale streaks off of it. Every drop of water which dries on the surface leaves a pale white ring.

If you happen to meet the Does on the street, ask them about the hard water. They will look a little vague and say, "Yes, it is pretty hard, isn't it?"

Tell them that their life here in Clinton is made bothersome in a dozen little ways by hard water. Tell them that it is a constant drain on their pocketbook.

If they begin to look interested, tell them that there are 700 municipal water softening plants in the United States serving over 940 communities. Tell them that though Clinton has one of the worst hard water situations in the country, we are not one of the 940.

* * *

Ten years ago this week:

Two British Army officers purchased 376 U.S. mules for shipment to India.

Mrs. Roosevelt took Mrs. Doris Duke Cromwell on a tour of West Virginia coal towns and resettlement projects.

At the Empire Cat Club show in Manhattan a rodent owned by a Chicago doctor won a silver cup, 40¢ in cash and a rosette inscribed "Best Mouse."

President Roosevelt asked for 3,000,000 five thousand dollar dream houses, each house to include living room, dinette, kitchen, two bedrooms, tile bath, porch, garage, oak floors, gas stove, coal furnace and refrigerator.

Princess Elizabeth posed with a dog under the shade of parasol held by Margaret Rose.

U.S. Army observers stated that Madrid is proof that bombs cannot wreck a large city.

* * *

See you next week.

From the Top of the Hill # 7: December 4, 1947

Here's another installment of From the Top of the Hill, John D MacDonald's newspaper column from the Clinton Courier. I've presented the last portion of this one before -- where JDM recounts the family's winter stay in Texas -- with additional background. If you're interested you can read it here.

We'll call this section The Old World -- Glances Over the Shoulder at what was going on exactly ten years ago this week.

President Roosevelt spent a rugged week talking to business men and politicians about the 37-38 industrial recession.

Hirohito, Emperor of Japan, was pleased to call his reign the "era of radiant peace."

Congresswoman Virginia Jenckes of Indiana proposed to the Washington DAR that the Capital's famed Japanese cherry grove be cut down and sawed up for firewood.

The Japanese Second Army was consolidating its gains in Paoting, North China.

In Moscow's Red Square Stalin reviewed 1,750,000 of the faithful and introduced his fifth grade, eleven year old daughter, Svetlana, to the public.

Dr. Arthurs Holley Compton, physicist, obtained first empirical proof of the existence of a gimmick called a "neutrino."

Three hundred and fifty railroad cars and locomotives were torch-cut into scrap near Memphis for shipment to Italy's war machine.

We were enjoying Carole Lombard and Frederic March in Nothing Sacred. Remember that wonderful right cross to the Lombard chin?

* * *

World news of ten years ago has a wry flavor. Thirty million people went blissfully about their business, unaware that the war would pop them into untimely graves. There were enough houses for everyone and five dollars would buy a grocery order that was work to carry out to the car. Let us know if you want this feature continued.

* * *

Last winter we followed the sun to Texas. It was in the nature of a gamble, because the typewriter we took along had to bang out enough saleable wordage to get us back. We were looking for a place that wasn't expensive. Believe it or not, we found such a place and we herewith recommend it to all who wince at the thought of Florida tariffs.

Go to the Hill Country, seventy miles northwest of San Antonio. It is a resort section used by the people from the Gulf cities when the summer heat down there becomes unbearable. During the winter it is pretty quiet and thus accommodations that, during the summer months, rent for two and three hundred a month can be obtained for fifty and sixty. And it is almost as warm as Florida.

We stayed at a place called Bon Aire Lodge six miles from Ingram, Texas, "the only all rock town in the U.S.." They stamp that on outgoing letters. Bon Aire Lodge isn't a lodge. The proprietor purchased the mess hall from a P.W. camp, cut it into pieces and sprinkled the pieces around on a rocky hill. He paneled the inside in Mexican pine and had local stone masons rock the outside.

We rented a cabin that had yet to be rocked. After we were there a week, a truck dropped great slabs of white and brown stone beside the cabin. A few days later some lean and dusty men showed up with chipping hammers and went to work. During the chill of early morning we furnished the coffee.

The men talked to each other in a very normal fashion. "Mistuh Lee, would you kindly hand me that rock?' They has worked together for years and it was still on a mistuh basis.

They sang while they worked. It was a song we'd never heard before. No words to it. A mournful chant, plaintive and haunting.

We were sorry when the cabin was all rocked and they moved on.

This summer, as the FM tower diagonally across the street from us was being built, we were walking near it. Suddenly he heard that same song. We found out the next day that the steelworkers who put up the tower came from Texas.

Last night we looked at the red lights blinking on the tower and thought of that plaintive song. We thought of the live oaks, the hillside goats, the Guadalupe River. We remembered sitting out in the sun in a swim suit while we hacked at the typewriter during February, March and April. We remembered the big-hatted, slow-talking men gathering, with their weathered-looking women at the stone schoolhouse during the evening to play dominoes.

If you get tired of ice and want to head down in that direction, let us know. We'll tell you whom to write to. That is, if you don't mind being envied.

"So Sorry"

Sports Fiction magazine was a fiction pulp begun in 1938 by Louis Silberkleit’s Columbia Publications, a low-rent publisher even in the world of cheap fiction in the twentieth century. The magazine never really caught on and the neglect it suffered at the hands of its owners is evident when viewing its publishing history: only 43 issues of the magazine are known to have been published between 1938 and 1951, and even that’s questionable. It rarely published the same number of issues in any given year, and it shut down completely between 1944 and 1946. I only own one issue of Sports Fiction and just looking at it one can see all the corners that were cut in putting it together: second-rate artwork, messy, uneven printing, sleazy ads -- the kind one never sees in a Popular or Street and Smith publication -- and authors even pulp aficionados might have trouble recognizing.

John D MacDonald wrote three stories that appeared in Sports Fiction, all dating from his early years as a writer, years he was living in Clinton, New York (1947 and 48). The first was a boxing story, the third is unknown to me (at least by the title: “They Never Quit” -- probably a team sport) and the middle one was about golf. These were years when MacDonald was happy to get anything published, by any paying publisher, so he may not have cared where these tales ended up. And given Columbia’s reputation, he was probably paid the rock-bottom rate of a penny a word.

But there’s something about this middle tale -- titled “So Sorry” and appearing in the magazine’s July 1948 issue -- that transcends its sports setting and the cheap magazine it appeared in. Yes, it’s about a golf tournament and the competition between several disparate personalities, told by a non-participating bystander, but the real subject MacDonald deals with here is racism.

MacDonald had done this before in a sports pulp, and for another Columbia title no less (Super Sports), in 1947 with his “Big John Fights Again,” a boxing story featuring a black boxer. I own this magazine (it’s somewhere in the house) but I’ve never written about it. John Dinan, in his excellent 1998 study Sports in the Pulp Magazines, has, and here is what he had to say:

MacDonald’s boxing story in the December 1947 Super Sports was also as good a piece of fiction as one will find in the pulp mags. MacDonald uses terse first-person style to advantage in describing the dark underside of the world of boxing as the story moves toward the BIG fight. “Big John Fights Again” is a story reminiscent of The Harder They Fall and Requiem for a Heavyweight, told from the reporter’s point of view and with a bit of a twist -- the fighter is black. Not wanting to fight, Big John tells the reporter he’s afraid of what might happen to him. The reporter naïvely responds: “That’s nonsense; people don’t do that.” Big John responds: “Maybe not to white folks,” and proceeds to enlighten the reporter on some hard facts about prejudice.

One has to wonder, was Columbia the only place MacDonald could sell stories with this kind of subject matter? Were they rejected by others before ending up with this publisher?

The setting is the Southland Open, a big, nationally coverd golf tournament played at the Upland Club, in an unnamed city and state. The story is told in the first person by Dave Able, a representative of the Miramar Sporting Equipment company of Los Angeles. Dave isn't there to play golf, he's there to sign golfers to endorsement contracts, always hoping to find a little-known golfer who suddenly breaks big. He's been around the game for a long time and knows many of the regular players.

For readers who don't know the rules of golf tournaments (read: me) MacDonald dutifully explains it all in a long paragraph: Following a qualifying round where the player must score 80 or less, the tournament is played for three days: two days of eighteen holes, the third for thirty-six. Each player plays against one other player, a process chosen by lots. At the end of the first day the high fifty percent of the group are eliminated. The same process is followed for the second day, usually leaving around twenty survivors. After the first eighteen holes on the morning of the third day, only eight players are still standing to play the final afternoon round. First money is $7,500 (around $75,000 in today's money), second place takes $1,750, and so on.

The story opens with Dave attending a get-together in a suite at the Upland Club. Four of the golfers who will play in the tournament are there and Dave briefly introduces each one to the reader.

You know them all. Mart Snyder is a thin, dark, expressionless man with ulcers. He's been on the circuit for thirteen years now and in spite of his dead pan, he's always tied in knots. Harry Crebson is the big blonde guy who started to knock them dead just after he got out of the army. He has freckles and a grin. Hal Lovelord is a Canadian who has a vague expression, a dim wispy mustache and a deadly eye on the putting green. Jimmy Ratchelder is, of course, the plump pink little guy with the shrewd grey eyes who has made more out of tournament golf than any man in the last twenty years. It's a business to Jimmy -- pure and simple... It was practically an even money bet that one of the four in the room would knock off the $7500 they give you for being best man.

There ostensibly to commiserate with a fifth golfer who failed to make the qualifying round that day (and who’s drunk and asleep on a couch), Dave finds the four in what sounds like a serious discussion. An unknown golfer qualified that day with a score (63) that broke the club’s course record. Are they worried about a young upstart who could possibly beat them all in the tournament? Yes, but only to a point. The real problem, at least with Snyder and, especially, Ratchelder, has less to do with how he plays and more to do with who he is.

He’s a Japanese American.

The boys were talking about Tommy Suragachi of Oregon... The press hadn't noticed Tommy, a slim, nervous acting boy, until he had banged out that miracle round of sixty-three... Then the press had picked him up. He had played golf before the war and had been a caddy. He served with the infantry in Italy during the war. He had brought himself and his clubs to the tournament on a bus. He was being staked by a whole bunch of Japanese farmers on the West Coast who had kicked in a little bit apiece. Apparently it was a very little bit because Tommy Sonagachi was living in a down-at-the-heels tourist cabin a mile and a quarter from the course.

Based on MacDonald's physical description of Ratchelder he's clearly the bad guy of the story, and he doesn't disappoint.

"You men better think about the game and what it means to the country... Golf is one of our biggest national games. It will hurt the game and hurt us if a Jap wins a big tournament like this one. It may be that some of the private clubs that have tournaments now will cancel them if they find they've got to put a Jap in the club...If this Sura-something wins they'll have a national holiday in Japan. What the hell was the use of licking them if we've got to make heroes out of them?"

The three others are in varying degrees of disinterest on the subject. Big, freckled Harry Crebson laughs it off, pointing out that “Japs” were pretty handy to have around when he fought in Italy. Snyder and Lovelord emphasize the fact that it is highly unlikely that a young player could win the tournament and that all they have to do to prevent Sonagachi from winning is for them to play their best. But Ratchelder is adamant. He even suggests that the four of them quit the tournament in protest, but Snyder points out that it would only make a martyr of the young man.

"Besides," Snyder continued, "the public might take the wrong slant on it. They wouldn't realize that we were doing it to help the game. They might think we were doing it because we were prejudiced or something. I'm not prejudiced against him."

"Neither am I," Ratchelder said. "I just don't think that a Jap ought to be given a chance to win the Southland Open or any other major tournament. Maybe they should be allowed to play in some of the small city tournaments on the public courses."

Crebson winked at me and said, "Well, to hear that you boys aren't prejudiced sure makes me happy. It surely does!"

The party breaks up with Ratchelder adamant about finding a way to “get to” Suragachi in order to rattle him .

Able drives over to the motel where Suragachi is staying and finds a very nervous young man. Naturally uptight, he bemoans his chances of winning and reveals that he is well aware of the racism he is the victim of.

"I saw the way Mr. Ratchelder looked at me today. And Mr. Snyder. You can tell when people look at you like that. I've gotten used to it out on the Coast. They hate all of us out there. Most of them do."

Able manages to sign Suragachi to an endorsement contract, provided he does well in the tournament.

Of course all four of the seasoned golfers make it to the final round, along with Suragachi, who plays spectacularly despite his obvious case of nerves. And, also of course, in the final round he is paired with none other than Ratchelder, giving the older golfer his perfect opportunity to rattle his opponent with an small act of racism that the observing crowd picks up on and imitates…

“So Sorry” works well on both the level of a sports story and as a tale of prejudice, although it would be too much to ascribe any real greatness to it. Its unusual characteristics and the fact that a heavy subject is dealt with in a cheap pulp magazine story is not completely out of the ordinary. Yet the fact that the editor of Sports Fiction made a special mention of the story’s connection to “Big John Fights Again” on the title page indicates that they knew they had something a bit different in their magazine and wanted readers to know it. I wonder how many other MacDonald stories like this are out there, a serious step up from the average penny-a-word tale, unread since their publication and mouldering away as time slowly destroys them.

“So Sorry” has never been anthologized or republished.

From the Top of the Hill # 6: November 27, 1947

Another in the continuing series of newspaper columns John D MacDonald wrote for the Clinton [NY] Courier back in 1947-48, when the family were residents of that town.  In addition to a nice Thanksgiving message (which I have posted before) there's a humorous recollections of John's days in military procurement, his Army job before he was called up to serve overseas in the war. The man he refers to, General Benny Meyers, was Major General Bennett E. Meyers, the number two man in procurement for the Air Force. during the war, and his name came up as part of a Senate investigation into the government's contract practices back then with none other than Howard Hughes. Supervising billions of dollars of contracts for planes and other equipment, "Benny" somehow managed to enrich himself far beyond the means of an ordinary government employee. It was revealed that during the war he was a frequent player of high stakes poker, enjoyed the amenities of many a fine hotel on contractors' dimes, burned through three wives (the third was an "actress" named Ila Rhodes) and owned stock in numerous private aviation companies, all who were awarded contracts during the war. And when he retired from his post in 1945 (earning a pension of $5.500 a year) Meyers purchased a luxurious mansion on Long Island at a cost of $60,000.

In testimony he angrily denied any wrongdoing.

His initial appearance before the Senate committee took place two weeks before this column was published. Meyers may have been a partial role model for Colonel Dolson, a character in MacDonald's 1952 Collier's serial "My Brother's Widow", which later became the 1954 novel Area of Suspicion. Dolson was the on-site procurement officer at Dean Products, a company responsible for the production of top secret... well, if you haven't read the book yet perhaps I've already said too much.

This year, Thanksgiving has given us an oddly uncomfortable feeling. It is a time when, nationally, we shake hands with ourselves in the pugilistic fashion, and consider our multitudinous blessings, with emphasis on the food department.

This year, Thanksgiving is a time when two young American girls lost to their father a forfeit of twenty-five dollars each because they could not stand the official German food rationing system for two weeks.

It is a time when American magazines will go overseas, and they will contain pictures of our healthy families gathered around the well-set table. Remember that Norman Rockwell picture of a family at dinner? It was drawn as a part of that series of four to illustrate the four freedoms. Reproductions of that picture go overseas.

In many prisons where the convicts are permitted to read newspapers, someone goes over the papers first and cuts out any reference to crime. Maybe the United States periodicals that go over seas should have all reference to food removed.

Did you ever open a magazine and look at a color photograph of a great big steak, butter melting on top? We wonder how those advertisements strike such persona as Bill Mauldin's French philosopher— the man who said that a pessimist cuts off the loose end of his belt, while the optimist merely punches new holes.

Our ancestors gave thanks because they fought a wild and alien country with their hands and made the soil give them food. We give thanks because in this strange year of 1947, a blind throw of Fate's dice left us as an island in the midst of war, left us untouched by the hunger, cold and disease that afflict the rest of the world.

We must be thankful, but not complacent. We are in the midst of the second armistice in the war that began in 1914. Somehow, during these years of uncertain peace, we must find the strength with which to protect this way of life which makes our Thanksgiving possible.

* * *

Reading of General Benny Meyers' difficulties reminds us that it is only a question of time until an investigation committee comes boiling up here in black limousines and takes us back to Washington, probably handcuffed to a steering post.

We have a guilty conscience.

We were engaged in procurement activities for the War Department during the early war years, and one of our jobs was to help contractors get their tools and materials in ample time to meet contract schedules.

One Christmas we got a card from a very good shoe company which said that a friend was going to give us a pair of slippers and would we please send along the size. We ran through the mental list of aunts, uncles, cousins, friends and decided that the donor was one of two relatives. We sent the size and a few days before Christmas the slippers came along with a card from the... Corporation.

As they were made specifically for us, we kept them.

But, before we could get accustomed to a wonderful world where slippers fell out of the blue, we were sent overseas. Otherwise we would probably have gone on from slippers to bigger things and would have ended up as sort of a General Meyers, junior grade.

The slippers are still around and when the congressional thumb presses heavily on our doorbell, we will open the door with pallid face, shaking hands -- and the smell of burning leather in the house.

* * *

We have received two letters suggesting that we lean more heavily on this matter of the fifteen cent charge on Utica phone calls. We found out the other evening that once upon a time a petition was prepared, signed and presented to the telephone company.

Apparently nothing happened to alter the rate, but we have been unable to find out exactly what the official response was.

At any rate, the opinion of the telephone company may have changed in the interim.

To those persons who have taken an interest in this matter, it is suggested that they attend the next meeting of the Civic Group, ask Jim Sherman for the floor and move that a committee be formed to look up the response to the last petition and arrange for the preparation of a new petition if deemed advisable.

The Civic Group is the local, non-partisan medium for getting things done -- and as such, should be the mouthpiece for all citizens interested in the betterment of Clinton as a place to live.

* * *

See you next week.

From the Top of the Hill # 5: November 20, 1947

John D MacDonald's fifth column for the Clinton Courier,  written back when he was still a struggling pulp fiction author.

For students of JDM's biography, this column contains several interesting sections. He begins with a brief discussion on personal independence and conformity, which -- perhaps -- reveals the first seeds of his discontent with the town he had moved to, as discussed in detail in his 1965 non-fiction hardcover The House Guests. It also presages attitudes that would make up much of the character of one Travis McGee.

 And speaking of The House Guests, this column contains the first ever mention of the MacDonald's cats, Roger and Geoffrey, made "famous" by that cat-biography.

Finally, there is a piece on speeding cars, a favorite subject of the author's, explored over the years countless times, in short stories such as "Hit and Run[1952] ,"  "Eyewitness," "Hit and Run[1961]," and "The Man Who Almost Blew His Top," and in novels like Cry Hard, Cry Fast and Slam the Big Door.


We had lunch at the Inn last Tuesday -- as every Tuesday -- with the Clinton Chowder, Walking and Three No Trump Society, and we were subjected to various jeers and jibes from citizens named Stanley and Johnson and Robinson and Weber and others because we spurned regimentation and refused to accept the standardized lunch.

It turned out that our independence cost us the sum of fifteen cents, (15¢), and somehow it seems very nice to be in a place where some measure of individual liberty can be obtained for a nominal fee.

We make no cult of eccentricity or individualism, and yet we derive a certain feeling of contentment from the fact that if we should choose to diverge from the standard pattern, we will not be given a vacation behind barbed wire to think over the sin of deviation. Such would be a pretty grim situation.

In this day, in this country, an individual who refuses to conform can be punished only through the somewhat ineffectual medium of social ostracism. In a police state, a minor deviation from the norm implies freedom of thought and, as such, is deserving of direct and implacable punishment by the forces of the police state.

Of course, this has gone a long way from our fifteen cent fee for a small hunk of self-determination. We generalize too much... and we don't care for hash.

* * *

Last week's column led to a discussion with Ed Stanley. He objected to the criticism of the fifteen cent toll charge. Ed Stanley says, and I have his permission to quote, "If Clinton became a part of the Utica exchange, it would cost Clintonians a great deal more money each year in phone bills than it does now."

Since neither of us was able to quote sources and statistics, I will let it stand as is. Maybe we should haul in a statistician from the telephone company.

We can go on record as saying that we resent paying seventeen cents when we use our own phone and fifteen when we use a pay station.

* * *

In addition, we received some comments on our eulogy of a Beagle named Kelly, probably because the column happened to be printed alongside a long letter from a Pennsylvania gentleman who seems to have been nibbled by a canine once upon a time.

We'd be in a better position to argue, if we owned a dog. We'd like to own a dog right now, but we can't get permission from two domineering felines named Roger and Geoffrey. We obtained them from a market in Utica, and they would not look kindly on any whim of ours to obtain a dog.

They are representative of the Cat of the Future. Particularly Geoffrey. The anthropologists say that we would still be swinging from limb to limb were it not for the fact that we have a thumb which works in juxtaposition to our fingers so that we can grasp objects and use them as tools.

Geoffrey has a toe on each front foot that works as a thumb. He can pick up small objects in his hand and nibble on them.

When at last most of the earth's surface is vitrified by the atomic bombs and mankind is no more, a few surviving cats with rudimentary thumbs will be fashioning stone axes to hunt with.

A few thousand years hence, cat historians will be pondering over those strange two legged beings that once inhabited the earth. Where did they come from and where did they go? They were obviously unfit to rule the world.

We are being very nice to Geoffrey.

* * *

But in these years we have left, before atomic disintegration, maybe we can do something about a menace more easy to visualize.

Somehow anything you say about the automobile seems very trite.

There is nothing particularly trite about two tons of metal traveling at one hundred and eighty feet per second.

This is not an appeal to ninety percent of the people of Clinton. This is an appeal to ten per cent.

Clinton is a children's town. There isn't a better place in which to raise kids.

Except for one thing. Among us we have a few citizens who are very, very proud of a fast reaction time, and get a feeling of almost sensual joy out of swooping into the village at a speed that would be dangerous "for anyone else."

Under the hood are over a hundred horses that give a joyous leap with the least little touch on the gas.

Within twelve months in the Village of Clinton one of our children is going to be badly smashed by one of these high octane Knights.

It might be our boy. It may be yours.

The Knight is going to be sick with remorse. Maybe he'll give up driving for the rest of his life. Maybe he'll never go over thirty from that moment on.

Somehow his remorse isn't going to help very much.

Yes, this is a children's town -- except for that one little thing.

* * *

See you next week.

From the Top of the Hill # 4: November 13, 1947

Here's the fourth installment of John D MacDonald's Clinton, New York, newspaper column, From the Top of the Hill. It contains an animal story left out of The House Guests.

I've a very busy next couple of weeks ahead of me, so I'll probably be posting several of these columns in a row until things settle down.


The other day we were at a very fine wedding reception, and, noting a good many Clintonians present, we went on the prowl, sliding up to each and asking in a tense voice what they thought of the column so far and what they would suggest to improve it.

A few people said, "What column?" but we smiled bravely.

One gentleman said, "What are you trying to do in that column, anyway?"

We were prepared for him. We have two aims. The first is to entertain. The second is to develop in Clinton a feeling of pride and unity, so that we can all be conscious that we are living in the prettiest part of the best country the world has yet produced.

On second thought, we believe that gentleman walked away before we had quite finished with our statement of aims and objectives.

* * *

At the reception we saw a Clinton lass named J. Sinnott and, in our one track manner, asked her what she thought the column ought to say. She said, "You ought to complain about the fifteen cent toll charge to Utica, but you won't get in in the paper."

We were intrigued.

Dear Telephone Company: On the first of the month when we pay our telephone bill, fifteen cents per Utica call seems like an awful amount of money. Please look and see if you could cover your costs and standard rate of profit for a little less.

Once upon a time we used to look at huge corporations and think of them as a sort of prehistoric beast, lumbering across the financial pages, staring out of beady little eyes and thinking deeply with sharp little brains that would never forget, never forgive, never relent.

Thus it was somewhat of a shock to find that these huge corporations seem to be collections of very average citizens, people who worry about Russia, about their kids reading too many comic books, about their wives acquiring that "new look," about any dilution of that little guarantee of freedom of speech tucked away in the Bill of Rights. We don't think that those American citizens who happen to set policy for the Bell Telephone Company are going to put ponderous machinery in motion to squash us because we question their fifteen cent toll charge.

Jane, you can pay us off on that little wager any time.

* * *
Last week we met a Beagle. He is a relatively new resident of Clinton and his name is Kelly. It is, of course, immaterial as to who pays his annual license, because dogs like Kelly belong, not to one family, but to the human race.

Even Evans of Huckster fame told us that good advertising is based on repetition. Love that Soap! Kelly can't read. But Kelly can think.

He has one item to sell -- a massive appetite.

Other dogs merely sit and beg -- paws held limply.

Not Kelly. He understands the psychological basis for repetition in advertising. No limp paws for him. He touches his two front paws together and waves them up and down. Not for balance. For effect. He does this with all the mechanical fervor of a metronome.

It works!

But if Kelly used this discovery of his merely to eat frequently, he could be classified as a smart and greedy dog.

Kelly is more than that. When anyone in the house is feeling low and blue, Kelly comes over, sits up and makes like an account executive.

Kelly figures that if the metronome act usually makes him feel good, it can also cheer up other people who need it.

So Kelly is the logical result of a few hundred thousand generations of proximity to these queer creatures called "people".

He can diagnose a mood and cure it. Kelly is the only Beagle so far who has become a practicing psychiatrist.

* * *

We have heard one argument so far concerning the two way traffic around the Square. The argument was -- Quote -- It's always been that way -- End Quote.

We have given the argument due consideration and, meaning no disrespect, we can not find much merit in it.

In a surprising number of cases, the statement, "It's always been that way" has certain merit. Traditional methods lead to a sense of security.

In this case, traditional methods lead to a sense of insecurity -- a feeling that you're about to lose a fender.

Somebody must have a better argument than the only one we've heard so far.

* * *

See you next week.

The JDM Master Checklist

A few weeks ago friend and author Dan Pollock wrote me to say that he was cleaning out some old files and that he has uncovered something that might be of interest to me. Dan shares my love of the writing of John D MacDonald and has donated much of his own collection of JDM ephemera to The Trap of Solid Gold, including articles on writing, past issues of the JDM Bibliophile, and many other items of interest I had no idea existed. This time he had discovered a copy of The JDM Master Checklist and assumed I had a copy, but wanted to offer it in case I didn't. Well, I did not own a copy and asked him to send it along to me. If truth be told, I had never even seen the thing.

The JDM Master Checklist was a project begun back in early 1965 by Len and June Moffatt of Downey, California, to catalog all of MacDonald’s writings up to that point. In the pre-internet age where little if any indexing of pulp magazines existed, this was no small task, but as the JDM Bibliophile -- the fanzine the Moffatts created to begin this project -- began to circulate, fans, researchers and fellow bibliophiles started contributing information for what would become The JDM Master Checklist. MacDonald himself was contacted and became interested, as he was in the process of renewing the copyrights on these works, and he provided much valuable information from his vast files. Finally, in early 1969, the work was published: a 56-page mimeographed, stapled, stenciled work that contained everything known -- up to that point -- on the works of JDM.

I never owned a copy of The JDM Master Checklist, for two reasons. First, it preceded my interest in John D MacDonald by about five years and was out of print by the time I became aware of it. Copies were hard to find back then as owners jealously guarded their own copies. Second, the list was superseded by Walter and Jean Shine’s John D MacDonald: Bibliography Biography, published in 1980 by the University of Florida. This I did obtain and it has been my primary source for keeping track of my own large JDM collection. There was to be a second edition of this work (something I myself worked on) but it never came to be.

When I was finally able to look at The JDM Master Checklist a week ago, I was surprised at how inclusive it was. I had assumed that the Shines had done much of the heavy lifting in cataloging the nearly 400 short stories published in various magazines of the last century, but the listings in the Master Checklist is nearly as complete as that of the Shines. In addition to that there is a section of works published in anthologies, one on the novels (including international editions), an index, and even a biography. A Herculean task, to say the least, but the Moffatts had help: a lot of help, and they listed these people in their introductory pages. John D MacDonald fans own these people -- most of whom have probably passed on by now -- a huge debt of gratitude, and I have transcribed their names here as The Trap of Solid Gold could not exist without the work that they did.

OUR THANKS

TO THE FOLLOWING PERSONS WHO CONTRIBUTED INFORMATION AND WORK TO THIS CHECKLIST:

Anthony Boucher, Leonard Broom, Knox Burger, William J. Clark, Ed Cox, Jack Cuthbert, Les Deuel, Ron Ellik, Rory Faulkner, John Hale, Robert G. Hayman, Mrs. Eugene Hobel, George C. Hoyt, Jr., Brian Kirby, Cathy Konigsberg, John D. MacDonald, Hiroshi Onta, Thomas L. Powers, S. Gilbert Prentiss, J. Prince, Henry D. Renard, Takumi Shibanon, Rick Sneary, J. Clyde Stevens, Chuck Toole, Robert Turner, Gail & Tom Van Achtoven, Ramona Weeks, Mike Wharton, Bill Wilson, Ira Wolff, Stan Woolston, L. H. Zelders

OUR APOLOGIES TO ANYONE WE MAY HAVE MISSED!

Of greater interest to me was the biography that was included, running five pages and containing -- in addition to the standard stuff you can find anywhere -- much personal information on MacDonald, provided by the author himself, who is quoted frequently. I’m not sure any of this was really new to me, but I believe this is the only bio where one can find it all in one place, a rich collection of the minutiae of MacDonald’s interests when away from the typewriter. As such, I have transcribed it and present it below. At some point I’ll produce a stand-alone version with a link under The Trap of Solid Gold Resources over in the right column.

If Dan Pollock does any future file cleaning I’ll be sure to share it here. Thanks Dan!

JOHN D. MacDONALD:

A Brief Biography

John Dann MacDonald was born in Sharon, Pennsylvania on July 24, 1916. He lived in Pennsylvania -- with summer trips to a small, unworked farm on the Pymatuning River in Orangeville, Ohio -- until he was twelve, at which time his family moved to Utica, New York.

After grade school, he attended the Utica Free Academy, graduated at 15, and took a post-graduate year there. He returned briefly to Pennsylvania at the age of 17 as a student at the University of Pennsylvania, but his formal education was to be completed in New York and in Massachusetts. He received a BS from the University of Syracuse in 1937, and an M.B.A. from the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration in 1939.

The effects of the Great Depression were still in force during his college years, and he "pieced out the pocket" at various jobs. In Massachusetts he worked in a factory feeding a bank of automatic wood lathes. In Syracuse he was a chauffeur, a fruit-stand clerk, a janitor in the medical arts building, and a book-duster in a bookstore. In New York City he sold magazine and book subscriptions office-to-office, washed dishes in a cafeteria, and was "an under-aged liquor waiter, overworked bus-boy and overworked food waiter". He also had a stint of collection work, repossessing automobiles, refrigerators and washing machines.

During all of this time, he had no particular interest in writing as a hobby or as a career. He did write a little for his high school paper one year, but his writing in his college years was limited to the subjects he was studying.

However, he has always been a compulsive reader, reading as many as three or four books per week. His childhood hobby interests, other than reading, included stamp collecting and model airplanes. Golf, skiing and archery were to follow.

His father, a financial officer in the Standard Tank Car Company and Savage Arms Corporation, urged him to prepare for a career in the business world, and as John had no particular alternative to offer, he followed his father's wishes. From various sources we have learned that the literary world's gain was indeed the business world's loss. The brilliant writer could have been the brilliant business consultant. As a matter of fact, he became both an excellent writer and an outstanding businessman if only because of his business-like approach to the writing trade.

During the time he was preparing for a business career, he had no interest in writing, but another major interest entered his life. He married Dorothy Mary Prentiss, an artist, in 1937. Dorothy received an M.F.A. from Syracuse University. She has taught at Cazenovia Seminary, and at the Clearwater Art Center. Her work has appeared in national shows, and is in several private collections.

Their son, John Prentiss MacDonald, grew up to be an artist and a teacher, too. He and his wife, Anne, recently moved to Christchurch, New Zealand, with their three-year old son, Karsten, and one-year-old daughter, Margaret. John P. MacDonald teaches art at a girls' college in Christchurch.

John D. MacDonald's career as a businessman was interrupted when he joined the Army in 1940. He served until 1946, mustering out as a Lieutenant Colonel. His career as a writer began during his overseas sojourn. The latter included China, India, Burma, Ceylon, Australia, New Zealand, Philippines, New Guinea, Okinawa, Ulithi, Hawaii and Saipan. Wartime censorship prevented him from writing long and detailed letters to Dorothy -- so he wrote a short story for her entertainment. The year was 1945. Dorothy submitted the story, and eventually it sold to Story magazine, where it was published in the July-August 1946 issue as "Interlude in India". Encouraged by this and subsequent sales, John continued to write. The short stories, novelets, articles and novels listed in this bibliography attest to how much -- and how well -- he has written in the past 23 years.

John brought his knowledge and talent for conducting a business to the very serious business of writing-for-a-living. He applied the accepted and workable habits of a good business to his own chosen profession, such as regular office hours -- or as regular as one can make them in the writing profession.

He knew -- instinctively, perhaps -- or perhaps it was just plain, hardnose common sense (or business sense, if you prefer) that one could not survive as a writer if one did not produce. Sitting around half the day waiting for "inspiration" to strike was fine for the dilettante writer, but not for the working writer. The more words going the rounds of the publishers, the more chance of selling some of them.

His first sales were to the pulps (although Story magazine, where his first story appeared, was not in the pulp class), a magazine market that had been somewhat depleted by the paper shortage in World War II, and which eventually breathed its last in the early fifties.
Television and the paperback market provided -- and still provide -- the same kind of entertainment that once could be found only in the pulp magazines. Today's “Man From UNCLE” was yesterday's "Doc Savage". But the pulps were only a training ground for MacDonald. He was a hack only in the sense of being capable of turning out thousands of words within short periods of time. This is not to say that his early stories were all gems of literary craftsmanship. He was learning the trade, and competing with writers who at that time were "old-timers" in the field. Many of the top-name writers of that era had started when they were very young men. Some of them went on to become top names outside of the pulps, and others never graduated from the pulp methods of story-telling.

But John soon became popular in all the various types of pulp magazines -- adventure, mystery, western, sports and science-fiction. During this postwar period, the MacDonalds resided in various places, from New York State to Texas to Mexico. They settled in Florida in 1949, and also have a house in the Adirondacks. Since then, then have traveled most frequently to the Bahamas and to Mexico, but they have visited many other states and places in this hemisphere. (John also visited Europe in the summer before college, wandering around England, France, Italy, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, etc.)

As someone once said, "MacDonald seems to know something about everything and every place". This remark was of course inspired by the variety of subjects and places to be found in JDM stories. It is obvious that John has a fantastic memory, and is capable of transmitting the pictures in his mind to word-pictures on the printed page.

As a result, he did not become just another hack for the pulps. The slick magazines and the hardcover and paperback markets were goals he achieved because no market could be more demanding on him as a writer than he was on himself.

As a matter of fact, during his first full year of writing for a living (1946) he sold one short story each to Esquire, Liberty and Cosmopolitan, and in 1947 he sold ten or twelve stories to the slicks. He was not so much writing for the pulps as he was writing stories and then trying to sell them wherever he could. Had Collier’s rejected his first serial, it probably would have sold to Popular Publications.

He is "more intent on telling it true than in selling it once it is told". With this motto, he became more than just another writer of suspense fiction; he became a great American novelist and short-story writer.

In later years, when he was established and successful, he had his son, then about ten years old, help him burn approximately two million words of "impossible" manuscripts. Imagine the courage, the integrity and the self-criticism it took to do that!

He was one of the first -- if not the first -- paperback writer to be elected to the Presidency of the Mystery Writers of America. Writers of paperback originals (not to be confused with paperback reprints of hardcovers) have only recently come into their own -- that is, to be given the same "prestige" that was once reserved for writers of hardcover books.

By concentrating on the paperback market, and not being concerned about the prestige associated with hardcover publication, MacDonald helped to raise the quality of the market, along with others who did not worry about the comments of hardcover-oriented critics. Over the years be has won awards and acclaim, with many reprintings of his work, including translation into several foreign languages. He has been dubbed "the writing machine" by his friends, and is generally known as a "writer's writer". The latter translates into: "Geez, I wish I could write like that!"

Although he is generally known as a leading paperback writer, he has had twelve hardcover books published, not counting Three for McGee, which is a hardcover reprint of three paperback originals. Five of the twelve had been published at the time he became President of the MWA in 1962.

We once asked John to list his favorite writers. He refused to attempt a list of living writers, because an omission could sound like a knock, but he did list deceased writers who are among his favorites: "Faulkner, Chandler, Hemingway, Camus, Conrad, Maugham, Cary, London, and (so help us ) Kipling and Fitzgerald."

If you have read The House Guests, you know of the MacDonalds' love of animals. They still have old Knees, the goose, and her child Duck, a Peking from an egg she hatched. They also have two cats, each one-quarter Abyssinian, three years old, from the same litter: Beauregarde and Marilyn. Each has only one good eye, due to rhinotracheitis in the first week after birth. John says that both cats are "frighteningly bright", and -- if you have read The House Guests --we say that's as it should be.

John says that he exercises by walking, and that he is in pretty fair shape at six feet, one and one-half inches, and 173 pounds. We would consider fishing as exercise, but to him it is an avocation. He gave up golf because it took too big a piece out of the day.

On their annual visits to their home in the Adirondacks, John engages in his "traditional" exercise of felling, hand-sawing, splitting and stacking all of the cords of hardwood that they use. His interest in (and knowledge of) boats is well known, and he is rather proud of his "very fast and satisfying 240 horse Muñequita", and his little sailing catamaran.

He was once a semi-pro bridge player for large money and a "pretty fair country chess player," but these too would steal the hours he needs for his other major interests. He is wary of competitive games because he can get hooked on them, and they would take time that he prefers to spend in other ways. He does love poker, and considers himself a purist in that he prefers table stakes, pot limit, 3-card draw or 5-card stud, nothing wild. "I play to end the evening ahead, and have no wild, wistful optimistic urge to try to improve a nothing hand."

His favorite spectator sports are pro football, the bullfights and professional hockey, in that order. He is a long-time "wistful" supporter of the Cleveland Browns, dating from the first year they had Jimmy Brown. But he would rather be slowly parboiled than to have to sit through a basketball game.

John cannot stand the live theater. He sits with shoulders hunched, breathing shallowly, painfully waiting for a blown line, a bad line, a sickly goof. He says he sees a stage play about once every ten years. He goes to maybe seven movies a year, after seeing what Judith Crist, the New Yorker, Time and Holiday have to say about them. He claims that he hasn't seen a really bad movie in years. (The last movie he had seen, at this writing, was Rachel, Rachel, which he labels "Superb!")

He is not a joiner. He belongs to the MWA, the Authors Guild and the P.E.N. Club (Poets-Essayists-Novelists). He resigned from the Players Club because he didn't use it.

John does not like to kill things, be they birds, crickets, spiders, snakes, rabbits or whatever. An angry, edible fish is the solitary exception, and "I do not like killing him, only catching him, provided he weighs more than the test of the line". (His reels have 4, 6, 8 and 12-pound test line on them. The 12 is for tarpon and dolphin.) He prefers fishing for small angry fish wherever they may be, St. Lawrence River or a brackish Florida canal, and he "will release anything I do not damn well intend to eat". (He does not knock hunters or hunting, but he cannot do it himself.)

About music, he says: "I just went down and checked the records most recently played, and find a most catholic assortment: Billie Holiday, La Misa en Mexico, Simon and Garfunkel, Pablo Casals, Modern Jazz Quartet, Brubeck, Chicago-The Blues Today, Ohana-Concerto for Guitar and Orchestra, Eydie Gorme and Trio Los Panchos, Illya Darling, Tatum and Bach.

"I guess I like all music that has enough quality of invention, guile and surprise so that I get a feeling of pleasurable amusement when they fit the pieces together in a way I could not have anticipated. I have good stereo equipment, and built a lot of the pieces of it myself. Most 33 1/3's have some dreary bands thereon, so I tape to eliminate the drearies, and because I scrupulously clean tape heads and demagnetize, the per-play loss of quality on the tape collection is infinitesimal compared with the loss resultant from needle play, even on the Marantz turntable."

His favorite hobby is photography, and he has achieved a semi-pro status in that field. He is a member or the ASMP, and has sold color work to Venture and True. He has also done back-of-book studies of many writer friends. He uses Nikon and Rollei equipment, and prefers to work in black-and-white. He doesn't have the time to do his own lab work, and uses a professional lab in New York. He says that photography is good for the novelist's eye, "Keeps it fresh and questing."

We asked him if there really was a Plymouth Gin (a favorite or McGee's), not having been able to find any in this area, and also asked him about his other favorite drinks and foods. His reply: "Yes, Virginia, there is really a Plymouth Gin, and very good and dry and strong it is. I like it in a beaker of cracked ice, with a dab of extra dry sherry. Despise all sweet drinks. Like very spicy Mary's, like outdoor drink or Planters Punch, no sugar. Great Western Brut is damned fine champagne. Like dark beers. There is no domestic beer worth drinking. Have cast-iron stomach, and most enjoy the very spiced Spanish, Mexican, Italian dishes. Love Julia Child but hate French cooking. Indifferent to steak. Would prefer knockwurst and kraut any time."

John said recently that he is not "a political animal," and that was one of the reasons he supported LeRoy Collins when Collins was running for a seat in the U. S. Senate. (Unfortunately, a real political animal defeated Collins so overwhelmingly as to be heartbreaking.) John calls himself a pragmatist. He believes that "Government should protect men from one another and from the other organizations, devices, violences that man keeps creating. Government is always cyclical -- going from revolutionary to power-progress, to status-quo, to oppressive, to decline and death. All power corrupts; all committee effort is asinine, 99 of 100 politicians are warped, limited, saddening simpletons. Most of mankind is indifferent to political philosophy."

John believes in a divine, inexplicable order (i.e., shape, texture, rhythm) to the observable universe, from single leaf to island universe, but feels that joining in groups to celebrate such condition is grotesque, often ludicrous, sometimes cruel. Personal awe needs no congregation.

We asked John about his current and future writing plans. His answer: "In order: A McGee, The Blood Game (a novel he started some time ago but put aside until now), another McGee, The Primitive Experience (the second Coppolino trial), and that takes me so far into 1970 that I will not make any guesses as to what, God willing, comes after that."

When asked if there would be more than twelve McGee novels, he replied that it would depend on how he felt about it after the twelfth... He may not sit around and wait for "inspiration", but like all good writers he writes first of all for himself. So, if there are to be more than twelve McGee novels, we must hope that John's interest in Travis continues, and that he will not tire of McGee as Doyle did of Holmes.

John's mother is still living in Utica, N. Y. His sister Doris and her husband, a construction company executive, also live in Utica.

John D. and Dorothy MacDonald are "pretty much turned off and turned on by exactly the same things." John says that neither of them "are what anyone would call gregarious. We are sufficient unto ourselves, and stick with the very few good, close and true friends, cherish privacy, and find all the days far too short for all of the things we want to do."

-ljm February, 1969

"The Little People"

When writing about the early fiction of John D MacDonald, that period when he was just starting out and learning his craft, enough words cannot be said about the support and guiding influence of pulp editor Babette Rosmond. At that time she was an editor at Street and Smith, managing two of the publisher’s premier titles, Doc Savage and The Shadow magazines, crediting herself as B. Rosmond, probably because of her gender. Like every other editor MacDonald submitted stories to in the that six-month time frame between October 1945 and March 1946 when he couldn’t sell anything to save his life, she was among those who rejected many of his submissions, but her rejections were personal and encouraging. In one rejection letter she wrote, “I, too, am an admirer of atmosphere, but too much atmosphere and too unconvincing a plot make [your story] a weak yarn... However, I am extremely fond of the way you write -- so dry your tears and send me something else very soon." She was an early coach, mentor and -- eventually -- friend who not only helped him in getting a literary agent but counseled him to expand the scope of his stories’ locales.

To put it in real perspective, of the 57 stories MacDonald had published in his first two years as a writer, 30 of them, or 53%, were purchased by Babette Rosmond.

Much of MacDonald’s early work reads like just that: the earnest attempts of a man still learning his craft. While the plots and story ideas are strong, characterization and atmosphere still have a long way to go. This is certainly true of “The Little People,” a very early novella published in the November 1946 issue of Doc Savage, an issue that contained three different JDM tales, including “The Scarred Hand,” which was deemed good enough by the author to be included in one of the Good Old Stuff anthologies. “The Little People” isn’t as good as “The Scarred Hand,” but it’s better than the third story, “The Startled Face of Death,” a story that took place in -- you guessed it -- India.

“The Little People” takes place in the United States, specifically upstate New York, where the MacDonalds were living at the time the author wrote this. It’s a sprawling “heist” tale, carefully thought out and nicely executed, but as it goes on it becomes both repetitive and very predictable. Yet taken for what it is -- one of the earliest published works of a man who would go on to become a great writer -- it proves to be both instructive and enjoyable.

With any heist tale there has to be a mastermind, a leader who runs the show, and in “The Little People” it’s a man named Joseph Turin, a criminal whose slight frame is more than made up for by his ruthlessness and steely, “illimitable determination.” He has gathered a team of twenty men, "a collection of village hard guys from Northern New York State, with a sprinkling of city crooks." The plan is nothing less than to rob an entire town. The men have been chosen for their particular expertise, some in firearms, some with explosives, even one who can fly a plane. They gather in an abandoned warehouse in an unnamed location to make their final preparations.

"Now, men," Turin said, his voice low and hoarse with intensity, "before I go over the high spots again, let me tell you that some of you guys are going to get killed on this deal. It's in the cards. That's so you will understand the risks. But the profit is going to make up for it. Those that come through will be set for life. This is going to be the biggest haul in the history of crime. You guys are going to make history. But if any one of you wants to back out now, go ahead."

The medium-sized fictional town of Misoo Falls, New York, an hour or two east of Syracuse, was chosen for its location: only three roads in and out, with its western border taken up by a large lake. The various members of the gang will go in in groups, meticulously timed, blocking all of the roads, cutting the lines of communication and disabling the local radio station. Other teams will infiltrate the town and immediately overtake the small police station, while others will rob all of the town’s banks, its post office, jewelry stores, railroad station and even the local citizens they encounter. In the meantime, a hijacked C-47 will land at the local airport (where all the other planes there have been disabled) and stand ready while the thieves load their swag onto the airplane. Once done, all the teams will gather at the airport and take off, heading west to a secret location where they will split the stuff, separate and "melt away into the quiet places of the world, unsuspected, the possessor[s] of great wealth and a bloody secret that would stand unmatched in the history of world crime..."

There would obviously be some resistance from the citizens of the town, and the teams are instructed to deal with them accordingly:

"Don't shoot unless you have to. Don't let anybody corner you. If you have to shoot, make it a good clean job. We aren't going to be able to avoid knocking off a few guys and once that's done it doesn't make much difference how many more we have to get rid of."

It doesn’t take much imagination on the part of the reader -- especially given the story’s title (MacDonald’s own, believe it or not) -- to realize that the drama of “The Little People” involves how things go wrong at the hands of some of the citizens of Misoo Falls, those who fight back and eventually thwart the well planned heist. These incidents are told in a fairly rote, reportorial style, one after the other, all similar as the gang of crooks slowly dwindles in number. Here's the first such mishap, a good example of all that follow it, showing how one citizen deals with the first entry of the gang:

Buck Deegan was hot, tired and mad. He wheeled the dolly into the truck, loaded on the last box and wheeled it out onto the platform and into the warehouse. He cursed the fates that made him not only a truck driver, but a part-time stevedore. The heavy muscles of his shoulders ached. He stowed the last case and stood for a minute on the loading platform. He looked at the long line of red vans. The rest of the guys had finished and gone out to eat. Only sucker-Deegan was left. He looked curiously at a truck, an open job, loaded with men, that wheeled into the yard at a good clip. Men piled out of the truck and walked toward him.

He recognized the lead man who had worked with him for two weeks and then quit for no reason. He grinned and said, "Hi there, Winny! Who're your friends?" To Deegan's immense astonishment the little dark-haired guy walking beside [Winny] pulled a gun out of his pocket, leveled it at Deegan's middle and fired.

The slug crashed heavily into Deegan and he fell backward as the men swarmed up onto the platform. Through the swirling mists of pain he felt the upsurge of a mighty wrath. The men ignored him. Buck shut his eyes, grasped the fluttering remains of consciousness and bunched his muscles. He reached one hand around behind him and grasped the butt of a small heavy wrench protruding from his hip pocket. Feeling as though he was in a dream, he rolled heavily against a pair of ankles standing next to him.

Dimly, he felt the man fall. He brought the heavy wrench around and felt the deep pleasure as the wrench crunched against bone. He raised it and crashed it down once again into the misty circle of the stranger's face. He lifted it again and it fell with his arm as the second shot smashed the back of his head...

And so it goes, as the local citizens -- farmers, policemen, shop owners and radio station engineers -- all rise to the occasion, retaliate and gradually winnow the gang of men down to a mere handful by the end of the tale. And, of course, things end badly for Joseph Turin…

“The Little People” was submitted to Babette Rosmond along with another story, and in her written reply to the author (dated April 9, 1946) she tells him that she would purchase both of them. She really liked the unnamed story, and mentions that she will probably publish “The Little People” in The Shadow, "going on the excuse that there's a lot of action in it." Six months later it appeared in Doc Savage, giving one an idea of how long it could take from date of sale to date of publication, at least at Street and Smith. In this same letter she offers to help find him an agent (the one JDM was considering apparently was revealing himself to be “a joker”) and she wryly begs his loyalty after he becomes professionally represented. Mentioning a story his would-be agent was trying to peddle, she wrote, “As for "The Bright Flash of Vengeance,” don't worry about it. If your joker sells it, okay -- if not, remember mama." Rosemond would go on to publish that story in the January 1947 issue of The Shadow. (You can read the letter on Cal Branche’s JDM Homepage, here.)

“The Little People” has never, to my knowledge, been reprinted.

Babette Rosmond

From the Top of the Hill # 3: November 6, 1947

John D MacDonald's third column for the Clinton Courier,  from the very early days of his career as a writer. This is pre-Florida for the MacDonalds, and here he seems every bit as involved in the governmental workings of his surroundings as he was to become as a Floridian.

I've mentioned before that Clinton was the model for the town of Dalton in MacDonald's 1956-57 novel Death Trap, and in that novel the author uses Clinton's town square as a central point in Hugh MacReedy's investigation. He even retains the name of one of the streets leading into it.

Incidentally, if you had taken JDM up on his two sports wagers offered at the end of the piece, you would have won the first and lost the second.

Now that the headlines on the testimony of various Hollywood characters have faded away -- to reappear later, no doubt -- we must confess that the whole affair gave us an odd feeling of unreality. There were those famous faces -- R. Taylor, G. Cooper, R. Montgomery -- performing for the investigating committee. We are used to those people as two dimensional beings on a flat silver screen. We are accustomed to seeing little publicity releases on their marriages and their swimming pools. To have then plunked down in the middle of a discussion of ideologies seems a bit like reading an appreciation of Einstein by one Mickey Mouse.

The next time we go a few steps up Fountain Street and buy ourselves a hunk of celluloid escape, we will gaze at those famous faces and ponder that the life of an actor or actress is indeed a hard one. Not only do you have the responsibility for getting rid of several thousand dollars a week, but you might at any time have to sit in front of a group of unsympathetic Congressmen and be led into a discussion of realities. Any touch of reality must be quite a jolt to our tinseled friends out there.

* * *

The number of cars on the road is constantly climbing. On these wet evenings at dusk it is becoming more and more of a dangerous experiment to drive through town. The Williams Street-College Street corner is particularly fascinating. Not only is traffic coming in from four directions, but people are also angling for diagonal parking slots along the curb.

Wouldn't one-way traffic around the square be a sound idea? Each of the six streets feeding into the square could become stop streets, including Utica Street. You wouldn't be able to turn left from Williams into College; you'd have to go all the way around. The blinker could be eliminated. According to the way people ease around the corner turning right into College Street, it doesn't do much good anyway. It might well be moved to another corner. Maybe where the kids cross. Or the corner of Bristol Road and College Street.

Or maybe we just haven't been informed of some unapparent but good reason why there should be two-way traffic around the square.

* * *

With elections over, we can talk about a few trends we have noticed. One is the change in county government. The Political Scientists have made clear during past years that the American City, financially speaking, is a dying organization. Cities have rigid boundaries and an assessed valuation which must bear the costs of running the cities. As total valuation decreases -- through increasing age of structures -- the dollar of assessment must bear a higher tax, thus penalizing new construction. The citizens continue to expect all city services. To avoid tax rates, the citizens buy or build outside the rigid city limits and still retain many of the commercial advantages of city life.

The State of New York has been quietly going to work on this problem, This past year all welfare was taken away from Utica and Rome and centralized under Oneida County. The state refunds 80% of all welfare costs. Thus the city tax burden is lightened and County Government becomes more of an agency of state government.

The boys who try to look into the future tell us that county and city government have overlapping functions in too many cases. They say that one day not too far in the future, all local governmental functions, including police and fire protection, will be consolidated in the hands of the county.

Frankly, we would like to see this happen. We have the idea that the towns and villages elect to the Board of Supervisors men less likely to be rubber stamps than are the men elected to the Common Council of a fair sized city. We believe that county government is the logical place, the logical body of men, to accept responsibility for the government of all the citizens of the county, country and city alike. We feel that no agency of local government is likely to be entirely free of the unfortunate effects of machine politics. We do feel, however, that if and when county government becomes the sole surviving agency, citizen interest will be focused to an extent that will make breeding conditions of machine politics a bit more unfavorable than at present.

Machine politics thrives in inverse ratio to citizen interest. Citizen interest can be measured by the degree of participation in such organizations as Community Councils, Bureaus of Municipal Research, Leagues of Women Voters, Taxpayers' Leagues -- and all other non-partisan city and county organizations. If such organizations were as healthy locally as they are in, say, Monroe County, we would have better county and city government.

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Having attended three colleges at one time or another, we can usually depend on at least one of them to come through with a pretty decent football team. This year we are claiming Pennsylvania as the alma mater.

They are undefeated, but there seems to be a conspiracy among sports writers to ignore that fact. In national ratings Penn is listed lower than Columbia, which took a 34-14 whacking from the Penn men.

Somebody is taking the joy out of life. We brag about Penn and get blank looks. To get even, we will make a prediction. Penn will defeat Army by -- at least one touchdown, and Cornell by at least three. Any takers?

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See you next week.