 It was a little boy sitting on Welcome to Going Deeper. My name is Marcy Sclove and today my guest is Bruce Watson. Bruce is one of the recipients for the upcoming 2019 SAMI Awards. You are getting a centennial award which made me think of all these jokes like, haha you're 100. That kind of thing. It's not funny. Which is not funny. Bruce is a prolific writer. He has written four amazing non-fiction books and has an online magazine called The Attic which we will be talking about. So welcome. Thank you. Thank you. And congratulations. It's kind of nice to finally be, you know, given some recognition in your own town where I'm thinking about the Amherst Bullets and Pieces that you did for so many years and how you've really... Well I used to get a lot of recognition and I wrote 28 years and I would be walking downtown with my little children when they were little and I got a lot of people stop me on the street. So that was wonderful. Thank you Amherst and Northampton later. So I got a lot of recognition. But this is for a different, the Sammy Snot for that is for something else. So what did they tell you it was for? They told me it was about time. No, they told me that I, it was no coincidence, a year and a half ago they approached me with their 100th anniversary coming up, this is the Jones Library, of to write a 100th anniversary history of the Jones Library. And I initially thought, History Library, what am I going to write about crime, waves of overdue fees and the danger of mold, but in fact I thought about how much the Jones had meant to me and I've been here now for 30 years and when I first got here it was that old Jones Library that many people remember where you could just get lost in the labyrinth. It was wonderful and I just fell in love with the place and that's continued over the years and I've used it like when my children were young it was the place where you went for a break and story hour and later I was as a freelance writer I would be there almost every day writing and I thought well why not and I'm glad I did because I found by going upstairs into their special collections and all the archives and treasures they have there not just about for Austin Dickinson but about themselves that it's a fascinating place with a very interesting history. And now there are all sorts of histories of libraries. Susan Arlene has written a history of the library book and some others. We're also sort of starting to come to the realization that these libraries are these institutions that are holding our society together. They are the embodiment of the best in American life. Free information, sharing, people who are willing to help you, not to mention open public spaces for whoever needs that. So I tried to incorporate all of that into my book on the Jones Library which is coming out in a few weeks when I think it'll be available at the Sam's. Oh, that's great. It's also making me think about what this moment is in libraries because it's a big transitional time with all different kinds of information and how to kind of incorporate all that into the old space. Yeah, I got to trace all that. I mean it starts out, you know, this library is unique. Everybody seems to think, as I did when I first came here, oh that was somebody's house and isn't it nice? It never was a house. Wow. It was built to look like a house. That was the idea behind it that was really different than most other libraries. They didn't want a place where people just came and went. Got their books and left. They wanted, as one trustee said, a place where, a hearth where mother emmeres welcomes her children. I love that. And so from the beginning it was designed as a place like that with a lot of fireplaces and rugs, old rugs, and it has that hominess and that sort of set the tone that it's continued for ever since. Yeah. Good. Enough about the library though because I want to hear more about you. I wanted to start with the online magazine that you have. I obviously just looked at it. Didn't know about it before I was doing this interview. And what I'm so excited about is its tone and how positive and interesting and sometimes very funny, so many different aspects of life but not the drudgery negative political quagmire that we're in right now. Well, it goes back to a little before the last election, believe it or not. I was flying to Iowa to speak and something about moving, something about entering the heartland I suppose made me think about what was about to happen. And even though a lot of us didn't think the election would turn out as it did, it seemed to me that the ugliness of that election, which was not confined just to one man or one party, the overall ugliness of the election had made us such a strident country that the history that I used to write for Smithsonian and American Heritage was all but gone. The idea that it was America can do no wrong, no America can do no right, and in between there's this vast history of culture, literature, lore, poets, humorists and some politicians who have really created what I think is the spirit of the country and they were not getting any attention and I thought, well, I don't know what's going to happen but I'm going to start a website. I'd never done that before. So I did this and that and it started in January 2017 and ever since, now it has, because that's more than two years, it has more than a hundred articles, each one about 800 words in different categories. There's a category of history, there's a category of arts and literature, there's a category of women, humor, and because I travel as much as I possibly can, there's a category called Attic on the Road and so you can go through and just browse, you can see a new one every week, there's a thing called I hear America singing where I just started that, but where I pick one of my favorite songs, put a link to the video, another category called the Attic Window, which, because I can't do this alone, you can click on it and you go through the window and you're at a New York Times article or a museum exhibit and the tone finally came to be called True Stories for a Kinder Cooler America and that I think is what we need. I do too. I mean I'm happy to, I'm fairly political as everybody knows and I have my strong opinions, but there are no politics in the Attic, I will not allow it and I'm the only writer so it's easy to not allow it. So this week's was on, oh I can't even remember, and last week's, last week was on the Nana Ice Classic and Ice Lottery and this week's was on Ida Tarbell the Muckraker, I've done articles on the artist Jacob Lawrence or Jasper Johns, the artist Edna St. Vincent Malek, Kerouac, WB Du Bois, Langston Hughes, the Attic on the Road has gone, I've been around lately since I started the Attic, I've been to the Grand Coulee Dam and Cadillac Ranch in Texas and Harper's Ferry and so there's just an embarrassment of my own riches so to speak there on someone. Yeah, so that one that I read this week, maybe it's last week's, but the one about, first it was the Happiest Cities and then it was... Oh those were lists, I decided everybody likes lists these days. But where's the the photographs from all over Attic on the Road, did you take all those photographs? If it's an Attic on the Road piece like at the Grand Coulee Dam or Harper's Ferry, those I took with a little phone. But the web being what it is and the Attic being not in the crosshairs of any copyright, I sort of feel like I can use a photo from somewhere and if someone wants to tell me to take it down I will but. So the photos are generally not mine, but for the explicit travel pieces Cadillac Ranch I took those photos. Okay, okay, well I love it and I think people should go to it and we're going to put up the URL, it's the Attic... Dot space. So I'm in the middle of reading Freedom Summer. We own our own copy, but I had some library copies here. Wow. Well that's, that describes a story. I hope we can get to that. This is a wow too. It is a wow. Yeah. I've been lucky over the years. I'm basically more a storyteller than a writer. I look for a story. I've tried to be a fiction writer. And I was failed miserably. I wrote a lot, but I found you can tell, you can find, you don't have to make anything up in history too if you find the right stories. And Freedom Summer, the story of 1964 that many people thought they knew. I even thought I knew it. The three murders and wasn't that, you know, a tragedy and it's still a turning point in the civil rights movement. But the story was really the day after those murders, which took place on the first day of Freedom Summer when 700 college students had gone to Mississippi to help register voters and things. And the murders were clearly done to scare them away. And the story was that they stayed. And the story is the rest of the summer when for seven weeks no one even knew what happened to the man. They figured they'd disappeared, but I mean, they had disappeared. They figured they were gone, but nobody was certain. And they haunted the whole summer. And the whole nation paid attention to Mississippi because of that. And the inspiration that I found, and I think readers find in this story of people really trying to make a difference and putting their lives literally their lives on the line to do it is remarkable. And I was lucky enough to find local people and volunteers. They're mostly still alive. Who told me their stories of terror, fear, restless nights, but also of getting to know a culture they'd never known and surviving and coming back with what we could only call PTSD now. And it is indeed a remarkable story. I felt privileged to tell it. Yeah, I'm just curious about the logistics. Like how many interviews, so it says in the back of the book. Think about 50. 50 interviews and all of the details that are fully footnoted and there's a long bibliography. Do you do all that research yourself? Do you hire? Yeah, I don't have Steve Ambrose. I don't have people. I did, when I wrote a book on sacraments, any guy came forward and did some preliminary research for me. But other than that, I've always done it and preferred to do it. If I can, if I was doing a World War II, I probably wouldn't. But you have a finger on it on the pulse if you are doing it yourself. Right. It becomes a little obsessive, I'll admit. And then there's also, by the way, a whole trove of letters, both in a wonderful book called Letters from Mississippi. And then also in various archives around the country, in Mississippi and in Wisconsin, and the University of Wisconsin. And I looked through as many of those as I possibly could, too. The letters were just so heartfelt. Yeah. So where are you from? Where were you born? Where are you from? I was born, I think. I should say this in the attic, probably, because it's American as apple pie. I was born in Peoria, Illinois. Peoria, where they used to say, will it play in Peoria? But I didn't grow up there. I grew up in Southern California. Okay. Orange County, which is also about as American as apple pie, about as awesome as Disneyland. Right. Okay. So I was trying to figure out how that... Do you have a sense of how your early life influenced or informed this writing and the breadth of your interests? I will credit my mother, who in another book I wrote about light in the history of light, that I hope we may get a chance to talk about. I actually dedicated it to her. These other books I dedicated to teachers or to volunteers, but I dedicated that to her because she was, as I say in the dedication, interested in everything. She was a school teacher, a public school teacher. She raised four of us on her own. After a divorce. And there was nothing that you could bring in that she wouldn't be interested in. She would take me out at night to see the stars. She taught everything from elementary up into middle school. And in middle school she taught English, journalism, math and art. She was a real Renaissance woman. So I think that that interest and her love of books came through somehow. Yeah. So that's a good segue to the book about light. Go ahead and talk about that. Well, my most recent book was a book called Light, A Radiant History from Creation to the Quantum Age. I wanted to call it light, I wanted to call it eternal, a biography of light, because that's what it is. It's a biography of light. And it traces, this was way out of my league. I know, it's so science-y. Well, it could have been just science-y. I discovered when I thought I got the idea from reading an Einstein biography, I wonder what have anyone ever done a history of light that it had been done, but almost always by physicists. And so they were primarily, there was a history of optics. Well, not being a physicist, and interested as well in the literary aspects, I just thought, well, let's do this from how my mother would do it, interested in everything. So it starts with creation myths. I was reading Joseph Campbell and that type of creation myth. Where is light? And then it goes to scripture. What did the Hindu scriptures say? Beautiful, beautiful, hymns to light in the Rig Veda. Everybody knows, of course, Genesis and let there be light and Buddhist light, et cetera, moving on chronologically into Greeks, and now you start to get into science. Greeks and what a light actually is, and then the whole way that Quran treats light, and then the Islamic scientists, and if you're still with me, folks, moving on into some philosophy, and finally into everything from art history and the major artists of light, which I narrowed, I could have, every artist is an artist of light, but I picked Rembrandt, Caravaggio, and Turner, and then the Impressionists. And finally, with Newton, and then on into the 20th century, we come to the mastery of light, and with physics and relativity, and the quantum light that we're using on our quantum optics that we're using on every screen item, everything we do, making this an age of light. I'm exhausted just talking about it. Yeah, it's a lot. Anyway, it was so much fun. So much fun to do. I hope I made it comprehensible in all different ways. How long did that book take you to write? About two years. And what happens to you when you're in between projects? I go nuts. I wonder, yeah. Everything I say, I wonder if anybody's written a book about cups. Everything becomes a possibility until I can narrow it down. I'm glad to have the attic now because if I think of something that seems like, oh, I could spend it. I'm interested in telling that story. I can do it right away. I don't have to sell it. Just do it. I enjoy it. It's up there, and then I can move on. And maybe one of those 800 word things will turn into another book project at some point. They all have been, most of them have been books by somebody else. Yeah. So you reached over for Bread and Roses. It's still my favorite book. It was, it's not my first book, which was about erector sets. And we missed that one, didn't we? And that was sort of a foot in the door. Somebody saw an article, an agent saw an article in Smithsonian and said, I think that'd be a book. And I thought, well, let's try it. Just try it. An agent came to you and said, this could be a book. That's the dream, isn't it? Oh, that is the dream. So you don't turn your back on that dream. So I said, sure, give it a go. So I wrote up a proposal. I wrote it in the Jones Library, by the way. And they sold it, and I wrote it, and I hope I did a good job. But that opened the door to more, and they must have been rather surprised when, for my next book, I proposed doing a story on a knock-down, drag-out, bloody, famous, labor strike in Lawrence in 1912, as soon as the bread and roses strike. And it remains my favorite, just because it's the most amazing story. The story, it should be a movie. I'm surprised it hasn't been, because it unfolded like a novel from Dickens. I didn't have to, not only didn't I have to make anything out, but I didn't have to compress time or expand it. Every week there was something. There was a thread, there was a walk-out and the fire hoses and all that. And then the chaos. And then an organizer came to town. And then they charged him with planning dynamite, which turned out to be a complete fabrication. And then, in the most famous incident, the family sent their children out of town to families in New York and in Vermont to get out of harm's way. For safety, yeah. And that got a lot of publicity. And then there was a woman killed, and then there was congressional hearings and a murder trial at the end. It was stunning. Wow. And a story where it was so much fun to tell and it had not been told. There hadn't been a book. And how did you come upon the subject? Well, I worked. I was an elementary teacher during the time, elementary school teacher, during the time that I was writing novels and back in the 80s. And the last place I worked was Lawrence. Okay. Wow. And there was a bilingual by then because I'd been in the Peace Corps in Costa Rica and got a job teaching in a bilingual classroom. And Lawrence, I was teaching on the south end of town. Most people know Lawrence as the place they drive by on 495 when they see those mills. But I didn't see them that much until one day I went into town and I was just, I'm from the West Coast. I'd never seen a mill town and this is the mill town. And they're all there still and they're a thousand or 2,000 feet long in some cases and there's six stories high and you just know that town has a story to tell. So I heard about the strike, heard about things like that and thought about it later. Wow. There's a really beautiful scene in a film called Pride. You should check out that film. It's about this strike in Wales. Oh, I do know that movie. Yeah. And in London, there were a group of gays who wanted to be in solidarity and there's this beautiful scene where the workers have, you know, a gathering. The gay people come to the gathering. They're all a little afraid of them and all this kind of stuff. But they sing that song. They sing the song, Bread and Roses. And it's so moving. It's so beautiful. Judy Collins's most famous version of it. Yeah. But there's also a movie called Bread and Roses with Adrian Brophy. Is that how you say his name? And it's about a strike and even though it has this name, it's not about this strike. It's about a generous strike in a service people strike in LA in the early 2000s. It's a good movie. But at the very end, he gives up and he talks about the origins of the phrase in 1912 in Wales. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so just briefly, we can't leave out Sacco and Vincetti. No. That would be not good. Well, Sacco and Vincetti sort of emerged as a sequel to Bread and Roses. It was the next book. It came along very quickly. At the very end of Bread and Roses as I was researching, I came across, you know, I look everywhere I can and there was an overlap there. Sacco had actually been, as a shoe worker from Italy, he had actually gone to Lawrence during the strike and seen people speak and helped raise money for the cause. So that drew me to a book on them and then, of course, in that case, I couldn't say there were no books on Sacco and Vincetti. There were like 60 books on Sacco and Vincetti. Wow. But what I was able to do, I got thoroughly involved in it. There hadn't been one in a long time and it was sort of, were they guilty, were they innocent? For those who don't know, Sacco and Vincetti were two Italian immigrants and anarchists, pro-client, proud anarchists who were accused almost a hundred years ago now, a hundred years ago next year of a payroll robbery murder, brutal gunning down in Braintree, Massachusetts. And it led to a trial in which they were convicted despite all sorts of doubt and seven years of appeal during which time they became the most famous men in the world, I am convinced. Wow. There were marches on the day that they were to be executed and finally were. There were marches in every capital in the world, Johannesburg, Tokyo, Sydney, all over Europe, not so much in America, curiously. Sure. That's some. And so, all of the literature on it had devolved into were they guilty, were they innocent, were they guilty, and there is reason where you can argue both sides. My book, I decided, I'm not going to say what I think, let the reader decide. I'd have a hard time reading it and thinking they were completely, that they were, that they were totally guilty. I mean, there's just all, so, so much doubt. But it was also interesting because I speak some Italian and I was able to read their letters in Italian, which had not been used very often. And I found the letters, I was going back and forth, back and forth to the Boston Public Library, where there's stacks and stacks of letters by them and by their lawyers and using a lot of stuff that they hadn't, that hadn't been used before in spite of all these books. And so, I had, again, this is not an inspiring story other than the nobility of the people who fought for them. There were some many older socialite women who befriended them, became like second mothers to them when they were in jail. Wow. There was a lawyer, their second lawyer, who had no, everything to lose by taking the case and the appeals, and he did. Of course, it has a rather sad ending, but it was a remarkable story. Yeah. Wow. And word on the streets, you have a new book you're working on. Well, sort of, I hadn't heard it on the street yet. Yeah, yeah. New York Times, I heard it first, but then I heard it on the streets. Yeah, yeah. Well, somebody should put it in the attic. Yes. And I'm finishing it right now, and it's a, coming out, I hope next year, from, it's a young adult book, and I was asked to write it as a young adult book. And it's about race being such a hot button issue now, and I'm sure forever as it should be. Yeah. We are opening up and turning over all sorts of rocks, and discovering on Freedom Summer was one of those. Sure, yeah. But I mean, many people were shocked to read what Mississippi was like in 1964. They were very careful to talk about all the progress that Mississippi made. But still, we are, we are in that sort of mood, and I wanted to, not whitewash anything, no pun intended, but to call attention to the fact that that there was, there have been over the years people who have fought for racial equality, even when it wasn't popular. So my book is on a group of anthropologists. Margaret Mead is the most famous, but at the center of it is her teacher, a man named Franz Boaz, who basically was the founder of anthropology in America. He came from Germany. He started anthropology at Columbia. All of his students within 40 years were all over America teaching his, his paradigms, his teaching, which was basically the scientific racism of the time, which statistically, quote, unquote, proved white superiority, proved that the primitive peoples, quote, unquote, and the savages, quote, unquote, were never going to mountain anything. They didn't have anything worth studying. That was the opposite of everything Boaz and his students believed. And they waged quite a heroic battle in print, in classrooms, and in public schools to restore the dignity of all people. And so it's a, it won't make you feel great about racism in America. It certainly will not erase that or change anything, but it does show that it has not necessarily just been on one side. In the process, I read a really good book called A History of White People by now Irwin Painter, the historian at Princeton, and she just goes through scathing. It's hard to read. All the history of racism, all your favorites, Emerson, Jefferson, of course, all these others and just the racist statements, but there's one chapter called Franz Boaz Dissentor. And she just says exactly what I'm saying that, yeah, he wasn't perfect, but he did this. He waged this, but he didn't know because he waged this battle and people should know about it. Oh, that's great. So that is pretty inspiring given the age group also. Yeah. I've never written for that age group. Yeah. So how does that work? Like do you have to kind of be careful of your vocabulary? Yeah. And, yeah, and just shorter and more anecdotal, more stories, really. And it's hard with anthropology because that's not an easy discipline to, under any circumstances, to bring to even to high school level. Exactly. And so it is, I'm not going deeply into anthropology. Right. It's more of a social activist study. That's great. All right. Well, I would like to remind everyone to please come to the Sammy Awards. They're on April 25th, 6 p.m., I think. It's a converse hall. You have to get ticket. Converse hall, tickets. That's the whole idea. You'll buy tickets. It's a fundraiser for the Jones system. Right. Thank you for coming. Thank you, Marcie. I really appreciate it. You're very nice.