Memories

Fire at the Mill

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Some memories are of photographs and not the incident itself, but some feel to the rememberer like they are of a photo, with the details so clear and so accessible. There is one memory … I could count the rocks in the creek bed if I would just take the time.

My father was born 80 years ago this Saturday. If August 15, 1935, is known for anything, it is not the birth of my dad but for it being the date Will Rogers and Wiley Post died when Post crashed their airplane north of the Arctic Circle near Point Barrow, Alaska. (They may be the first celebrities to have perished in a plane crash.)
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We Miss You, Clawman Treefeller

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

I wish you could have known Matt Coleman. Many did, but not enough. There was not enough time. “Matt’s heart was so big, it surrounded him,” one of his colleagues wrote.

I am grateful that I happen to think this about so many people that I have met, those clauses like “You ought to know so-and-so,” or “You should have met my friend, X,” but I am frustrated that I have not said it out loud often enough to the people I thought this. Matt already knew most of my friends, anyway, and the one friend I introduced him to, well, Matt asked her out.

A person’s end should not be what the world knows of them, though, and four years ago today, August 11, 2011, my friend Matt Coleman was murdered.
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No Mystery

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

We are speaking of the summer of 1976, when I was a seven-year-old hidden from myself, a summer I remember for being the Bicentennial, for being sunny every single day, and for the work of Leslie McFarlane, who around that time had published a book revealing he was the author of my favorite books. That book landed with a thud that did not reverberate into my world: as far as I was concerned, “Franklin W. Dixon” and not Leslie McFarlane was my favorite writer, and The Hardy Boys were the older brothers I did not have.

Books 1 through 22 of The Hardy Boys series were written between 1927 and 1947 by a Canadian writer who was desperate for income, Leslie McFarlane, and even though Grosset & Dunlap only paid him $85 per book with no royalties, he discovered that this was $85 per book that he could count on as long as he kept typing. He wrote the first eight in just over two years, just as the Great Depression was consuming all it could.
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