The Most Famous Writer Who Ever Lived

by Tom Shroder

  Possibly her interest was fired by her own lineage, of which I had known very little. Her mother, born Evalyn Bone, was the daughter of Joseph Bone, an Iowa pioneer, veteran of the 7th Iowa Cavalry and the Indian Wars and owner of one of the first grain mills in Hamilton County. Adam McKinlay, Mack’s grandfather, came to Webster City as a teenager, apprenticed in various mills, eventually managing Joseph Bone’s mill until, at twenty-six, he married the boss’s sixteen-year-old daughter and became a part owner.

  When a local printer decided to publish a two-volume History of Hamilton County, Iowa, Effie, who literally had the county’s history in her blood, was tapped to provide an eleven-page chapter about the key development necessary for a town to arise: Hamilton County mills.

  “Her eyes were alive with the zeal of research,” Mack wrote of his mother’s scramble to make good on the assignment. “We lived only for the day when the volume would actually be printed and we could hold a copy in our hands.” Then, one night, Effie arrived home bearing the thick volumes.

  “With tender fingers I touched the page which bore Mother’s name, and regarded her with a wonder not as yet mingled with any hope or desire for emulation.”

  I found a passage from Effie’s first published work on the early mills, expecting something tedious, archaic, clearly the work of an amateur. In fact, it had style, literary fire, sensuality, and astonishing deftness for an unpracticed writer—even by contemporary standards. Effie wrote: “Often a warm night in early March broke up the ice and the swelling, menacing roar aroused the family. Great cakes of ice weighing many tons, carried by the swollen flood, piled up in the bend of the river, wedged against the bridge piers, against the mill foundation, hurling themselves upon the corner of the mill which stood upstream, leaving nothing but destruction in their wake. . . . Fire could be combated with water, but water and ice knew no defeat; they carried everything before them.”

  The words piled up and hurled themselves at the reader, just as the ice was hurled by the flood. Water and ice knew no defeat. . . . Poetry, pure and simple.

  No doubt, though only a small handful of volumes were published, after her hardship and the scandal her marriage had caused, Effie must have been profoundly gratified to find she’d managed to improve her status in her own eyes and that of her neighbors. Effie McKinlay Kantor was a lot of things, but she was now also that remarkable creature: a published author.

  After the history was distributed in 1913, the managing editor of one of three local papers—even a town of nine thousand had three newspapers in 1913—asked Effie, then thirty-five, to try her hand at being a reporter, a position that, as Mack wrote, “had a dignity that approached eminence” as well as paying more than her previous menial jobs.

  Effie attacked her reporting with energy and passion, bringing the sensibilities of a small-town crusader to the paper’s pages. She campaigned for parks and other civic improvements while earning several promotions with accompanying pay increases, just as her father’s career and finances were sputtering to extinction. Joseph Bone had sold the mill and invested in properties in Washington State. Adam McKinlay had become unable to perform the necessary tasks of millwork due to asthma contracted over years of breathing in flour dust and was forced into a succession of lesser jobs. When the western investments didn’t work out for Joseph Bone, Adam found himself depleting his own meager savings to provide his father-in-law with loans that were never repaid. Finally, he could find no job at all, and the family struggled to survive on Effie’s salary and proceeds from the sale of the undeveloped portion of their small homestead property.

  So for a few years Effie had status, and earned enough to keep her family afloat. Then, in 1917, The Freeman-Tribune failed. It was following this disaster that Effie wrote her desperate appeal to John Kantor and John put her and his children up in a Chicago apartment until he got caught up in the real estate expert scandal.

  When John’s rent checks disappeared, the family moved back in with Effie’s parents in the ever-shrinking house in Webster City. Her father’s prospects remained moribund, and it seemed that every job Effie could have aspired to had already been claimed by a returning World War I veteran. Just when total financial collapse seemed inevitable, Effie discovered she had friends in Webster City, friends who had been impressed by her energy and zeal as a newspaper reporter and who had attained political power in the Iowa capital of Des Moines, just an hour or so drive away. Those friends called in favors until they found Effie a clerical spot that paid enough, barely, to move Mack and Virginia to the capital city and still send money home to her parents.

  I could find no mention of this time in Des Moines in any of my grandfather’s published autobiographies, and it was mentioned only in passing in the files of correspondence. Then, months into my commuting to Capitol South and the Madison building, all the way into box 139 of the Kantor Papers, I found it: a carbon of the original typed manuscript of what my grandfather had intended to be the sequel to But Look the Morn but never published. As I read through the pages, I quickly realized that the time in Des Moines, just two years, was more than a brief digression in my grandfather’s life: It was seminal.

  —

  Moving seventy miles away from Webster City had a fringe benefit for Mack: obtaining a safe remove from a town where his last name had been featured frequently on the front page of the local newspapers in connection with the ongoing scandal in distant Chicago. Free from the constraints of his hometown, where his life history was not only known but discussed and clucked over, Mack must have felt free to reinvent himself—and not just free, but driven.

  Mack found himself at the high school hangout, the drugstore lunch counter, mingling uncomfortably with his new high school classmates but drawn to another group only a few years older, “who bore the unmistakable stamp of those who had gone far and seen much, no matter how young they were.”

  These were youthful veterans of the war “over there” in Europe, now belatedly resuming their high school careers.

  “I felt that I too had gone far and seen much,” Mack wrote. “I imagined that I was more at ease among these ex-soldiers than with boys my own age. It was not without design that I wore a khaki shirt and overseas cap when first I sipped soda water in that drug store.”

  Just looking the part wasn’t enough. Mack began to casually drop references to “my regiment” in conversation, and refer to battles that of course he had only read about. Soon the subtle hints turned into bald lies about the action he had seen, always based on accounts of battles he had read about in fervid secret sessions in the public library and presented in what he imagined to be self-deprecatory fashion. “Oh, I didn’t have it so bad. Sure there was a lot of lead flying, but the boys up in the hedge rows had it far worse!” He showed off a scar on his calf he casually said was torn by a German bayonet when in fact it had been impressed by a German shepherd. He even bought service ribbons in a secondhand store and pinned them to his flannel shirt. At first he felt the thrill of his purloined identity. “The girls of 1919 were more impressed by a veteran of school age than by a football hero.”

  But soon, of course, the lie grew legs and careened around town, forcing him awake to the horrible shame of what he had done and to live with the constant threat of exposure. He lay sleepless at night, searching for a way out, fantasizing about calling a school-wide assembly and confessing all.

  The true veterans didn’t take long to detect contradictions and false notes in his increasingly elaborate tales, and word spread. His former friends snubbed him, or had places to be when he came around. “The worst thing about it was that I despised myself even more than other people could despise me,” he wrote. He was left to struggle with the terrible possibility that maybe he was his father’s son after all, compelled to lie for personal gain or glory by some blood poison stowed away in John Kantor’s seed. The stain of his shame sank into the fabric of existence. “It is impossible to e
xaggerate the remembered drabness and bleakness and chill and ugliness which lay over my life at this time. . . .”

  But I knew. I knew exactly how it felt. It may seem ridiculous to compare—he was fifteen, and I was only six, but the nature of my lie, the motivations behind it, the yearning for recognition I was too young to attain and didn’t deserve, were freakishly similar right down to the lust for the badge of a service uniform. The depth of the shame, too, cut across age differences—even as an adult I have hesitated to speak, or even think, about this episode. But when I came across those unpublished pages, sitting at the wood desk in the Library of Congress manuscript reading room, cringe-inducing memory flooded in:

  At some point in first grade, I became profoundly impressed by, and envious of, the slightly older kids who got to walk around school wearing those buckle-on white belts slanting across the shoulder like a beauty contestant’s sash. These were members of the safety patrol and the belts were the badge of honor that marked them as the Chosen Ones. I lusted after those white belts, made of shiny plastic, smooth and cool to the touch.

  Safety patrollers were selected by an election, certifying the admiration of their classmates, which may have been the real distinction I yearned for. Their role—standing prominently in front of the school at the first and last of the day, encouraging their fellow students to walk, not run, to and from cars and buses—seemed to me a dazzling spotlight, drawing me like a moth to flame.

  First-graders were too young to be designated as patrollers, and elections wouldn’t even be held until the second grade began.

  But my mother didn’t know that.

  I think I must have daydreamed about it for days, if not weeks, until one afternoon I blurted, “Guess what happened in school today? I was elected to the safety patrol!”

  I don’t know what kind of response I expected. I don’t think I even cared. I just wanted to hear myself say it, to create an alternate universe in which I was the popular kid, the one whom his classmates respected and the adults deemed worthy of Special Responsibilities.

  I still remember the shock when my mother raced right past—“How wonderful, dear”—and bustled about, excitedly planning early breakfasts to accommodate my new pre-school duties. I was taken aback by her enthusiasm, and a thousand calculations whirred in my brain. Well, okay, I hadn’t considered that my mother would actually do anything other than praise me. It was disconcerting that she seemed so action-oriented, but I was pretty sure I could still deal with this. When she asked me where my patrol belt was, my mind whirred some more and I said, “Only second-graders get those. We’re going to make ones out of paper and leave them at school.”

  I would think that would have tipped her off, but she kept coming, like a monster in a nightmare. Now she was calling my father at work. Now she was dialing up the other mothers in our carpool to let them know I’d need to be picked up ten minutes early. I knew then I was doomed.

  Here came the shame, the self-loathing, the soul-searing, world-crushing knowledge that I had gone too far and there was no way back.

  Oddly, I don’t remember my mother confronting me when my absurdly clumsy lie collapsed of its own ridiculous weight. I recall no lecture about honesty. What I remember is every day thereafter walking into school like a condemned man awaiting execution. And each day that no ax fell became a hellish eternity, making me yearn for the flash of the blade and the blow that would put a final end to the misery, along with all else.

  Finally, what seemed like weeks later but was in reality probably a couple of days at most, after suffering through another endless stretch of watching the clock until the bell rang my release, I was shuffling guiltily toward the door when my teacher said, “Tom, can you stay for a minute?”

  The blow I had feared, and hoped for. I froze, light-headed, weak-kneed.

  She walked to where I stood and cocked her head. “Tom, did you tell your mother you were elected to the safety patrol?”

  I flushed, my heart thumped thirty-second notes in my chest, my entire body throbbed with alarm. Something sprouted in my six-year-old brain and bloomed from my lungs. “There must be some kind of misunderstanding!” I shouted, and sprinted from the room. Fortunately, none of my classmates ever discovered the nature of that “misunderstanding.”

  For Mack, a teenager exposed for all to see, the consequences of his lie were simply unbearable. He quit school and found a job testing gravel, sand, and cement for the Iowa State Highway Commission. Dropping out was easy enough to explain by saying his family needed the additional income. It was also true.

  The commission was charged with the transformation of hundreds of miles of muck roads into modern highways, for which a bottomless source of pavement would be required. Mack’s job involved digging samples from gravel pits, then running rote tests in labs leased from the university. At night he hung around the neighborhood pool halls, mingling with drinkers, gamblers, and in some cases, thieves.

  One day, a pool hall buddy showed up at Mack’s lab while he was alone, running tests. He was in the neighborhood, the buddy said. Mack was glad for the company, but slightly uncomfortable with the companion, whom he knew to possess a set of tools with which he boosted headlights from parked cars to sell to shady garages. The two chatted for a while, pleasantly enough, until his buddy noticed a stack of factory automobile tires piled in the corner, and a transom window above the door that swung open and had no lock to secure it.

  Now he boxed Mack in a corner, speaking under his breath, proposing they meet back there that night. Mack could help him up to the transom. He’d do the rest—wriggle through the slot, drop to the floor, and unlock the door. Then he’d need Mack only to help roll the tires down an alley to his car.

  Mack mumbled something noncommittal. But when his “friend” left and his boss returned, Mack pointed out the lack of a lock on the transom, and urged him to have one installed immediately.

  Then, when Mack was alone again, a chain of thoughts began grinding in his head.

  “I suddenly saw the pool halls for what they were—dull, spiritless abodes of the idle and the disappointed and the incompetent. . . . If someone wanted tires, why not go to work and earn money to buy them?” Then he thought of his father, always trying to find ways to grab money that he hadn’t earned.

  “God, I said to myself, I want to work. I want to work hard. But at what? I didn’t want to be a laboratory assistant all my life.”

  He tried to think about what he was passionate about. Butterflies, the woods . . . Perhaps he could be a naturalist. But as soon as the thought occurred, he dismissed it. “I realized that what I loved about moths and butterflies was the romance of their pursuit and capture, the unbelievable color and delicacy of the creatures themselves. . . . Mine was merely a poetic fascination, a grand worship of Nature. I was not cut out to be a scientist.”

  Still, those moments he spent in the woods had moved him. He could still see them so vividly, even in the industrial confines of a cement lab. The more beautiful they had been, it seemed, the more fragile and fleeting. How could he hold on to them? How could he make the world see what he saw?

  And then he knew. “I thought: If you imagined it clearly enough you could make it come true for yourself. And if you wrote it down, you could make it come true for everybody. You could write the good and bad things, reconstruct all existence.”

  He had always been a reader, enamored of tales of adventure and daring. Now “I saw for the first time what books were really for. They were a means of cementing the past, which otherwise would have perished, a way of holding beauty and legend, unfading, shared and dreaded and loved far down the centuries.”

  Mack raced home that evening, his transformation shining from within. He was no longer disappointed, aimless, bitter about what life had dealt him. He had a goal, a great ambition.

  “I lay across the bed and began to write. My mother came in and asked wh
at in the world I was doing. I told her, ‘I’m going to be a writer,’ and she came over and kissed me on the back of my head, and I went on writing.”

  Perhaps of all single mothers in dire need of practical moneymaking support within a thousand miles of Des Moines, Iowa, only one, Effie M. Kantor, would have uncomplicatedly, unambivalently rejoiced at such a declaration.

  Her need for practical solutions would soon increase dramatically. A farm belt depression hit hard at Iowa’s state budget. First, Mack lost his job in the lab, followed quickly by Effie, who lost her clerical job in a steep reduction of state office staff. Only Virginia, who was going to college, managed to hold on to her part-time job. They put off the landlord and lived on bread and beans and made thin soup by boiling bones donated by a sympathetic butcher. Effie made a pittance in change by playing piano for dance classes and church socials.

  And then, within months, the miracle occurred. Hahne—a job printer specializing in livestock catalogs who thought printing his own newspaper might launch his political career—offered Effie the editorship. Despite her current destitution, and what must have seemed like an astronomical salary offer of $40 a week (the equivalent of $535 a week in 2015), she didn’t agree right away. She told Hahne she had one condition: that Mack could come on as an unpaid apprentice.

  Despite his reservations, Mack soon felt at home in Hahne’s small newspaper office in a red-brick storefront on the edge of Webster City’s small downtown.

  “The two of us put out the paper, a four-page tabloid,” Mack wrote in his unpublished account.

  We didn’t carry any wire stuff. Everything was local news and had to be written by one or the other of us. Sometimes we had a lucky windfall in the form of a report from the State Park Commission, or copious verbatim extracts from church bulletins which the local clergy wanted us to print. Generally speaking, we wrote every column that went into the paper, with my mother doing the lion’s share.