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Episode 23—Tom Stanton on Key Moments, the Use of Timelines, and Starting His Own Newspaper
141 Plays9 years ago
Author Tom Stanton talks about his latest book "Terror in the City of Champions."
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Transcript
Introduction to the CNF Podcast
00:00:01
Speaker
Here we go again my friends, another episode of the hashtag CNF Podcast, where I speak with authors, reporters, writers, and filmmakers about creating works of non-fiction. Everything from the process of writing a book or a long article, to the influential books and inspirations that make whatever it is they do that special.
Episode 23 with Tom Stanton: Depression-era Detroit
00:00:22
Speaker
So with the latest episode of the podcast, we're dealing with episode 23 with Tom Stanton, author of Terror in the City of Champions, Murder, Baseball, and the Secret Society that shot Depression-era Detroit. So be sure to give the podcast a subscribe, share it with friends, and sign up for my email newsletter over at BrendanOmera.com. And without further ado, here's Tom Stanton.
Tom Stanton's Connection to Detroit
00:00:54
Speaker
you know, a lot of the work that you've done is very, like, Michigan, Detroit-centric. And I wonder, is it safe to say that you have, like, maybe what is the connection that you feel so deeply with Detroit and Michigan? Yeah, well, I've lived most of my life in the Detroit area. And I'm the, gosh, probably the fourth generation, fifth of the include my sons, who aren't in Michigan right now, to be in this area, so we go,
00:01:23
Speaker
go back to my great-grandfather, and I grew up with the stories of my father, who passed last year at 94. And he came from a large Polish Catholic family on the east side of Detroit. And when I was a kid, at the holidays, the Ansonuncles would all come to our home for the holiday celebration, and they'd reminisce.
00:01:49
Speaker
A lot of seeds for my stories were planted at that point. I know it sounds kind of absurd, but things were fond of when we're young, I think. For many of us, material that we've drawn over the years repeatedly, that has been the case for me.
The Challenges of Writing Nonfiction About Detroit
00:02:09
Speaker
It's kind of, in some ways, part of my niche. I know Detroit. I know Detroit sports history very well.
00:02:19
Speaker
And it's really unusual that I go outside of that. And the one exception was the Hank Aaron that I did with HarperCollins in 2004. But other than that, there's been a Detroit connection to all of the work. And it's just such an interesting story through the decades, Detroit, in terms of its rise and its fall and hopefully its rise again.
00:02:47
Speaker
You have everything here, darkness and lightness, just such a diverse, interesting cast of characters over the century, plus I've focused my work.
00:03:01
Speaker
Yeah, and it seems in a lot of ways that it's kind of like a writer's dream to have a city that has so much depth and character and those ebbs and flows in peaks and valleys. So is that another reason that maybe it's, well maybe have you ever been tempted to write about something else but you always just feel this gravitational pull towards basically your home city but also a city that just lends itself to such great narrative?
00:03:31
Speaker
observation. I guess I've never really viewed it that way because I do have a whole list of, you know, book ideas that I bounce around and a lot of them have nothing to do with Detroit, but it is, you know, perhaps it's telling that I do keep coming back to this subject matter. You don't usually hear about the books that an author is not done, but I mean I literally have a list of a couple dozen ideas that have nothing to do
00:04:02
Speaker
i'd love to get into those at some point a little bit later too i think i'd be kind of fun to dive into of a lot of other sports related baseball related this this one the latest one takes me a little different direction that i've uh...
From Journalism to Long-form Narrative
00:04:18
Speaker
the most part most of my narrative non-fiction has been baseball related and this certainly has a strong baseball story in it but it also has the crime story and so this was a little bit of a stretch for me
00:04:32
Speaker
an intentional stretch, wanting to do something that's a little bit outside of my comfort zone. And so that was a challenge. In what way was it out of your comfort zone? Well, in terms of book-length work, my background is journalistic. I've written everything journalism-wise in terms of subjects. I'm not originally a sports reporter.
00:05:02
Speaker
And so I've covered politics and government and police and law enforcement. But I've never done it in the book form. And so even though I've used as a journalist over the years the Freedom of Information Act repeatedly and obtained documents and studied them, never done it in book form. In this case, touring the city of champions is, as you know, a story that
00:05:29
Speaker
focuses on a secret society called the Black Legion. And so I was going through 900 plus pages of FBI files and hundreds of state police reports and court documents and transcripts. And I've done that kind of stuff before, certainly, in day-to-day journalism, but never in book form.
The Black Legion and Dayton Dean's Testimony
00:05:51
Speaker
And so trying to give shape to that was just a little bit of a different challenge.
00:05:57
Speaker
I think what I determined in the end is really, subject matter doesn't really matter. When you're writing a book, whether it's on sports or whether it's on a crew that's killing people, you're looking for the same things. You're looking for strong characters. You're looking for telling detail. You're looking for little bits of information that are going to reveal motivation or reveal words to make somebody human.
00:06:27
Speaker
And you're looking for events that are kind of crucial in the narrative. And I wonder what in reading like sort of the key figure for the Black Legion essentially becomes in a lot of ways this
00:06:43
Speaker
reluctant pawn Dayton Dean uh... he you know he had his he was always hot sort of constricted by the Legion to go out and commit these acts of murder and then he for one reason or another he serve can't pull the trigger can't place the bomb uh... throughout most throughout most of it and uh... you know without giving too much away in terms of his his path throughout the book you you kind of get a sense through him
00:07:12
Speaker
the the terror of the legion not only
00:07:16
Speaker
and impressed upon the city and some of the region at large, but also within its own membership, just the almost the terror that they're able to instill in the people that they sort of strong arm into their own fraternity is really well illustrated through his arc in the book. And I was wondering like, how did you come to him specifically as the one to kind of carry us through the Legion?
00:07:47
Speaker
I'm glad there was a lot of information on him, because he's an interesting character. But it's also the fact that there was a lot of information on him that allowed me to do it, because he ends up being the guy who talks. You're a member of the Black Legion, you're told repeatedly, you know, that only former Legion members are dead. Anytime you speak of our secret society, you know, your life is in danger, you do it under threat of death.
00:08:14
Speaker
And when the thing starts falling apart, he's the one who speaks up. And it's because of his testimony that people get sent away, including him. And so because he did talk, because he did interviews with the media back in the day, there was more material available on him than on anybody else.
00:08:38
Speaker
Fortunately, in his case, it's kind of an interesting character, and he's central to a lot of the crimes that get prosecuted. A whole lot of crimes did not get prosecuted, dozens of murders, and it's because people kept the secret, didn't talk, and I think it's also because there was a cover-up that there were a lot of political figures using the Legion to get votes, and if there had been a full investigation,
Family Influence on Writing
00:09:08
Speaker
You know, a lot of big names would have gone down. But Dayton Dean, at some point, didn't realize, even though he wasn't a very bright guy, and originally was into it, not so much out of fear, but because he embraced the mission and liked the excitement, realized that he was a pawn, that he was being used, that people were meddling with him when they assigned him various tasks. And so he just
00:09:37
Speaker
He fits into the story nicely. So how did you end up in 1934, 1935 era Detroit? Like, how did you come to the story and end up on that time period? You know, it really does trace to my childhood when my aunts and uncles would be sharing stories of their childhood. And I was an obsessive sports fan in the early 70s, I'm 10, 11, 12 years old.
00:10:03
Speaker
And we had very few successes to root for in Detroit at that time, sports-wise. The Tigers had won the World Series in 68, but I was seven years old. Didn't really remember much of that. And in 72, our Tiger team went into the playoffs against Oakland A's. And so that was kind of the highlight in terms of team success in Detroit during my childhood. But my uncles would tell at this time when they were 14, 15 years old, in my dad's case,
00:10:31
Speaker
and the Tigers won, you know, went to the World Series in 34, then won it in 35. A month later, the Lions win the enough title, and the Lions never won anything in my lifetime. And the Red Wings, you know, in the following spring, take the Stanley Cup. And at the same time, Joe Louis is the uncrowned, undefeated champion of boxing, uncrowned, because he, obviously, was African-American and had not been given a shot yet at the title.
00:11:00
Speaker
And so it just seems such a glorious time. And I grew up with that era, because in my case, probably in your case, in most sports fans' cases, when you're coming of age, the sports heroes you have are always going to hold a special place in your heart. And it was the same with my dad.
00:11:25
Speaker
When he's in his 90s, he might not remember what he had for breakfast that morning, but he could still recite the lineup of the 1935 Detroit Tigers, the TV he first cherished and grew up with, the one that included his hero, Charlie Geringer. And so I grew up with those names because my dad liked to reminisce, and I enjoyed hearing him reminisce. And I knew I would eventually write something about that time period, the challenge.
00:11:54
Speaker
as a writer is one of the challenges is writing about a period where none of the key figures is alive anymore. And so you don't have interviews you can do. You can do it with family members who are a generation or two removed, but often their stories aren't always reliable.
Timeless Themes in Historical Contexts
00:12:20
Speaker
They're good for adding bits of character
00:12:23
Speaker
pieces of personality, but in terms of actual confirmation of things, they don't always have that down. They often have family lore, but I knew I would be writing about that period at some point, and I have written about it, and it comes into play in other books. I've done The Final Season, which was my memoir of the last year at Tiger State, really a father-son story on my relationship with my dad.
00:12:52
Speaker
And they figure into that, and they figure into the follow-up book, The Road to Cooperstown, which was also another memoir. And so, you know, I knew there was a lot of material there. You have, you know, from a baseball standpoint, not just the four guys who would go into the Hall of Fame, Greenberg, or Cochrane, and Goose Gosselin, but just some really rich character. It's like Schoolboy Rowe, who just kind of set the nation on fire as he had a
00:13:22
Speaker
15-16 game winning streak in 19-34. And he and his girlfriend, Edna, future wife, become national celebrities for a while after he mentions her on the air on the Rudy Valley show. So there was just so much material there. And of course, it's taken place 34-35. Detroit was incredibly hard hit by the depression, 40% unemployment rate.
00:13:50
Speaker
We had some of the first bank closures, or we actually had a bank holiday, kept the banks from closing in 1933. You know, it's prohibitions coming to an end. It's just a really ripe time in terms of material.
00:14:05
Speaker
Yeah, and when you do this type of historical narrative nonfiction, I'm always intrigued about a lot of the themes and how they really translate into the future and how it's just, sometimes it just feels like, as an old history teacher once said to us in the class, he's like, times changes, technology changes, but people don't.
00:14:31
Speaker
And it was interesting how, sure this was in 1930s Detroit, but so much of the fear and themes and just the hope that so many of us will put in sports is just as a way to distract are so prescient to today's world. And I was wondering how much thought you, how present was that in your mind as you were writing this book that even though it took place over 80 years ago or so, that it was almost like
00:15:03
Speaker
2015 United States, Detroit era, just with different costumes. Yeah, it became, I thought, it became more prevalent as I was working out of the book because I was thinking, as I'm doing it, secret society has hate-motivated group, kind of like a clan of steroids, you know, more violent than a good collection. And then as I'm writing, as I'm researching, I'm thinking, well,
00:15:32
Speaker
We really don't have that same kind of thing in the numbers we're talking. I mean, just had tens of thousands of members in southeast Michigan. It was also flourishing in Ohio and Indiana. And so as I'm initially starting out, I'm thinking, yeah, we still have hate groups, but they're fortunately not nearly as dominant as they were in an earlier era. But as they dug deeper into it,
00:16:01
Speaker
It was startling to me how so many of the issues that we debate today were still at the forefront back then. I mean, one of the leaders of the Black Legion, when he's finally interviewed by an FBI agent, it's obvious that one of his big issues is the Second Amendment and what that means for individuals owning guns, because it was more restrictive back in that era. You need to do it.
00:16:28
Speaker
did apply for permits in Detroit, I'm not sure how, when other places, and you had to have people co-sign for you, preferably people of authority. And so that's one of the ways Mickey Cochran got his gun, the Tigers manager, Rebecca, his handgun, anyway, his shotgun's rifle's not such a big deal. But you have him spouting, this leader of the Black Legion, reading the Second Amendment to the FBI agent,
00:16:57
Speaker
I'm not sure who's already familiar with it. You have Black Legionnaires claiming that FDR is disregarding the Constitution, that he's violating the Constitution. So you see echoes of that in terms of how people have viewed Obama, some people. You have a whole debate over immigration. I mean, at its heart, the Black Legion is a white male Protestant organization
00:17:27
Speaker
And it's American-born folks are allowed in. And so they're against folks who have emigrated from, in this case, it tends to be Europe, tend to be against Catholics and Jews. And so, you know, it's a different group that immigration is about now, but it's still immigration. You have these black legionnaires
00:17:55
Speaker
referring to FDR as a socialist and people worrying about the direction of the country. I mean, it was coming a little bit out of the Great Depression at that stage, 34, 35, 33, I think was the worst year. So people have a lot of anxiety. They see their way of life changing, or at least temporarily. They've lost their factory jobs, many of them. As it turned out, a lot of the black legionnaires
00:18:24
Speaker
did not lose their jobs, probably because they were co-opted into the anti-union fight in the Detroit area, so they tended to have jobs in the factories and they kept their jobs or got them back quickly. So yeah, you do see echoes of other times, or at least I did, in ways that I didn't expect.
00:18:45
Speaker
Now in your extensive research for the book, what was the feeling as you were digging this stuff up? Because I imagine you just realized maybe the more you read, the more stuff keeps digging up and keeps coming to the surface.
Research and Historical Accuracy
00:19:04
Speaker
As someone researching and wanting to write the story about it, I imagine that there was a point
00:19:09
Speaker
several points where you're like man I can't believe what I'm finding and I wonder what that was like is you the research process and how you were processing all the stuff you were reading yeah it you know you start with the basic reporting of that was happening in the papers at the time there were three Detroit dailies and eventually the
00:19:34
Speaker
Well, the Black Legion story does go broader than that, but, you know, I relied first on the Detroit dailies, and then you try to find what court transcripts you can, and obviously that files and state police files, and then there are also archives. There was a historian in the 70s who did quite a bit of research on the Black Legion, never published anything before, and he had done some oral histories with figures while they were still alive, which was great.
00:20:02
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it can get overwhelming because you have thousands of news stories and you have to figure out who's exaggerating, who's not, and you can do that by comparing the stories from the same period and seeing what's getting repeated, what's not, and then you get a sense of which papers. I mean, there was a Hearst paper here at the time, the Detroit Times, and they sometimes tended to play a little looser with information
00:20:32
Speaker
And so you're sorting today, and it gets overwhelming, certainly, and you have to winnow it down. You have to focus it, you know, at the first writer to say that a lot of writing is about omission, you know, what you don't put in the story, because it's so easy to get cluttered. And even as it is, I suspect, you know, I have too much information in the book, possibly. I mean, it's difficult to know, but it's the version I have
00:21:20
Speaker
paths that don't necessarily intersect, like the sports in the Black Legion, but the way you braid it together just makes a really compelling 3D portrait of that era of Detroit. So, well, job well done. I don't think you have to worry about it being cluttered for sure, at least from my point of view. Oh, thank you. Yeah, so I mean, it's, you know, you're sorting through a lot of information and, you know, when you really dig deep into a story and you're researching it,
00:21:25
Speaker
at this point and I am pleased with it.
00:21:48
Speaker
the little things that, you know, the little aha moments. They're few and far between when you really get into it, but I guess one of the big ones for me was just seeing page after page and that guy documents, little notes that J. Edgar Hoover would put on reports, on letters, telling his staff how to respond to something or responding himself.
00:22:16
Speaker
indicating that, you know, we're not gonna investigate this. This is a, don't have authorization. And he was, he didn't want to look for authorization. He was avoiding investigating the Black Legion. And, you know, that really struck me because if he had, if he had really gone full force at it, a whole lot of people would have not died in my view. And so it was kind of a frustrating little
00:22:48
Speaker
little realization as you're going. Of course hindsight is 20-20, but that infuriated me as I dug deeper into the documents of realizing that lives could have been saved. Somebody's father wouldn't have died had somebody taken this investigation more seriously.
00:23:15
Speaker
So how did you organize this material before you got to the nitty gritty of trying to stitch together a narrative through all the stuff that you were able to dig up? Yeah. With a non-fiction narrative to some degree, you're going to be following a chronology. So I always, early on in the process, always
00:23:44
Speaker
come up with timelines and keep adding to a timeline until I pick out the key moments, the key scenes, the key crimes, the overlapping areas, looking for connections. I was hoping so much to find really strong connections between the sports and the Legion. And there were some, you know, certainly in the Detroit area of the Legion, there's tended to be baseball fans.
00:24:14
Speaker
a lot of baseball fans who planned the timing of some of their crimes around the Detroit Tigers schedule. If we're going to take this guy out and beat him, we might as well wait until after the game's done to do it. Of course, one of their famous murders, they used baseball, which was on everybody's mind, even though
00:24:35
Speaker
the City of Champions, and you have the various teams that win championships, and a lot of individuals who win championships. By far, it was the Tigers and Joe Lewis who were driving the conversation in Detroit. Everybody was talking about baseball, so. I was looking for those overlaps, but I do start with the timelines, and you just have a very involved filing system where, you know,
00:25:04
Speaker
literally boxes of file folders, individual characters, and specific crimes, and you just keep adding to those until you're able to flesh out the entire scene.
00:25:18
Speaker
I'm not sure if that really illustrates what you were asking. Oh yeah, definitely. Because I'm always interested in the process writers take.
Memoir Writing and Fact-checking Challenges
00:25:28
Speaker
Some people, Bronwyn Dickey, who wrote Pitbull, Battle Over an American Icon, who I spoke with a couple weeks ago.
00:25:39
Speaker
She, like you, just read so much stuff. She wasn't able to properly organize. She chose to use Evernote, a way to digitize it and then tag it and search it. And so that helped her organize all her notes and she was able to.
00:25:55
Speaker
you know, tackle her chapters at that point, and then I'm more of an analog person myself, so it's like hearing you say, like, you know, you've got these file boxes with, you know, papers and stuff. I think it's kind of interesting to see how certain minds process all this material, and then you see the finished product, and it's just like, oh wow, it's kind of neat to sort of reverse engineer it and see how it came to be. Yeah, for, I mean, I am a little bit old school on that. I mean, the, I would be,
00:26:25
Speaker
If I were gonna digitize everything, I would have to be scanning lots of microfilm and microfiche copies, because as you're going through it, you don't necessarily know what key little notation might be in a story that you're gonna wanna refer to later. So I tend to have file folders that are full of microfilmed copies, and those are often of poor quality, and I'm not sure that you could even scan them
00:26:54
Speaker
to have them without a whole lot of heartache later on trying to decipher and reorganize. So yeah, I am old school in terms of file folders and copies and that way the material's there when you go back that you can, you're not having to reinterpret every story as you go and kind of looking for tidbits. You don't know, I mean, until you really get into the guts of developing the story, you don't know really what key little detail
00:27:25
Speaker
you might suddenly discover that you need or that you're trying to confirm. For example, I mean, it's just a little minor thing, but dealing with nonfiction here, and so I take that, I take that, my mission seriously, it's nonfiction. I'm not making up things here, and I try to require that I have the same verification process that I have when I'm working on day-to-day journalism.
00:27:52
Speaker
So you want to be right, that's first and foremost. So little things like, at one point the FBI had sent out agents in different cities to some addresses in various cities. And so I had, you know, they didn't, it would dead-end it in Detroit. They sent somebody out to go to this address because there was a return envelope
00:28:18
Speaker
You know, that we noticed that this guy's post office box and go see who lives there. And so in the report it's saying this person lives here and they appear to have nothing to do with the Black Legion. So looking at that address, this is nowhere in the FBI file, but the address sounds familiar to me. So I stuck it back through my files because I had also created like an address file, you know, a cross-referencing things.
00:28:42
Speaker
And I discovered, you know, the FBI didn't. I discovered it was one of the key black legionaries who lived at this address. And that, I mean, that seems like such a minor little thing in the scheme of a hundred thousand word book. And it is, but it sure made me feel good to be able to add a sentence in there that, you know, the FBI was either fooled or the local agent, you know, was
00:29:09
Speaker
uh... ignored the the evidence uh... but either way they've missed it and it's just it's not a key moment of the book but you know just uh... still but i can cover tiny little things like that uh... factual way uh... it picture
00:29:27
Speaker
And I wonder, too, with a book like this and so much of the seed of it came from memories that your fathers and grandfathers had bestowed upon you and told you about this era.
00:29:44
Speaker
I wonder, before your father passed away, how much you talked to him about the book you were working on that became Terror in the City of Champions, and what those conversations were like, and even though your dad isn't in the book, how much did your father factor into it? Well, certainly in the sports aspect, he was very helpful in terms of capturing the excitement of the era.
00:30:15
Speaker
Growing up, I would hear the stories, and I'd have him repeat them for me later on. You pick his mind and hope to get little treasures out. But I always remember the stories of the celebrations that would happen after the Tigers won the World Series or taking the kids, taking pots into the, cooking pots into the street and banging them with wooden spoons to make noise.
00:30:45
Speaker
or getting to listen to the 35 World Series games in schools. Somebody would bring in a radio and went to a parochial school and the sisters would allow the whole school to listen to the Tigers. And so that's where he heard that World Series be won as the heroes of Mickey Cochran and Gosselin scoring in the final inning.
00:31:15
Speaker
It brought it to life. It personalized it. He would talk about the days when Joe Louis was fighting how you could walk down the sidewalks of most neighborhoods in Detroit, and you could hear the sounds of, the radio sounds of that fight wafting into the street from the open windows on a summer night. As you just walked down the street, it would be coming from
00:31:44
Speaker
numerous homes so you could just kind of hear the fight as you, even if you weren't in front of a radio yourself. And so, yeah, we talked about it. He didn't know so much about the Black Legion. A whole lot of people seemed to have forgotten about the Black Legion, but when it was exposed, it created a national hysteria because it was a secret society and suddenly, you know, wives and
00:32:11
Speaker
mothers and daughters are learning that the men in their lives were members and have had no idea. Or you learn that your neighbor's a member and you're wondering, well, who else? Are you here that the police force is honeycombed with members? So who do you trust? And so it created a hysteria and it spawned a couple movies, including one with Humphrey Bogart, relatively early in his career.
00:32:38
Speaker
I believe there was a novel that had spawned, and a play, and works of art, and it had international coverage. Back in the day, we obviously didn't have television, so you didn't have the true police stories that we now have on TV, but you did have the detective magazines, probably 12, 13, 14 different ones, true detective kind of things, true crimes. And the Black Legion was a cover story on many of them,
00:33:07
Speaker
everybody affiliated with uh... it uh... a lot of course it paid money to uh... go you know about a story goes through from there their viewpoint so you don't have my dad didn't personally know much about black region that was one of my own culture used to almost a lot closer to tell a story of thinking it picked up by the park region but uh... discovered fact that it was undercover police officers
00:33:36
Speaker
So you've written a bunch of books, and I wonder if there was a single one great, but what book was maybe the most challenging for you to write? You know, they all have different kinds of challenges. The final season, the Tiger Stadium memoir, is always going to have a
00:34:00
Speaker
special place in my heart. I did write a book that I don't always include prior to that. I co-authored a kind of a reference book called Elton John from A to Z with another obsessive Elton fan. But I really start my account with the final season. It kind of took me in a different direction. And so the, you know, one of the challenges of my first two books were Memoir, and the three cents that have been
00:34:29
Speaker
journalistic in nature and set in decades past. Memoir, you know, one of the challenges is, you know, fact-checking memories. You know, that's, you know, you discover some family story that you've heard. You know, that doesn't really match up timeframe-wise to what was happening somewhere else. So, you know, family stories get glossed over. You also get that when you're doing journalism, too.
00:35:00
Speaker
you know, somebody will be insistent that something happened. And when I was working in the Hank Aaron book, for example, with that one, lots of people are still alive who played with Hank Aaron. So you do a lot of interviews of folks who are looking back on things that had happened 30 years ago when I was working in the book. And they tended, just for one example, to
00:35:26
Speaker
you know every time they were remembering a hanker at home run, they were remembering it in the most heroic terms, you know, ninth inning, pace is loaded, game on the line, and you start fact-checking that thing, and you come to find out, oh no, that game actually was seven to one, the home run occurred in the fifth inning, and so, you know, that was kind of a different kind of challenge. With the Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth book,
00:35:56
Speaker
You know, I kind of have the opposite challenge. You didn't have anybody alive when I was working on the book who had played with Ty Cobb during his Major League days, and only a couple who were still alive at that point who had played with Babe Ruth. And you've undoubtedly interviewed folks, famous folks, and they tend to, you know, when your decades removed from Babe Ben,
00:36:24
Speaker
They tend to have the glossy stories that they tell. You know, they've burnished them over the years and penetrating those, getting beyond them, it can't be difficult. And so you'll encounter when you're doing your research in the time of A-book.
Entrepreneurship in Journalism
00:36:40
Speaker
You know, stories that everybody's, that have been repeated so many times that they're no longer questioned. There's a lot of that stuff with Cobb and Ruth.
00:36:53
Speaker
in Cobb's case, you know, just kind of being portrayed as the Satan of baseball, which really wasn't how he was viewed in his era. As Charles Lierchen, Charles Lierchen recently wrote, you know, very compellingly about that, trying to change how Cobb is viewed and challenging a lot of the stereotypes. I challenged some of those in the book I had done.
00:37:21
Speaker
I guess it really went off tangent there. But it's different challenges. It's not that one particular book project stands out. It's just they all have different aspects of it. But I think doing the first one is always, you learn as you go. So the first one is really a learning experience. I think probably the final season was most challenging.
00:37:46
Speaker
Well that one probably in a lot of ways just cut to the bone in a way that others don't especially you know it being a father-son story but also seeing you know your iconic Tiger Stadium demolished. I'm sure like what was what was that like for you to need to be there for that entire I believe was the 99 season?
00:38:09
Speaker
right that at that that's where you have that final season and then and then having to see the the place demolished me what was you know what was that like for you you know what the uh... i mean uh... the ninety-nine season was the finality of it and it was it worked for the start of the book that there is really too much history of the the place uh... you know uh... baseball what was taken place of the field by drive story but it did ended up being something much more personal as we were
00:38:39
Speaker
Getting into it, the real powerful story was my relationship with my father, how four generations of our family had shared the game there, how this was one of the last places we could connect since the old family home. It disappeared from the landscape like a lot of them in Detroit and other big cities. And so it became a very personal story. And so it was actually as I'm going through the season, it's a process of
00:39:07
Speaker
revelation as I'm coming to realize it's not just about the ballpark and the heroes that I had seen there, but you know it's about my father aging and you know the fact that he wasn't always going to be with me and I come to that realization at some point. The ballpark actually wasn't knocked down for quite a while, it just stood vacant for a while so we had like a
00:39:36
Speaker
I don't know, probably a 10-year reprieve where, you know, the ballpark was vacant and empty and still standing at the corner and kind of eventually demolished. And even after it was demolished, up until just a couple weeks ago, four or five years, there was a group of folks, volunteers, called the Navenfield Grounds Crew at Tiger Stadium. First up, it was called Navenfield.
00:40:06
Speaker
These guys would keep that diamond, just keep the infield diamond going. And people would come out every Sunday to play baseball at the place now, just in the last week or two. The field itself has been erased. It's going to be replaced with fake grass. It'll have a ball field for kids to the police athletic league. A lot of programming on it.
00:40:35
Speaker
very controversial here so it resonates even all these years later it works we're coming within a couple years it's going to be twenty years after the fact since the tiger stadium was uh... last used for major league game and it's it's still in the news here uh... it resonates in that way so when you were growing up uh... what did you want to be when you you wanted to be a baseball player me too
00:41:03
Speaker
I think a lot of us can relate to that, and then at some point you realize you're, I don't know how, it may have taken you longer to realize maybe you're more talented than I am. At some point, if you're not gonna make it, you come to that realization, and it seemed to me the next best thing would be to be a sports reporter, and as I actually got into journalism, it wasn't sports originally, and I found I liked other aspects of journalism, political reporting, government reporting,
00:41:32
Speaker
And so it kind of took me away. And I, at 22 years old with some other friends, I started a weekly newspaper thinking what would happen if it succeeded. And if it succeeded, it grew into a small group of newspapers in northeast Michigan, I'm sorry, in southeast Michigan, northeast of Detroit. So I'm sorry, when you were 22, you and some friends started your own paper?
00:42:00
Speaker
Yeah, we started a little weekly newspaper, and through hard work and diligence and good reporting, it succeeded. And it grew into a small group. We kept expanding. We grew into a small group of five weekly newspapers, Northeast of Detroit, in the suburbs. And after 16 years, we sold them.
00:42:26
Speaker
the papers that coincide, that sale coincided with the last year at Tiger Stadium. And so it allowed me to... Was that in the book, in the final season? Yeah. It was, shoot, I came around, I'm sorry, I forgot that. No, no, no, no, it's probably only a sentence or two in passing of the book. But it took place in the middle of the Tiger season. The deal was finally consummated.
00:42:56
Speaker
So you're a newspaper conglomerate, gets sold, and the final season the Tigers are playing at your famed Tiger Stadium. Wow. Talk about a watershed year for you. It was a big one, yes. Meanwhile, my wife is thinking of having a midlife crisis, I think, going to all 81 home games. I've never done that before, but it's kind of
00:43:22
Speaker
realizing I had to do it that year if I were ever going to go to every game at Tiger Stadium as I vowed I would do when I was a kid and much smarter than my dad, who wouldn't allow, wouldn't buy the full season passes, because we couldn't afford it, but nonetheless, you know, it was a childhood dream. So yeah, we ended up selling the papers, which gave me some freedom to pursue
00:43:49
Speaker
book writing full-time and I did that for quite a while. I wasn't intending to become a journalism professor, but I just had reached that stage and coincidentally was where I wanted to give back and coincidentally had visited a campus where I had friends teaching and they had a teaching position open, full-time journalism position. It was at the alma mater of one of my mentors who had just died, Neil Sein,
00:44:20
Speaker
who was a top editor at the Free Press in Detroit and a very well-known figure in journalism in our region. And I just decided it would be nice to try to repay him by encouraging a generation of younger journalists at his alma mater. So my productivity book-wise has slowed down. I think everybody gets into
00:44:44
Speaker
Not everybody, many people, writers, when they get into teaching, they're going to have a whole lot of time to write. That doesn't work out that way, if you're doing your job anyway. Yeah, kind of like talking a little more about your starting that newspaper and how it grew. I mean, just what was, oh, so put me in, temporally speaking, what was the year that you started the first paper?
00:45:13
Speaker
Yeah, well, if I'm being totally honest, we started one that, in December of 1982, we tried to start an arts and entertainment paper in Blue Collar, McComb County during the recession. And that lasted about three issues, and we were running out of money because we had all borrowed money from family, which decided, well, we better go back to doing what we know, which was, you know, we had all worked for local community newspapers at that point.
00:45:42
Speaker
And so we switched over to a local community paper. And it was a free circulation delivered by mail to everybody's home. But it wasn't a shopper in that our news coverage was better than the paid papers in the area. It was serious news coverage. And over time, it just really took off. And I give your all to it. And you're in your early 20s.
00:46:11
Speaker
You can work those 80, 90 hour weeks and do it for a couple years. And the success followed. Some of it was luck, some of it was being smart about what we did, some of it was the fact that the market where we started the paper started to boom, you know, a lot of growth. It was a high growth in the 1980s.
00:46:37
Speaker
And so just a lot of things came together, and it blossomed. And then when we sold, it was because somebody was trying to get a larger strategy, media strategy. They were trying to encircle Detroit with suburban papers. And so if we had waited till now, I'm sure I wouldn't be able to unload the papers. It was difficult to sell newspapers now.
00:47:06
Speaker
at the right time, and I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it while we were doing it, but one of the things that I was never able to totally manage was the realization as the paper succeeded, just the very nature of them required that I become more of a manager of people, and it took me further away from what I really enjoyed, which was writing.
00:47:32
Speaker
So as the enterprise grows and you hire more reporters and staff in other areas, you're no longer the reporter who's going out on assignment and enjoying that challenge. You're now in charge of a lot of other people and the day-to-day of managing other people. That really wasn't what I wanted to do. And so I'm sure there are entrepreneurs who can manage that more successfully than I did, but in my case,
00:48:01
Speaker
the success of the publication, which I appreciated financially because it allowed me to take care of my family, took me away from what I actually enjoyed.
Starting a Newspaper: Motivation and Challenge
00:48:11
Speaker
So being able to sell and being able to write books for pretty much full time for almost, I guess, eight, nine years was a great reward.
00:48:21
Speaker
So what compelled you at age 22 to even start this venture? That's usually the time that most people are going to cut their teeth at smaller papers or bigger papers and be working for someone and doing it. But I wonder what was your headspace like to just to eschew that all together and start your own paper?
00:48:45
Speaker
Yeah, it probably was that I hadn't given it a lot of thought, to be honest. You know, I was at that point feeling kind of invincible, and I never really gave much thought to, you know, what if this fails? You know, I end up owing my future mother-in-law whatever it was I borrowed that she so graciously put toward the project.
00:49:13
Speaker
You know, I never really gave some thought, well, how am I ever going to repay her back if this doesn't work? But I had already, I didn't, I was one of those kids who couldn't afford to go away to college and didn't have the kind of grades that would give me a scholarship anywhere. And so I ended up working my way through college. And so my first newspaper job was with a weekly when I was 18 years old and I was working, you know,
00:49:42
Speaker
you know, for those three or four years before I started my own paper and I had another weekly in the same area. And so it really was, you know, it was kind of a, I already knew what I was doing that way, but in terms of having a whole lot of thought process into it, it was probably a whole lot less thought process than I probably should have put into it. And I was very fortunate that it worked out
00:50:09
Speaker
in some ways. I mean, that's if I'm being totally honest about it. I don't think I had some glaring genius that
00:50:22
Speaker
That's probably why it succeeded so well because you didn't overthink it and you just kind of plunged in and I think a lot of the best entrepreneurs, there's some planning involved but a lot of it is they just get over the lizard brain fear that will rationalize yourself from doing something like that and you just kind of dove in to the deep end and saw what happened. If it failed, it failed but it clearly succeeded so it's like I think
00:50:49
Speaker
There's a big lesson to be learned in just how you approach that. It's just sometimes you just got to dive in with your whole body and just do it. Yeah, I mean this is a very good point because I look now in my mid-50s and occasionally think, oh, why don't I start this or start that?
00:51:11
Speaker
But you have more to lose when you're later in life or when your kids are growing up and adults don't.
Life Lessons and Values
00:51:20
Speaker
But you have more that you're putting at risk. And I know there are lots of entrepreneurs who do that all throughout their lives. But in my case, I think it was partly the product of just being young and feeling rather invincible
00:51:40
Speaker
probably overly competent. So I wonder, what might be the greatest piece of advice that your father ever gave you? Oh, wow. You know, my dad was not money motivated. Most of his career worked for the government, usually doing like darkroom, tech work, sometimes photography.
00:52:09
Speaker
And just money was never a, you know, he had a good retirement from the government, but money was never a driving force for him. And, you know, he always emphasized probably the same advice that a lot of other parents give, you know, do something with your life that you're gonna enjoy because you're gonna be doing it for a long time. Don't do something just in pursuit of the dollar because you won't be happy with that.
00:52:40
Speaker
And, you know, he, for the most part, actually, he wasn't an advice giver. You know, he would give advice if you asked, but it was more a modeling his behavior. He was just always gave people the benefit of the doubt, and that's something I've tried to do. He would tell me that when he encountered somebody who would mistreat him, you know, somebody who, like, he never met, or, you know, maybe
00:53:09
Speaker
just somebody who was snappy or something in some kind of a business setting. We just figured that perhaps they were just coming off something horrible in their life that maybe that morning that they had a fight with somebody they loved or that maybe their parent was in the hospital or spouse. So it was obvious to give somebody a benefit of a doubt.
00:53:38
Speaker
you know, assume the best about people. And it's not always easy to live by, but there's something that I learned from them that I try to model.
Literary Influences and Career Inspiration
00:53:48
Speaker
And when you were going down this path of journalism, being a writer, what were maybe three to five just influential books that had a big impact on you and made you want to continue down that path? And books that you revisited and reread to see, that's how it's done. That's how I sharpen the saw by reading this.
00:54:16
Speaker
Yeah, you know, I have a soft spot in my heart for memoir, and one of the ones, one of the writers I came upon early in my career was Willie Morris, who, you know, may not be all that well-known. He, you know, the first book I came upon of his is not all that well-known. There's a book of essays called Terrain's at the Heart,
00:54:45
Speaker
and other essays at home. And Willie Morris was a Southern Boy Road Scholar, University of Mississippi. And he wrote, you know, this isn't the work I'd want to remember him for, but if people aren't familiar with his work, they may know him for a little piece he wrote that became a movie called My Dog Skip.
00:55:15
Speaker
with the kid from Malcolm in the middle. But I mean, that's not the work I would point to. But he wrote a memoir called Good Old Boy, growing up in the South, which really touched me. I mean, it's difficult when you look at, for me, you look back, trying to figure out why certain works touch you at a given moment in your life.
00:55:41
Speaker
and maybe they wouldn't later. But that one, I go back to Willie Morris' books. I tend not to reread entire books, but I will go back for inspiration and read a chapter here or there. Baseball-wise, I have very fond memories of reading Kinsella's Shoeless Joe, which became the basis for Field of Dreams. There was a book when my wife and I were
00:56:11
Speaker
dating that we, first time I'd ever done this, we read a book together, you know, we read your early romantic years, you're reading a book to one another, taking turns, and it was, you know, it was just such a, I know for some people it can tell us stuff is a little too romantic and maybe even sentimental, but at the stage in life when I was reading it, I totally loved it, and so that's another one I go back to.
00:56:40
Speaker
Over time, you know, I go back to some of the classics from the 20s and 30s because I had an uncle who tried to make me into a novelist by giving me, he was a failed writer, I guess, and for decades, every Christmas, he would give me his used books that he wanted me to read. You know, we're not talking one or two, I'm talking hundreds over the years. This is probably gonna be a,
00:57:09
Speaker
a book I remember I write at some point, like a reading list he had for me. And finally, in middle age, I started going back and reading them. And that tended to be the Hemingway and that Scott Fitzgerald and Caldwell. But his favorite writer was Thomas Wolfe, the first one, McCombard Angel. And actually, I think there's a movie out right now about his relationship with his agent Maxwell Perkins.
00:57:38
Speaker
I don't know if the movie's going to go ahead and see it. But so, Thomas Wolfe has very lush writing, and I'll occasionally read from Lacombe or an Angel. And in more recent years, so Kimsella for baseball, but I enjoy oral histories too, so Lawrence Ritter's Glory of Their Times is one that I draw on.
00:58:06
Speaker
uh... for inspiration to roll hopes that the butchering uh... press box uh... interviews with uh... sports writers from about the right enjoy pat carter rey very cars players club uh... to buy a small uh... old-school uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh...
00:58:32
Speaker
It's great to hear the reading list that inspires other writers. I think it really, it's kind of the books you have on your bookshelf and especially maybe the five to 10 books that if the house were burning down and you had a backpack to throw a few books in, what would those books be? I think those tell a lot about who the person is and what they value in their taste and sensibility. So I love hearing these books that inspire you to do what you do.
00:59:03
Speaker
It is interesting because I think it's, you know, so much of it I think is when you read it too and what else is happening in your room. It's difficult to quantify that, but it's kind of that stage when you're first discovering certain writers and discovering writers for yourself. You know, it's one thing that people are recommending them, but when you come upon a writer that
00:59:32
Speaker
that your friends aren't talking about and that your teachers aren't talking about. And it may not be that the person is historically gonna be the most, have a place in the pantheon, but you discover the person at a certain point in your life and it means something to you. And Willie Morris is a very well-respected writer, but I feel like he's probably mine more than
01:00:00
Speaker
Is there anybody else's I know? I don't know if that makes sense even. Yeah, I feel like I came to Kurt Vonnegut like that. Like I had heard the name, but I was at a Walden bookstores maybe in 1999 or 2000 and I was just going up to the bookshelf looking for a book to read and I just, the name popped out and I just ran, I kind of closed my eyes, put my hand out, picked out a book and it was Slaughterhouse Five.
01:00:26
Speaker
And so that was my indoctrination to Vonnegut and I've since read all his books. I have a kinship with his style. I often consider him kind of like the first blogger because a lot of his pages or a lot of his sections are these almost 200 word snippets all broken up.
01:00:49
Speaker
So, yeah, I see what you mean. It's like, you know, you come to somebody on your own and so you kind of have ownership over there and then you have that connection. You mentioned Vonnegut, and this is totally off a target here, but the way I found my agent was, and I've been with the same agent, Philip Spitzer, since day one, but I came to my agent as a result of an essay I read
01:01:19
Speaker
but i have to reduce uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh... uh
01:01:48
Speaker
And I just reminded me, because I found my agent, based on reading one of Andre Dubuque's father's essays, once he was in a wheelchair meditation, from a movable chair, about going to Fenway Park with his agent. It was really the impetus for me to write the guide. But, yeah, bonding is such a...
01:02:14
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. There's definitely a lot of stuff we can still go on, but we're up. We've been talking for an hour. Your vocal cords have hung in beautifully. And I want to maybe be respectful of your time and let you go.
Promoting the Latest Book and Future Prospects
01:02:32
Speaker
But I wonder, lastly, with your latest book, I'll say the name again, Terror in the City of Champions, what has been
01:02:43
Speaker
the experience of promoting it so far and where do you see it going and what other work do you have to do for the remainder of the summer? Yeah, well I have a lot of appearances and you start with the bookstore appearances trying to drive people into to purchase it or various daily papers have been exerting parts of it and
01:03:08
Speaker
i think it could turn out to be uh... appearances and you know the two festivals of the following uh... you know so there are lots and lots of purposes of my schedule uh... it's uh... entertaining to have people come out i've had uh... couple people come out no family members yet uh... black legion first but you know uh... i've uh... made contact with the family members of uh... some victims uh... it's uh...
01:03:38
Speaker
It's interesting, I have, you know, one of the concerns you have, even though this organization is, you know, supposedly put out a commission in the 30s, you know, they do have family members who may not appreciate having their, you know, ancestors' names dredged up in this kind of story, so you're always in the back of your mind wondering if you're going to have some kind of harsh encounter with somebody, but, you know, I don't know where it's going, and it's been requested by
01:04:07
Speaker
a couple of people who are looking at it possibly for movie option, but I don't know, you know, how that goes. Yeah, well that's gotta be exciting though. All the elements are there. For the action, there's a lot of tension and drama in it. Like we said much earlier, it's kind of, you know, it takes place 80 years ago, but it feels very modern in a lot of ways. Yeah, yeah.
01:04:37
Speaker
You always hope you get that kind of a payday. Of course, I can keep doing your books. Yeah, that's right. And has it been encouraging to see the turnout? I mean, the picture I saw on Facebook for Barnes & Noble, the appearance you did, it may have been your first reading or your first signing. You had a human-sized height stack of books. I mean, that's got to be great to see that. Yeah, it is. It is nice.
01:05:06
Speaker
had a book out and I've not been out promoting a new book probably in nine years. And so, you know, you always wonder if, you know, the people who read you last time, whether they're still, still going to care about what you're doing this many years later. You know, so much has changed the way we promote books in that time. You know, you know, when I did tie in the babe,
01:05:31
Speaker
you know there was no face book yeah there's a uh... the kind of social media which we're doing was uh... basically delos
01:05:42
Speaker
Yeah, now podcasts have taken off and this is a way to do like a digital book tour. You can do a lot of this stuff and then it just stays there. I try to keep the interviews I do as evergreen as possible so anyone can listen to it maybe in a year or two and there's nothing that necessarily dates it so people can learn about your book for years to come if they ever stumble upon it, upon the podcast I mean.
01:06:11
Speaker
Thank you for taking the time to talk with me. I've really enjoyed it. Fantastic. One last thing. Where can people find you online and find the book and see you online, engage with you, and then find them by the book? Sure.
01:06:33
Speaker
For a while we were having availability issues because the publisher underestimated demand and we were out for a while, but it looks like we've been replenished everywhere, so you should be able to order us from any of the usual outlets, but you can find me personally. My name, TomStanton.com, at my website. There are links there to my Facebook presence, which I'm very active on.
01:07:00
Speaker
Twitter less frequently, but there's a link there to that as well. I love corresponding with people, and for people to reach out, I always respond. I look forward to that by interacting with other people.
01:07:14
Speaker
Well, fantastic. Well, thanks again for carving out some time of your morning here, Tom.
Conclusion and Future Conversations
01:07:19
Speaker
Best of success with the book. I loved it and I encourage everyone to go out and buy it and buy a copy for their friends and so forth. I appreciate that, Brandon. I look forward to talking with you again. All right. Sounds great, Tom. Take care. You too. Bye.