by Erik Larson
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
No BOOK CAN be written without the help of legions of good souls who donate their time and energy to the author’s cause. I wish first to thank my wife, Christine Gleason, a natural editor who happens also to be a brilliant physician. Her repeated readings of the manuscript and her observations were invaluable, even the occasional Zzzzzzs she wrote in the margins to note places where the story dragged. My daughters, Kristen, Lauren, and Erin, showed unusual patience in tolerating their father’s predawn disappearances into his office and his mysterious ban on nonessential use of his computer, a prohibition based entirely on his neurotic fear that something catastrophic might befall his manuscript.
My agent, David Black, is that rarest of agents who insists that a book proposal be just exactly right, even in the face of death threats from his authors. He is an excellent human being with an unerring eye for story. My editor, Betty Prashker, was as always a cheerfully assertive voice, prodding me gently for the manuscript and, later, recommending with equal grace that parts of it be destroyed and never seen by any other human reader.
The observations of friends who read all or parts of the manuscript were invaluable. Thanks, then, to Robin Marantz-Henig, who read the entire thing and gave me a detailed structural and stylistic critique, and to Alex Kotlowitz and Carrie Dolan, whose encouragement helped me survive those dark early days when the writing first got under way. I owe a special debt to Hugh E. Willoughby, director of the Hurricane Research Division of NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory, Virginia Key, Florida, who showed himself to be a deft critic of style as well as meteorological content. Any lingering errors are entirely my fault, not his.
Many archivists and librarians helped make my journey back to Isaac’s time a pleasant one, foremost among them Casey Greene, head of Special Collections, Shelly Henly Kelly, and Anna B. Peebler, all of the Rosenberg Library. Special thanks to Casey for no doubt saving my life with his frequent warnings not to tip my chair so far back. I thank, too, Margaret Doran, Curator of Collections at Galveston’s Moody Museum, for showing me the letters of lovestruck Will Moody Jr. and his beloved “Hib,” neither of whom made it into the final draft but whose passion and observations nonetheless inform the narrative. Thanks also to the Seattle Public Library, for making available to me a berth in the Writer’s Room and to everyone at the National Archives Annex, College Park, Maryland, the Library of Congress, and the Suzallo Library of the University of Washington—just for being there and for helping to preserve so many bits and pieces of the nation’s past and for happily fielding endless, naive queries about times long gone.
Erik Larson
Seattle
1999
An excerpt from
In the Garden of Beasts
Now available from Crown Publishers
CHAPTER 1
Means of Escape
The telephone call that forever changed the lives of the Dodd family of Chicago came at noon on Thursday, June 8, 1933, as William E. Dodd sat at his desk at the University of Chicago.
Now chairman of the history department, Dodd had been a professor at the university since 1909, recognized nationally for his work on the American South and for a biography of Woodrow Wilson. He was sixty-four years old, trim, five feet eight inches tall, with blue-gray eyes and light brown hair. Though his face at rest tended to impart severity, he in fact had a sense of humor that was lively, dry, and easily ignited. He had a wife, Martha, known universally as Mattie, and two children, both in their twenties. His daughter, also named Martha, was twenty-four years old; his son, William Jr.—Bill—was twenty-eight.
By all counts they were a happy family an
d a close one. Not rich by any means, but well off, despite the economic depression then gripping the nation. They lived in a large house at 5757 Blackstone Avenue in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, a few blocks from the university. Dodd also owned—and every summer tended—a small farm in Round Hill, Virginia, which, according to a county survey, had 386.6 acres, “more or less,” and was where Dodd, a Jeffersonian democrat of the first stripe, felt most at home, moving among his twenty-one Guernsey heifers; his four geldings, Bill, Coley, Mandy, and Prince; his Farmall tractor; and his horse-drawn Syracuse plows. He made coffee in a Maxwell House can atop his old wood-burning stove. His wife was not as fond of the place and was more than happy to let him spend time there by himself while the rest of the family remained behind in Chicago. Dodd named the farm Stoneleigh, because of all the rocks strewn across its expanse, and spoke of it the way other men spoke of first loves. “The fruit is so beautiful, almost flawless, red and luscious, as we look at it, the trees still bending under the weight of their burden,” he wrote one fine night during the apple harvest. “It all appeals to me.”
Though generally not given to cliché, Dodd described the telephone call as a “sudden surprise out of a clear sky.” This was, however, something of an exaggeration. Over the preceding several months there had been talk among his friends that one day a call like this might come. It was the precise nature of the call that startled Dodd, and troubled him.
FOR SOME TIME NOW, Dodd had been unhappy in his position at the university. Though he loved teaching history, he loved writing it more, and for years he had been working on what he expected would be the definitive recounting of early southern history, a four-volume series that he called The Rise and Fall of the Old South, but time and again he had found his progress stymied by the routine demands of his job. Only the first volume was near completion, and he was of an age when he feared he would be buried alongside the unfinished remainder. He had negotiated a reduced schedule with his department, but as is so often the case with such artificial ententes, it did not work in the manner he had hoped. Staff departures and financial pressures within the university associated with the Depression had left him working just as hard as ever, dealing with university officials, preparing lectures, and confronting the engulfing needs of graduate students. In a letter to the university’s Department of Buildings and Grounds dated October 31, 1932, he pleaded for heat in his office on Sundays so he could have at least one day to devote to uninterrupted writing. To a friend he described his position as “embarrassing.”