An Interesting Time To Be a Writer

 

A while back, I read an article that said Ernest Hemingway wrote A Moveable Feast after going through notes he had accumulated during his time in Paris 30 years earlier. I wish I had been that meticulous during my early days. Or even later ones. Notes from my newspaper days ended up in the trash bin after I wrote the stories.

I have found one period, though, in which my activities are well chronicled for posterity, if old Pos is ever interested. It’s the years 1963 through 1969, during which I was founder and editor of Nashville Magazine, the city's first slick paper monthly. All of its issues are stacked on a shelf at Nashville's main library, unless they were discarded after digitization. I wrote many articles for the publication, though quite a few didn’t carry my by-line. Each issue included a feature at the front of the book titled “Scene About Town.” I modeled it after The New Yorker’s “The Talk of the Town,” which back then included mostly short often humorous or whimsical vignettes about life and events that took place in the city.

We had several covers created by local graphic artists, including one for the first issue, shown above, by Dave Baker. The L&C Tower was the only "skyscraper" back then. The skyline has changed dramatically over the past 53 years.

My monthly musings about people and places and what went on around town bring back memories of how life was lived in those days. Looking back over a few issues (I have them all), I realized I’d forgotten how nice the perks were for a magazine editor. I was invited to all manner of dinners and parties and meetings. While attending, I picked up all sorts of little tidbits to put in my column.

At a United Givers Fund (now United Way) luncheon, a voluble advertising guy commented:

“Talk about your all-time salesman, I nominate the man who sold restaurants on putting parsley on every plate. Created a whole industry out of nothing. He should be sought out and recognized with a medal.”

I constantly had visits from strange people who would wind up in the magazine’s pages. Like the young lady named Sue Silber, who wrote poetry and observed her fellowman with a humorous perspective. At concerts, she watched as much as she listened.

“Audience-watching,” she said, “is a delightful sport in itself. Most audiences can be classified into various categories. First, there are the tappers. This classification can be further divided into the foot-tappers, the finger-tappers, and the hand-tappers. And then the last two can be further categorized as to what they tap.

“Some finger-tappers tap their chin–or chins, some their cheek, some their thigh, some tap their knee, some their program, some their cigarette pack, and some women tap their purse. Then there are, as it were, the back-seat conductors. These wave their hands in time to the music, sometimes quite broadly. Occasionally they even go so far as to use a rolled-up program for a baton. The musicians–foolish men–ignore these geniuses in favor of their own conductor.”

The pages revealed other such dramatic events as a cocktail party The Oertel Brewing Company held to announce its new “real draft beer” in cans. My comment: “This was akin to producing the real Jane Mansfield in a trenchcoat.”

I wrote about such things as traveling up the Cumberland River on a barge towboat, sitting in on a recording session at RCA’s now-historic Music Row studio, working backstage at a theatrical production, and watching them make Goo Goos at Standard Candy Company.

It was an interesting time to be a writer.

Now, approaching the age of 91, I find it interesting just to sit back and watch the world spin around me. Not that I'm the center of the Universe...you know what I mean.

What's Behind Mystery Writer Chester Campbell

I often hear that readers like to know personal stuff about authors, so I thought I would put together a few significant background bits about myself. The things we write about, the ideas we share, the events we describe come out of the knowledge and experiences we have gained over the years. For me, that adds up to 89-plus. Rather than use the old I pronoun, which would make it sound too self-centered, we'll switch to third person, the POV used in six of my novels—all but the Greg McKenzie Mysteries.

● Campbell graduated from East Nashville High School in 1943. He received the Overall Medal
as the city's outstanding ROTC cadet in his junior year.

● After enlisting in the Army Air Forces Reserve just out of high school, Campbell was called to active duty in January 1944 and served a year and ten months in the Eastern Flying Training Command during World War II.

● As a member of the class of 1949, Campbell was among the first to complete the new journalism curriculum at the University of Tennessee.

 

● Campbell began his writing career as a reporter for The Knoxville Journal while in his junior year at UT.

● Campbell received the Bronze Star Medal in the Korean War as a captain at Fifth Air Force Headquarters in Seoul. The citation said he "performed exceptionally meritorious service in support of operations in Korea as an Intelligence Officer in the Estimates Division, Directorate of Intelligence."

● During a brief stint as a freelance magazine writer, Campbell had articles published in such national publications as Coronet and The American Legion Magazine.

● As a copywriter for a Nashville advertising agency, Campbell worked on ads for such accounts as Kentucky Fried Chicken and Pizza Hut. His crowning achievement was keeping a straight face while working on full page newspaper ads for a high-rise mausoleum.

● Campbell was founder and editor for six years of Nashville Magazine, the city's first slick paper consumer monthly.

● Campbell served eighteen years as executive vice president of the Tennessee Association of Life Underwriters, a 4,000-member trade association. He was recognized by the National Association of Life Underwriters (now the National Association of Insurance and Financial Advisors) in 1980 with the C. Carney Smith Award as outstanding association executive of the year.

● Campbell holds the coveted CAE (Certified Association Executive) designation conferred by the American Society of Association Executives.

● After service in the Tennessee Air National Guard following the Korean War, Campbell retired from the Air Force Reserve as a lieutenant colonel.

● Campbell's first published book was titled The Best Is Yet To Be, a history of the first 150 years of City Road Chapel United Methodist Church in Madison, Tennessee. He has had ll mystery, thriller, and suspense novels published since then.

● Campbell's first wife died in 1998 from complications of Parkinson's Disease. He and his current wife share six children, 11 grandchildren, and 10 1/2 great-grandchildren.

Unscheduled Trip Down Memory Lane

We're painting the inside of our house. The biggest challenge is my office in the bonus room over the garage. It's packed with the clutter of 15 years of the writing life. The main problem is I've found it virtually impossible to throw anything away. You never know when it might come in handy, I've always contended. In the process, things kind of get piled up here and there (think everywhere).

But the painter must be able to get to the walls to paint them. So last week we started digging into the clutter. My wife would pick up something and say, "Can we throw this away?"

You can't go around willy-nilly throwing stuff away. It might be something of infinite value to posterity. Or at least something worth showing to a curious great-grandchild. To prevent such a tragedy, I would begin to read. I found it's like doing research for a book. When you get onto a fascinating subject, it's difficult to stop.

Taking some papers from Sarah, I found I was looking at notes I'd made from my trip to the Holy Land in 1998, the venture that led to my first published mystery, Secret of the Scroll. I took several hours of videos with the new camcorder I bought before leaving, and I looked through a partial script I wrote for an edited version I presented to my Sunday School class. Unfortunately, I loaned the tapes to someone who lost them.

It brought back memories of our tour starting in Jordan, where we visited Petra, the remarkable town carved out of reddish sandstone cliffs. Its best known site is the striking face of the Treasury, featured in the movie Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. We walked through the narrow 250-foot high sandstone slot canyon called the Siq where Indiana burst into the open facing the vivid facade of the Treasury.

In Israel, we spent nearly two weeks taking in everything from the stark, windswept heights of Masada to the multitude of historic sites around Jerusalem, up through Nazareth and the Sea of Galilee, the Golan Heights and the port of Haifa, then back down the coast to Tel Aviv and the ancient port of Joppa. That's where Secret of the Scroll opens.

I decided to keep these few sheets of paper and followed my wife's urgings to move on. The next slowdown came at a pile of magazines with colorful covers. It was my complete collection of
Nashville Magazine issues over the nearly seven years I served as editor. I started the magazine in 1963 and struggled to keep it afloat all those years.

After putting down the few issues I thumbed through, I resumed the trip down memory lane. I sifted through a stack of newspaper clippings of reviews for my earlier books. This was back in the days when our local paper and those in smaller towns where I did signings printed such things. There were also posters from bookstores about my appearances, something I no longer do now that my sales are mostly online. Reluctantly, I decided the lot of them were of no value to anybody but me, and I no longer had room for them.

File 13.

A little later, I found another itinerary for a trip through Europe Sarah and I took shortly after we married in 1999. Starting in Amsterdam where we watched a flower auction, we made a stop at the Luxembourg American Cemetery where World War II soldiers including Gen. George S. Patton, Jr. were buried. Then we toured Paris―the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame Cathedral, the Louvre, Montmartre―and continued through Germany and Austria. We visited Vienna and such interesting sites as the Swarovski crystal headquarters.

Most of the tour was spent in Switzerland. We ranged across the country from Zurich to Geneva, plus soaring to the Alpine heights around 10,000 feet aboard a cable car where we looked across at of the magnificent Matterhorn peak. In the Montreux area along Lake Geneva, we toured Castle Chillon, location for Lord Byron's The Prisoner of Chillon Castle.


After all that reminiscing, I was forced to detour off Memory Lane and get back to the cleanup. But, alas, we're not finished yet.

Winter, Too, Must Pass

One form of writing I haven't discussed here before is poetry. That's mainly because it's something I haven't indulged in for many years. I wrote a bit of poetry in my younger days and published one or two when I was running Nashville Magazine back in the sixties.

This was our second issue, dated February/March 1963. The cover is described this way on the Contents Page:

"After the pure havoc created by the weather in Nashville during January, we chose the serenity of a rural view for this month's cover. Called 'Valley in Winter,' the Edward W. Redfield painting hangs in the Main Gallery of the Parthenon in Centennial Park. It is part of the James M. Cowan Collection, donated in 1927, which has been called one of the finest small collections of art in America."

The magazine's graphic logo at the top, created by Art Director Hermann Zimmermann, is a representation of the front of the Parthenon. An exact replica of the Athenian temple, it was built originally for the Tennessee Centennial Exposition in 1897.

The Redfield painting is wider than shown on the cover. It's full width is shown on a two-page spread inside, followed by smaller winter photos and my poem:

WINTER, TOO, MUST PASS

The sky glistens in the winter night
like frost crystals
reflecting from a darkened pane...cedar smoke, sweetly piquant,
spices the heavy cold, conjuring up wistful scenes
before an open fire...but every silent breath
hangs in the air like a frozen sigh.

The night wind brushes icy fingers
across a reddened cheek...gaunt, bare arms
of once-stalwart oaks shudder in the maddening chill,
and warmth seems all but lost save in the memory
of a summer past.

Can life, once so vibrant, so compelling,
so filled with quenchless thirst be forever
locked within this bleak and frigid vale?

No: winter, too, must pass...dreams frozen in their prime
by the icy grip of fate
shall be revived as the sap of life

flows once more—

even through the bitterest night
the spark still glows,
for in the unfailing promise of spring
dwells winter's lingering hope.

The poem was not signed. This is the first time in fifty-one years that I have acknowledged authorship. I might look around and see if I can find some more.

Spring on the Way

I needed to look up something recently in my files of Nashville Magazine, which I edited from 1963 to 1969. In reading through several issues, I came across my last-page feature called "Loose Ends" in the February 1964 magazine. With all the weird weather we're having now (including snow flurries this afternoon), I thought the article, written one month past forty-nine years ago, made to order for the current situation. As you'll see, my writing tended to be a bit more poetic half a century ago.

IT WAS A SOGGY, gray winter morning as I drove into town, along streets lined like a football field with the thin shadows of light poles reflected on the pavement. The city mirrored a forlorn countenance, its colors flat, its buildings drab and water-streaked. A swirling exit from the new expressway stood chaste and deserted in the morning chill. 

A ragged Negro, bent beneath the burden of his years, hobbled across an intersection, his tattered umbrella a comic foil against the rain. Traffic flowed past, tires squishing noisily through the downpour, each car tightly sealed against the outside world like a secluded island moving in the gray fog of dampness.

This was the city at its seamiest, I thought. Denuded trees, yellowed grass, slate-gray skies. Instead of open, friendly faces, the sidewalks were sparsely populated with stooped figures, their darkened faces withdrawn, shrouded against the weather. A dull, gray, wintry day. A wet, murky city. A place for introspection, a time for seeking new perspectives beyond the gray horizons of the present.

These same showers, differing only perhaps in their degree of warmth, coming a few scant weeks from now will stir this same muddy ground into a rebirth of momentous proportions. The same wan landscape will burst forth with new color, and these same downcast faces will turn upward with new brightness. For such is the magic of Spring. 

It seems that all of life is geared to a similar cycle of cold, murky depths followed by the lightness and brightness of hope renewed. At least that is what makes the fight worth fighting.

An Early Page in My Writing Career

My first really drastic move into the writing business took place about this time of year, many years ago. I wrote about it on the Make Mine Mystery blog last Friday. Since it's a chapter in my writing story that I've not explored in a long time, I decided to repeat it here with only minor editing. This is how it goes:


I saw The Miracle on 34th Street in the TV listings and got to thinking about something almost as miraculous I was involved in at this time forty-nine years ago. We were putting the final touches on the "Premier Issue" of Nashville Magazine, the city's first slick-paper monthly. Our office was located on Union Street in downtown Nashville.

At right is the cover of that issue. That the magazine continued to appear monthly under my direction for six years and three months is certainly worthy of the miracle designation. I had worked as a newspaper reporter for nine years, sandwiched around a sojourn in Korea for the north-south unpleasantness, put in a short time free-lancing for national magazines, then spent two years at a PR agency. When I was "downsized" there, I lucked into a job with the State of Tennessee. That was late summer of 1962. I was told my job would be short-lived as the governor was leaving office at the end of the year. I was hired to write speeches for the governor, and my boss said as long as I got the speeches done, he didn't care what I did the rest of the time.


This sounded ideal as I had come up with the idea of starting a local magazine. Impressed by the highly-successful Atlanta Magazine, published by the Chamber of Commerce, I visited with the editor and learned what all was involved. Unsuccessful at getting the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce to sponsor my project, I decided to pursue it on my own. I was thirty-seven at the time, full of you-know-what and vinegar. I approached the former secretary at the PR agency, and she agreed to join me in m.c. publications, inc., for Mikie (Evans) and Chester (Campbell). We each put up $500, and that was our capitalization. Needless to say, this is not what I was told would be required.


I was referred to a graphic artist at the Methodist Publishing House who agreed to be art director. Since we had decided on a January launch, I needed to put things together in a hurry. Although the Chamber declined to help monetarily, a few prominent members assisted me with recommendations. I've never considered myself much of a salesman, but in retrospect, I seem have done a helluva job getting the magazine in print.


I traded advertising for a lot of the necessary services. I found a printer who agreed to be paid after the second issue came out (he also took an ad). My art director was friends with a three-man art studio that did a lot of gratis artwork (one of them painted the downtown view for the cover). An engraver took an ad to cover most of our halftones, and I did an article on a young guy who ran an electronic data service (this was in the days of punch cards). He handled our mailing labels. I also provided an ad for a photographer.


I paid nothing for articles, but I called on several friends from my newspaper days to write for me. They were happy to help the magazine get started and found the new venture a unique opportunity. I had worked for the Nashville Banner and talked its sports editor into contributing an article on the city's minor league hockey team, the Dixie Flyers. Fred Russell was a regular contributor to The Saturday Evening Post and wrote its annual Pigskin Preview. As for the rest of the articles and features, I wrote much of that issue, as I did for each subsequent edition.


Subscriptions brought in a small amount of income, but the lifeblood of a magazine is advertising. I had to go after it myself. I convinced a couple of ad agencies to support the new venture, despite lack of a track record. One of them bought the full-color back cover. I also got full pages from the local electric service, the gas company, and a new luxury apartment project. A friend from my Air Guard unit bought an add for his import auto dealership, and the data service guy helped me get a half page from his father-in-law, owner of a finance company. I also wangled an ad out of the savings and loan association that owned our building.


I wound up with seven and two-thirds pages of advertising in that first issue, or a little more than 17 percent of its forty-four pages. Hardly in the ballpark for a break-even operation. It provided the start of many years of running hard to placate our creditors. After a couple of issues, I found an advertising manager and relinquished that part of the business. By the end of 1963, our forty-four-page issue had fourteen and one-half pages of advertising for a much improved 33 percent.


I had a great time with the magazine, despite fifteen-hour days. I came up with lots of great subjects to cover myself, in addition to assigning numerous others. I even ran some of my poetry anonymously. We published a few short stories by well-known local authors, without payment. But our circulation never got much beyond 10,000, and advertising was always a hard sell. We were about ten years ahead of our time. When our unpaid accounts got too far out of hand after five years, I turned to a good friend who was head of PR for Life & Casualty Insurance Company, one of Nashville's two large insurers. He talked the head of the company, wealthy former Ambassador Guilford Dudley, into bailing us out. We moved into offices on the twentieth floor of the L&C Tower and had money to pay contributors. But the guy they put over me as manager was a rehabilitation project, and it turned out to be more than I could take. After a few months I resigned. The new management didn't fare too well, and the insurance company dropped the magazine in less than a year.


But forty-nine years ago, I was as excited as a kid with a new toy. I was ready to make a miracle happen. And I did.

Dark Night in Race Relations

With the election of President Obama, race relations is a topic much in the news, a lot of it on the negative side. If you weren't around 40-plus years ago, you may not be fully aware of the great amount of progress we've made in less than half a century. Back in January of 1963, I started a slick paper monthly called Nashville Magazine. I wrote an editorial feature in the back of the book titled "Loose Ends." Reprinted below is what I wrote in the June 1963 issue. Nashville is a much different place today. (NOTE: Negro, which is the Spanish word for "black," was the accepted term for African Americans in 1963.)

AN OLD NEWSPAPER REPORTER is like an old firehorse—ring a bell and he’s off and running. I heard the bell and sniffed the smoke tonight, and I stalked the story to its end. As I write this, I have just come from what has doubtlessly been the most turbulent evening of recent Negro student demonstrations protesting segregation in downtown Nashville eating places. The situation swirled out of hand at one point and could easily have ended in tragedy, though fortunately it did not.

By the time you read this, the details will have long been written and rewritten in the press, but I will be a good while forgetting the stark picture of exploding tempers at Fifth Avenue and Union Street. As the marching Negro youths squared off before a group of pursuing white boys, someone smashed against a window of the old Loveman’s building, and a large, jagged piece of glass suddenly sailed across Union Street to crash onto the opposite sidewalk. The Negroes broke ranks, swarmed into the street around a bus, and for a few moments serious violence seemed inevitable. But the Negro leaders herded their group back into marching ranks and soon continued the chanting trek to police headquarters.

Rocks pelted demonstrators, police and newsmen in front of the Metropolitan Safety Building and again later at the Negroes’ rallying point, First Baptist Church on Eighth Avenue North. Luckily, only one Negro boy was injured, and he not seriously.

As I followed the events of the evening, strolling along with the crowds, listening to comments of both whites and Negroes, I gained several disturbing impressions. First, the “student non-violent movement” is inappropriately named. Casting a group of high-spirited youths into an emotionally charged atmosphere where close contacts are inescapable is hardly a move calculated to produce “non-violence.” I watched the Negroes jostle white patrons of the B&W Cafeteria in attempts to squeeze inside the doors.

The violence that took place, however, can be laid mainly to young white toughs— teenagers and some not far out of their teens. Without their provocations, the Negroes would have doubtlessly marched and sung in reasonably good order.

But my most distressing observation concerned the magnitude of the entire affair. It produced a bold, two-line streamer in one of The Nashville Banner’s few evening extra editions in recent years, and it sent hundreds of words and scores of photographs around the world via facilities of the wire services. Nashville, which had been peacefully progressing in race relations since the violence that marked the initial steps in school desegregation six years ago, had been dealt another black eye in the face of national and international opinion. And yet who was involved? Here’s who:

• A group of Negro college and high school students, no more than 150 at the outside.

• An unorganized cluster of white youths spoiling for a fight, certainly no more than 150 in all.

That was it—barely seven-hundredths of one per cent of the population of Metropolitan Nashville. It was a striking demonstration of how the acts of a few can markedly affect the reputation of an entire area. I am sure the Negro students who took part in the march (many of whom were not Nashvillians) had no concern for what damage their actions might do to the city. They were fighting for a deeply-felt principle, for the right to go where they pleased, to hold their heads high and to be accepted as worthy as the next man. The misguided whites who hurled rocks and curses demonstrated an intelligence sufficiently meager to rule out any prospect that they might have realized the disgrace their actions would bring to their city.

And so the problem falls back upon us, upon we who do care about what happens to Nashville, we who do care about our city’s reputation and the blemishes upon it that show to the world. It will not be sufficient merely for the mayor to appoint a bi-racial committee to probe for areas of agreement between whites and Negroes of intelligence and good will. The solution, to my way of thinking, must lie in a full realization that Nashvillians of all colors and creeds must learn to live together side-by-side, to respect one another as individuals—not as members of this or that group, and to work toward the common goal of building a happier, healthier, more prosperous community. If this sounds trite, so be it. "Freedom” is a rather well- worn expression, but has lost none of its luster for all its use.

I came away from the demonstrations tonight aware that both sides in the controversy must disabuse themselves of some past notions. The whites, for instance, must realize there is no such thing as the Negro’s ill-defined "place.” And the Negroes, for their part, must learn to accept the fact that first-class citizenship demands first-rate civic responsibility, which includes a concerted effort to maintain law and order rather than bend it to one’s purposes.

So there you have it, the story of an evening which made Nashville struggle with her conscience. Not the factual, objective account of a long-time newsman, but a thoughtfully considered, editorialized appraisal of one who saw his city shamed and wondered why.

© 1963 m. c. publications, inc.