 Welcome to another show of Celebrate Life. My name is Gary DeCarlas and I'm your host today. Celebrate Life believes firmly that all people have a story to tell and every life is worth celebrating. I'd like to welcome back today our guest Todd Lockwood. We had a wonderful conversation a couple of months ago and we need to continue that today. So welcome back Todd. Thank you Gary. So there's two things I know in particular that we wanted to touch on. One is the Broadigan Library and that story is quite amazing. And then there's a story about a woman named Melissa Fisher. Marcella. Marcella, thank you. Marcella Fisher. So start where you'd like to start. Well you know I wanted to just start by saying you know this look back that we have been doing here you know it's got me realizing what a lucky guy I am you know to have had such a life and it continues. You like that. I feel very lucky. My guardian angel has definitely been looking out for me for a long time. That's great. And you know with the good luck has come you know there's been some tragedy as well as we talked about before my you know I lost my youngest brother in an accident in Burlington and back in 1987 and actually two years later I lost my sister in a United Airlines crash in Sioux City, Iowa. It was a big DC-10 that crash landed out there. And so you know what these events have done to me is energized me. You know it makes me want to do those things that you think of hey there's a cool idea but then you never do it. And these events these losses have really supercharged me in a way and put a fire under me you know and so when I come up with an idea now I immediately try to act on it. Well I would say that's the theme that I picked up from our first interview that you have an idea and you move on it most people don't. They just let them lie and because of that I think your life has been incredible and many people have benefited from it. So when I was in college a friend turned me on to Richard Baratigan. He was a counterculture author sort of of the beat generation lived in California wrote poetry and these short novels that were just great fun to read and they were really about my life I felt, my generation. They were very very I felt very connected to his work. And he wrote ten novels during his life and one of those was provocatively titled The Abortion and in this story he plays a librarian. Many of his novels were written in first person which made them all the more fun to read and so he's this hippie librarian in this weird little library in San Francisco and the interesting thing about this library is that it only accepted unpublished books. Nothing published was allowed in the place and so people would bring in their life stories written in three ring binders or whatever and they'd get to pick any shelf they wanted to put the book on to and they'd sign it into a big ledger and everything. So Baratigan it was clear he had thought about this idea for a while before writing it out in this novel and it was so compelling. I just thought wow that is so great. That's such a cool idea. When is somebody going to do that? Somebody's got to build this library. So I would read that novel once a year. It had a special spot on my shelf in my living room. I would read it once a year. You could read it in a weekend and I read it every year for 15 years. And finally when I got to the 15th year it changed from when is somebody going to do this to when am I going to do this? Wow. And it was actually losing my brother that pushed me. It's one of the things that got me in the state of mind to do it. And then something else happened is that I went to see the movie Field of Dreams just by chance and I'm sitting there in that movie and we're about halfway into it and I'm just in a trance and I'm like oh my God. This magic baseball field that this guy was building on his farm out in Iowa that was the Broadigan Library as far as I was concerned. That was the Magic Library. So the moment my feet hit the sidewalk outside the theater I just knew exactly what I had to do to get this thing rolling and see it. Become a real place. What year was that? That would have been in 1989. 1989. Yeah. And so literally the next day I got on the phone. I started calling up people I know around Burlington to see if they would be interested in serving on a board, a library board for this unique place. All ten people I asked said yes. All of them, boom. Interesting. The first guy I asked, Jack Hurley, he was a restaurateur in the area. He had created the Black Rose Cafe in Winooski, sneakers in Winooski. And then later, this is with a partner, a friend of his that he was doing these with, Ken Russock. They also did the Daily Planet. Right. Yes. Anyway, Jack was classic. As soon as I described the thing and a couple of sentences he said, I'm in. That's all he said, I'm in. And thank you, Jack. And I went on to the next call. So anyway. So you got your board. Your board. And we had a really interesting challenge on our hands. We were taking a fictional idea and making it into a real place. That functioned. That functioned. Right. Now it happened that Broadigan's fictional version of the library didn't actually have any readers. People never came in to read the books. It was really all about just having a, it was the idea of the place that he thought would make it appealing to writers. You know, the having a repository for one copy of your work that's been on your shelf forever. You know, you haven't been able to get it published. So here's a place to actually afford to sort of live, you know, and have sort of a life, you know. Well, we thought, oh no, let's take this to the next level. We want to actually have people come in and browse through the collection and see if there's anything interesting in there. And that's ultimately what happened after we opened in April of 1990. It took about six months to get this all figured out and get it all, you know, ready to go. We rented a space. So it was actually used, it had been a used bookstore on lower college street. Right. I remember. And we had, you know, volunteer librarians filling in. The whole operation was volunteer. There was no money changing hands. You know, it was all volunteer thing. Wow. And so we had close to 100 people in Burlington were involved in the place in some capacity, mostly as librarians. Yeah. And so being a librarian there was the coolest thing because you'd be sitting there, there might be nobody walking in for the first couple hours of your shift. And then all of a sudden, you know, a couple would walk in who had just flown to Burlington from Dallas or from L.A. just to spend some time in the LeBrotigan Library. They'd read about it in the news and everything. The media, by the way, went, the media went crazy with this national media. And, you know, they're, oh my gosh. I mean, it's starting with, I was on all things considered on NPR, almost like the day we opened or the day after we opened. Unbelievable. And, you know, the New York Times picked it up immediately. I was on the front cover of the Wall Street Journal. Really? It just, you know, it just started snowballing. And so people are hearing about it. In fact, there was a point where I was traveling a bit. Some of the traveling was to do some of these interviews. I did an interview on a CBS News program in their studios in Washington, D.C. I had to fly down there for that. But I realized that, you know, there was about a one in four chance that the person I would be sitting next to on the airplane would have already heard of the Burotigan Library. I would ask him, have you ever heard of something called the Burotigan Library? You know, they'd go, oh yeah, I just read an article about that. Oh my goodness, Todd. That's the place that takes unpublished books, right? Oh my God. Now, how did you get manuscripts in there? With the help of the media. With the help of the media. So part of that was to say bring your... Well, what we did is we had a standard application form that the writer would fill in. Everything was accepted, by the way. And that was one of the important tenets of Burotigan's fictional library was there was no judging going on, no judging at all. It was all about the writer coming up with something they felt was appropriate to put in this public collection. And so the media was helping put the word out. Whenever I'd get interviewed, which was many, many times, I would always ask them to include or let me include at the end of the interview, just send $2 to P.O. Box 512 in Burlington, Vermont, and we'll send you a writer's form because there's certain information we felt we needed. We wanted to be able to easily get in touch with the author if we needed to. No, just to be transparent, I have a manuscript in that library. That's right. That's right. Didn't you also give them a certificate? Oh yes. Yes. Yeah, after we get the... Yeah, we'd usually arrive in manuscript form. Some people had actually gotten their books self-published and it was already bound and everything. So that was great. We took those two, assuming they were not commercially published. And now if someone... Another little rule that we came up with was if a manuscript gets published after we get it, it's allowed to stay in the Brodigan Collection. And that happened a few times. Interesting. But it's important to remember that that wasn't our mission. We weren't trying to create opportunities for writers. We were simply providing this magical place for their manuscript to live forever after. Exactly. Yeah. It wasn't about creating or publishing opportunities. I guess you could have had publishing agents when the library got big enough, maybe you'd have publishing agents coming up to Burlington. I was wondering if that happened. And searching through the collection for something they might be interested in publishing. And that may have happened a few times where we might not have even been aware. They might have been just being a member of the public in there. Now there was one case that was really interesting. We're a guy who... This was on a weekday when we normally weren't open. And this guy was a lawyer in LA, a young lawyer in LA who, I guess in his 40s maybe, who decided to drop out for a while and get back to his roots. And he had been a Baratigan fan. So he, with a backpack and no car or anything, he just was hitchhiking around the country, he visited every place referred to in Baratigan's book Trout Fishing in America, which is sort of a really interesting metaphorical look at the U.S. back in the early 60s. And so this guy was visiting all these places. Well, Vermont is mentioned in the book, so he ended up in Burlington. He's walking down College Street with a backpack and comes upon our sign. We had a sign up on the sidewalk. You know, the Baratigan Library and underneath it says, A Very Public Library. I love it. It was the classic formal looking library sign. We went to lengths to get, let's take this, let's take ourselves seriously here. So anyway, so that guy, he made his way, he built a little path that you would follow off the sidewalk through a garden area and the building was set back a bit from the streets and our door was around the side. So he went back there and of course found the door, he found the place was closed and he's peering through the glass door for the longest time and must have been thinking, wait a minute now, there's something, I'm seeing something here and I've got to figure out what it is and then he realized he had read the abortion and he said, oh my God, somebody has created the library in the abortion. He figured it out. And the way we know this is because the Vanguard Press, which existed back then, a predecessor to Seven Days, they had an office in a building right next door, a brick house right next door and Pamela Poulston worked there and she was on our board by the way and so her office window looked out onto the entrance of the library and she saw the guy standing there and finally she goes out and says, can I help you? And so she unlocked the door for him, said, go on in, help yourself, just when you leave, just be sure the door locks itself and enjoy. You must have felt this was your sauna. Yeah, exactly. There were so many interesting little things like that. So did you fundraise for this to keep it operational? Yeah, we did some fundraising. We even had things were donated to the place like we found some guy in the Boston area donated his whole collection of original first edition copies of all of Brodygan's works. Many of them signed and everything. He donated that whole thing to the library. So it kept going for about six years and then, oh no, let me actually, let me back up a little bit because there's a great little story here that happened after we'd been opened for about a year or year and a half. We got a letter from the Bumbershoot Book Fair which is held every year in Seattle at the time it was the largest book fair in the country and it's held on the world's fairgrounds there. And so in their letter they were asking us would you consider transporting the library, the contents of the library to Seattle for one week and we'll set it up in a similar space here at Bumbershoot and we'd love to have Mr. Lockwood come out as well and be a tour guide and show people around and help tell the story. And we're going to pay for everything by the way. They were paying for all of it and so we said, well yeah, sure, we'll do that. So we put a sign on our door saying, sorry, out of town for the moment. And it went out there. So here I am, first day with the exhibit all set up and everything and this middle-aged guy walks up to me, big handshake, oh you must be Todd Lockwood. And I go, yeah. And he goes, well I'm Bill Concella. I'm my jaw drop. Bill Concella is the guy that wrote the novel that Field of Dreams is based on. Oh come on. Oh my God. And I said to him, you have no idea how incredible it is that you are standing here right now. Oh my God. And he said, oh he says, oh that's nothing. And he said, were it not for Richard Brodigan, I would not have written Shoeless Joe, which was the novel he wrote that Field of Dreams came out of. Whoa. So this guy was a major Brodigan fan himself. And I had no idea that Field of Dreams and Brodigan were connected in any way, but they were absolutely connected. Synchronicity involved in this is phenomenal. So he says, we were like talking and I'm just like thinking this is unbelievable. And this is when I feel like there's a, well maybe Brodigan himself who had died years before this, maybe he was pulling some strings and making this situation happen. It was just this. Did you get a picture of you too? We didn't happen to, but he said, I'm being interviewed on this big Seattle radio station this afternoon. He said, why don't you come along? We'll both be on. I said, sure, great, let's do it. So we got on that radio station and we're telling the city of Seattle about our meeting at the library exhibit. And the story behind it? Yeah, the story behind it. That is wonderful. So there were so many, so many things like this. Just these wonderful little situations. It goes back to that I'm going to do something about this. If you didn't do something about it would have never happened. Now one thing that we had to do, I came up with the idea we've got to call it the Brodigan Library. It's just got to be what it's going to be called. Well we had to get permission to use the Brodigan name and Richard Brodigan only had one surviving relative at that point, his daughter, Ianthe Brodigan who lives out in California. We had to get permission from her. So I wrote her a really nice letter and explained what we're doing and we're recreating the library and the abortion and we're doing it in Burlington, Vermont, blah, blah, blah. And I didn't hear anything. I think about three months went by and I'm like, oh boy, now what are we going to do? We're going to have to... Come up with another name or something. Up with another name or something. And then, boom, there's a letter. A letter arrives. No problem. Yeah, and she said, you know I apologize for taking so long to get back to you but I really needed to think about this because she's had, over the years, she's had lots of offers to do movies based on Brodigan's books and other things and 90% of them are fly by night situations that would have done, if they did anything they would have done a very mediocre job at representing her father's work. So she said, there's no question in my mind that you're the right person to do this. So when we got to April for our opening we actually flew her out from California and she put the first book on the shelf for us here in Burlington. A little ceremony. That's wonderful. And she was a wonderful person. I have stayed in touch over the years and when I'm out there I usually will stop by and visit she and her husband and kind of get caught up on things. Now the library has moved. Yeah, so the library, so we were in full active mode at our original location for six years and then we started to, it started getting more difficult to get volunteers to fill in all the time slots we needed and everything and so we eventually made the decision to move it up to the Fletcher and the Fletcher created a mezzanine space up there away from the other books so that it's sort of, we kind of recreated the atmosphere that was in the College Street, lower College Street location. By the way, one of the tenants in our bylaws is that no two chairs in the library are allowed to match. So there's all this different, kind of fun, different furniture in the place so we did the same thing. In fact, I think we moved most of those same chairs were moved up to the Fletcher and set up there. And so it didn't, at that point it wasn't accepting any new works anymore. We were up to about 320 volumes and by the way, this is another little thing that our board had to sort of think tank and come up with was, you know, in Brodigan's fictional library there was no categorization or anything going on. The writer would just get to put the, there were a bunch of different shelves and the writer would get to pick one, you know, and it didn't really matter where it was located because nobody was coming in. We looked at the Dewey Decimal System and realized, well you know what, that's not going to work either the Dewey separates fiction and non-fiction and a lot of the works that we were getting were in the gray area between fiction and non-fiction. So we developed our own classification system that using 13 subject categories, the last of which was all the rest, it was called. So we had a catch all there in case it didn't fit into one of the other ones. And it just gave, we wanted it to be convenient for, you know, these people that are flying in from out of town to peruse the collection, they could quickly zoom in to a category that they knew they'd probably be interested in. And so we ended up naming it the mayonnaise system. That's right, I remember that. Yeah, and that is derived from the fact that in Baratigan's book, Trout Fishing in America, the very last chapter is called the mayonnaise chapter. And in it he mentions always wanting to have ended a book with the word mayonnaise. And indeed he does, because that chapter is the last one and the very last word is mayonnaise. So a friend of my brother Herbs actually designed a wonderful mayonnaise jar logo that became sort of the official logo for the library. And it's with Richards on it instead of Helmins, you know. But we had actual jars of Helmins on the shelves, 32 ounce jars as bookends, separating the different categories of books, you know. And so that turned out to be kind of a genius decision because the books were all eight and a half by 11 inch manuscripts that were hardcover bound. And most of those binders, those bindings were all black, you know. So it just gave the collection kind of a monochromatic look. It looked like a research library or something, you know. Did you bind books? Yeah, we had our own binder. Yeah, we made the investment in some binding equipment. And so we would bind those manuscripts. And they weren't allowed to go out of the place, you know. They had to be read in the library. And we would print a standard cover sheet. So the first page you would see would be the standardized sheet with information about the author. And the author would also supply us with a synopsis that would be on that cover sheet. So somebody perusing could just open up to that first page, read the synopsis. Well, that's interesting. I think I'm going to take this aside and poke through it a bit, you know. So where is my manuscript today? Well, we were at the Fletcher for 10 years. They kept it there for 10 years. They weren't accepting new works. It wasn't too complicated. But they were, of course, people were coming in and poking through stuff still. And then, you know, the collection went into storage for about two years. And then in my basement. And then, meanwhile, I was trying to find a new home for the place, not locally. We were thinking, okay, let's think big here. And sure enough, we found a group interested in Vancouver, Washington. Quite interested, actually. And the guy that was really sort of the central figure there is a Brodygan scholar. He's probably the most knowledgeable person on Richard Brodygan alive, you know. And, in fact, Brodygan's daughter was telling me it's a little spooky to be around this guy for her because he knows things about their father. That she doesn't even know. My goodness. But that's where it's been ever since. It's still out there. It's interestingly, it's housed in a local historical museum that's in a former Carnegie Library. And the Fletcher here in Burlington is also a Carnegie Library. And the two buildings look very similar. Except, of course, the Burlington one has that nice new addition on it. But the original older part is almost exactly the same as the one in Vancouver. Wow. So they did another opening event and stuff out there. Of course, I went out to that and spoke and everything. They had a lot of, over the years that it's been there since 2010, they have had a lot of students at Washington State University have been involved in it. Interesting. And so they're in various capacities. And they've digitized a lot of the collection too. So you can go on to brodyganlibrary.org now and you can actually poke through the collection online now. We didn't have that capability back in the 90s because the internet was still in its infancy. And we didn't have anybody on our board that had those skills as well to create all that and get it online and so forth. Unbelievable. That is an amazing story. There were so many interesting little things. You know, there are more than we have time to talk about really. But yeah, it was really an interesting period. You know, just fascinating. Bravo to you, Todd, again, for thought, action. Thank you. And then you never know what's going to happen when you move forward on something. Right, right, right. It's the wonder of life. So, yeah, so a couple of, I think it was, you know, a couple of months after my sister died in a plane crash, I, you know, I was going through the beginning stages of the loss, you know, the beginning stages of dealing with it psychologically. And I said to myself, you know, I had to just, you know, just change the channel and do something else. So I'm listening to NPR. And on comes a story about a woman in Colorado by the name of Marcella Fisher. Lives in a little town in eastern Colorado. She has six kids, a husband who is disabled, and she's dreamed her whole life of being a country songwriter. And the piece on NPR was focusing on, you know, on something called a song shark, which are basically people that they put these ads in the back of magazine saying, we'll set your words to music and make your song a big hit, you know. And she, you know, saw one of these listings and said, oh my gosh, you know, she'd already been writing lots and lots of, she wasn't a musician, but she was writing lyrics, country, you know, dozens and dozens of songs, writing lyrics for them. And nothing had gotten published yet. She had none of them had been sent to music yet. And so she jumped at this, you know. And of course they kept, you know, writing her back and saying, we just need another $200 and then we'll be able to take it to the next level, you know. And another $400 and we'll be in great shape, you know. And by the time she realized that this was a scam, she had, you know, put almost $1,000 of her savings into it, you know, and she wasn't somebody that could afford that kind of loss, you know. And so I heard this on all things considered and I'm just going, man, you know, that really, that makes the music business sound like a bunch of creeps, you know, that somebody would take advantage of this woman like that. So I, you know, I thought about it and I ended up writing a letter to NPR and I said, you know, I'm back here in Burlington, Vermont. It happens that I own a big recording studio here. And we'd like to make good on Marcella Fisher's dream, you know. So if you can, you know, forward my letter onto her, you know, maybe something will come of this, you know. So sure enough, you know, I hear back from Marcella, she's just like, wow, you know, gosh, this is very exciting. And I said, well, yeah, we're going to make, we're going to make one really good recording for you of one song, you know, and you picked a song and we're going to pull together a first-class band back here, a six-piece, you know, country and western band. And we've got players that will, some of the best players in Vermont will be playing on this thing, you know. So we, you know, we started, I started asking these musicians, would you like to be part of this project? And they said, absolutely, totally, yeah, totally want to do this, you know. And so we recorded the rhythm section and used Little Joyce Cooper, the vocalist in Vermont, she sang the lead vocal. But the intention was that we were going to give Marcella a crack at actually seeing the lead vocal once we got the rhythm stuff down. And so what I did is I called, I called a pretty good recording studio in the Denver area and said, explain what we were doing, you know, and would you, you know, would you help us out on this? There's no money involved here. You know, this is just a good will thing, you know. And they said, yes. Absolutely, you know, we want to be part of it, you know. So Marcella, it was no problem at all. She would just live an hour away, you know. So she was able to get herself there. And she didn't, you know, she wasn't, she was an OK singer, but a fantastic songwriter. I mean, so the song is called Thank You Jesus for Just That Man. Wow. I mean, you don't get any more real than that, you know. And so I sent a multi-track tape to the studio in Denver that we had already premixed the rhythm section on a couple of tracks on that tape. And we also had on a separate track Little Joyce Cooper's Scratch Vocal. And so they had lots of extra tracks to record Marcella on. And so she took, you know, they did like four or five takes and with each one she got a little bit better at it. You know, I gave, I had sent her a cassette ahead of time so she could practice here the melody. Because the guys back here actually wrote this, wrote the music too. They wrote the melody for this song. So she wrote the lyrics. She wrote the lyrics. Your crew wrote the music. Wrote the music and arranged it. And arranged it. And put the arranging and everything. Did she like it? You know, oh, she was floored. You know, we had Gordon Stone on pedal steel, you know, and Jeff Salisbury on drums and, you know, Mark Ransom on bass. I mean, it was just a superb assemblage of flares, you know. So she, you know, we managed to get a half decent vocal out of Marcella. They sent the tape back. We did a final mix of it. And then I, you know, to make it even sound better, we put Joanne, little Joyce Cooper was put in there, but doing harmonies. Two different harmony parts behind Marcella, you know, which really made it sound totally professional, you know. So that was great, you know. And I said to Marcella, you know, this is not going to make you, may not make you a dime, you know, but you're going to enjoy hearing your lyrics. Your lyrics coming through in this way for the first time. That's pretty exciting stuff, you know. So, you know, I had a friend, after we got to that point, you know, we started thinking about, okay, how can we get this thing out there, out into the world, you know. And my, when my sister passed away and united a plane crash, united did this thing where they pulled middle management people out of their Chicago headquarters and assigned each one of them to a different family. These were all families who had lost somebody in the plane crash. And there was a woman at their Chicago headquarters who was assigned to our family. And we had a special phone number. If we called that number, before she even answered, we didn't know that it was a member of our family, you know, calling, you know. So I called her up and I said, hey, it had been a while, you know, it had been a, I think actually it had been close to a year since all that was going on. And I said, you know, it's Todd Lockwood. I don't know if you remember me, but I explained the project and I said, by any chance do you know anybody at United who works in the on air music area, you know, and she said, oh yeah, there in the office right down the hall from me, you know. So I said, well, I'm going to send you a copy of the final recording on a real, you know, real to real. And maybe you could run it by them and see if they might be able to work it in somehow, you know. Well, sure enough, three months later, it appears in the in-flight magazine, the listing under the country channel, Marcella Fisher, you know, thank you Jesus for just that man, you know. Oh my goodness. And it was on every United aircraft for two months on the country channel. Oh my gosh. So that was pretty cool. What did Marcella think about that? She was floored, just floored, you know. And then she said go get her too. So she had some friends in the military and she contacted them. We were in, the U.S. was in Iraq at that point in the Iraq war and so she managed to get through to the Armed Forces Radio Network and said I've got this recording I've done of a song that I think the troops might really like, you know. And sure enough, boom, it's playing over all the bases in Iraq, all the U.S. bases. We're hearing thank you Jesus for just that man several times a day, you know. Wow. Really, really cool, really cool. What's happened to her? Have you kept in touch? We did for a few years after that. You know, I've sort of, it's been a long time now. I'm pretty sure that she's still around. I think she would probably be, you know, somewhere around 80 years old now, you know. But a very sweet, sweet person, you know. You made her dreams come true. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, it was really, really an interesting one that just sort of had legs, you know. Todd, you're a dream maker. You are. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, I just feel compelled to do stuff like this, you know. And here I was sitting on this beautiful recording studio and it wasn't, we weren't booked, you know, seven days a week. We had time to, I could invest time in a project like that, and it didn't cost anything for me to do that. Right, right. So why not? Right, that's beautiful. Like a recording like that, does it ever turn into a disc? No, no, no. I actually was digging through my archives the other day and found the master tape to that project. I don't even have a machine to play it right now, but I'm going to get that master copied to a format that I can post online, you know, because it would be fun to hear it again and, you know. It'd be fun to play it on this show. Yeah, yeah, it would be. It would be. Yeah, yeah. I'm going to see. You can do that again. Yeah, I think I may have to go to a, there's a mastering lab that I've used in Portland, or Portland, Maine rather, that I think, I know can do it. You know, they can make that transfer for me. There'd be nobody around here that would have a machine to do it. But yeah, we could make that happen. That's great. It's been a delight having you on the show. Really great to be back, Gary. Thank you. Really great. Thank you.