My Discussion With J.D. Salinger ~ Catcher in The Mountains
People still call newspapers with random questions. But in addition to killing classified advertising, the Internet has finished off many of those callers.
The calls trickle in on a Saturday afternoon. "What channel is the BYU football game on?" callers would ask in Salt Lake City. It's unclear why someone would call a newspaper and not a television station with this question.
The calls now are mostly for other departments. People call with complaints about their newspaper delivery or want to know how to place a classified ad. Sometimes, a reader has a complaint about a story. At least they're still reading.
Thirteen years ago, The Valley News in Lebanon, New Hampshire, regularly got calls at all hours. People would call from bars with sports questions. "What was the Pittsburgh Pirates starting rotation the year they won the World Series in the 1970s?" Because people at newspapers know that kind of thing off the top of their heads.
Then there were the regulars. Hank From Hanover liked to call in to critique our newspaper. Everybody's a critic when you only charge 50 cents. Hank From Hanover was like most newspaper callers: He had some pretty extreme opinions.
Unlike almost any newspaper caller ever, Hank was smart.
Our sports editor, The Donald, liked to taunt Red Sox fans after their team's latest collapse. And being that it was also the tail end of the Yankees dynasty, he had plenty of reasons to trumpet his own team. The Sox bombed out of playoff contention late in the 2000 season and the Yankees won the World Series. The Donald, gracious as ever, mocked the ethos of the Red Sox in his Sunday column.
Hank didn't like it. He spotted the column for what it was: trolling pre-Internet (the Valley News started putting stories online in 2009) publishing. Hank From Hanover called up to yell at The Donald and I answered the phone.
That was my introduction to J.D. Salinger.
Salinger lived in Cornish, New Hampshire, a tiny dot of a town near the Valley News. People — New York writers who can't understand why somebody would want to live outside of New York — have often portrayed Salinger as a wooded recluse. They ask why someone would want to live in Cornish when they could live in Manhattan. These people probably wouldn't like the annual Cornish Fair.
I wish, for posterity's sake, I could quote that conversation. I was 23, had never read Catcher In The Rye, and had no idea I was talking to Salinger. He was fired up, telling me The Donald wrote an immature column. I made a half-hearted attempt to defend my boss. Writing to illicit a reaction isn't the worst thing in the world. It sells papers. Hank From Hanover asked a few questions about who I was. He made a few comments about my writing. I even got a few laughs out of him. At the end of a half-hour phone call (an eon in Newspaper Phone Call world) I asked if he wanted to leave a message for The Donald.
There was the slightest pause.
"Tell him it's Hank From Hanover. He'll know who it is," he told me.
This still wasn't that unusual. The Donald is an institution of sorts and knows pretty much everybody in his newspaper area. He knows all sorts of interesting characters, so somebody giving an obviously fake name didn't seem all that strange.
My desk was next to the news copy editors and I'm not a quiet phone-talker, so my side of the conversation had clearly been amusing several editors.
"Who was that?" a middle-aged editor named Todd asked me.
"Somebody who left an obviously fake name," I said.
"Who'd he say it was?" he followed up.
"He said his name was Hank From Hanover," I said.
There were some giggles and smiles from the copy editor. I caught on that the news desk knew more than they were letting on, so I pestered Todd like a 23-year-old reporter does. Who was that? Why did everybody laugh?
Eventually, Todd stopped evading my questions. He talked quietly, maybe to show his sincerity or he didn't want to be heard talking about Hank.
"That," Todd said, "was J.D. Salinger."
These conversations were not unusual. An excellent column written by one of those editors at The Valley News chronicles the staff's run-ins with Hank. He was a cross between an ombudsman and an irate reader. He wrote myriad letters to the editor that we all knew were written by Salinger, but he signed obviously fake names like Hank From Hanover. Our paper didn't print letters with fake names, so we didn't print his letters.
"Valley News editors won’t confirm this publicly, but they were sorely tempted to relax their standards for letters when Salinger submitted his regular missives," Mackie wrote. "He signed them with pen names, A. Reader and many others, but the editors bravely stuck to their policy of insisting on confirmed real names for publication. You might be surprised to learn that Salinger wrote about small things: culvert designs, the work of road crews, people who drive too fast in snow, post-modern literary criticism — the types of things that folks in small towns think about."
Salinger got New England, and sometimes getting New England looks very foreign. Have you ever noticed that when the power goes out in New York it's a national news story? The power went out at my house in Minnesota at least once a summer. I bet the power went off in Cornish regularly.
Why would anybody choose to kill their career by living in the middle of nowhere? Salinger would flip the question around. Why would anybody kill themselves for the sake of having a career?
And so he wrote. He adapted Catcher In The Rye for a local school show into an upbeat musical. It only sounds silly because Very Serious Authors don't do things like that. He wrote short stories, a novel and novella that will be released in the coming years.
There's plenty of time to focus on writing when you live in Cornish. It's just like lots of small towns in New England. But we have The Internet® here. We have grocery chains here. Ours are just quainter.
Uncle T texted me the other day from sunny Florida. "It's 62 degrees warmer here!" That's great, I said, I'll be sure to text you in August and ask how our weather compares. He persisted, remarking how nice it was on his back porch.
Almost nobody likes a high of 15 degrees. But I went for a two-mile walk today, grocery shopped and let the dog gallop off leash in the snow by our house. She went all Crazy Daisy on me. I get that it's warmer elsewhere and Christmas time isn't my favorite time of year, but life still isn't half bad. I don't have to drive to work. We can afford our house and save for retirement. We have amazing friends. Beer came in the mail last night.
That's my little life. Maybe Salinger would approve and maybe he wouldn't. Nobody has to approve of your life except for you. Salinger got that, and at 36 years old, maybe I'm starting to figure that out myself.
There were other conversations with Salinger. He called at least once a month. The Donald was a favorite of his, probably because the Donald is a talented writer and Salinger couldn't stand for him to turn in a less-than-perfect story.
I don't claim to know a lot about writing. There are grammatical errors in this blog. Salinger would post a blog a year but it would be spectacular. I'll never be J.D. Salinger. And that's just fine.
The calls trickle in on a Saturday afternoon. "What channel is the BYU football game on?" callers would ask in Salt Lake City. It's unclear why someone would call a newspaper and not a television station with this question.
The calls now are mostly for other departments. People call with complaints about their newspaper delivery or want to know how to place a classified ad. Sometimes, a reader has a complaint about a story. At least they're still reading.
Thirteen years ago, The Valley News in Lebanon, New Hampshire, regularly got calls at all hours. People would call from bars with sports questions. "What was the Pittsburgh Pirates starting rotation the year they won the World Series in the 1970s?" Because people at newspapers know that kind of thing off the top of their heads.
Then there were the regulars. Hank From Hanover liked to call in to critique our newspaper. Everybody's a critic when you only charge 50 cents. Hank From Hanover was like most newspaper callers: He had some pretty extreme opinions.
Unlike almost any newspaper caller ever, Hank was smart.
Our sports editor, The Donald, liked to taunt Red Sox fans after their team's latest collapse. And being that it was also the tail end of the Yankees dynasty, he had plenty of reasons to trumpet his own team. The Sox bombed out of playoff contention late in the 2000 season and the Yankees won the World Series. The Donald, gracious as ever, mocked the ethos of the Red Sox in his Sunday column.
Hank didn't like it. He spotted the column for what it was: trolling pre-Internet (the Valley News started putting stories online in 2009) publishing. Hank From Hanover called up to yell at The Donald and I answered the phone.
That was my introduction to J.D. Salinger.
Salinger lived in Cornish, New Hampshire, a tiny dot of a town near the Valley News. People — New York writers who can't understand why somebody would want to live outside of New York — have often portrayed Salinger as a wooded recluse. They ask why someone would want to live in Cornish when they could live in Manhattan. These people probably wouldn't like the annual Cornish Fair.
I wish, for posterity's sake, I could quote that conversation. I was 23, had never read Catcher In The Rye, and had no idea I was talking to Salinger. He was fired up, telling me The Donald wrote an immature column. I made a half-hearted attempt to defend my boss. Writing to illicit a reaction isn't the worst thing in the world. It sells papers. Hank From Hanover asked a few questions about who I was. He made a few comments about my writing. I even got a few laughs out of him. At the end of a half-hour phone call (an eon in Newspaper Phone Call world) I asked if he wanted to leave a message for The Donald.
There was the slightest pause.
"Tell him it's Hank From Hanover. He'll know who it is," he told me.
This still wasn't that unusual. The Donald is an institution of sorts and knows pretty much everybody in his newspaper area. He knows all sorts of interesting characters, so somebody giving an obviously fake name didn't seem all that strange.
My desk was next to the news copy editors and I'm not a quiet phone-talker, so my side of the conversation had clearly been amusing several editors.
"Who was that?" a middle-aged editor named Todd asked me.
"Somebody who left an obviously fake name," I said.
"Who'd he say it was?" he followed up.
"He said his name was Hank From Hanover," I said.
There were some giggles and smiles from the copy editor. I caught on that the news desk knew more than they were letting on, so I pestered Todd like a 23-year-old reporter does. Who was that? Why did everybody laugh?
Eventually, Todd stopped evading my questions. He talked quietly, maybe to show his sincerity or he didn't want to be heard talking about Hank.
"That," Todd said, "was J.D. Salinger."
These conversations were not unusual. An excellent column written by one of those editors at The Valley News chronicles the staff's run-ins with Hank. He was a cross between an ombudsman and an irate reader. He wrote myriad letters to the editor that we all knew were written by Salinger, but he signed obviously fake names like Hank From Hanover. Our paper didn't print letters with fake names, so we didn't print his letters.
"Valley News editors won’t confirm this publicly, but they were sorely tempted to relax their standards for letters when Salinger submitted his regular missives," Mackie wrote. "He signed them with pen names, A. Reader and many others, but the editors bravely stuck to their policy of insisting on confirmed real names for publication. You might be surprised to learn that Salinger wrote about small things: culvert designs, the work of road crews, people who drive too fast in snow, post-modern literary criticism — the types of things that folks in small towns think about."
Salinger got New England, and sometimes getting New England looks very foreign. Have you ever noticed that when the power goes out in New York it's a national news story? The power went out at my house in Minnesota at least once a summer. I bet the power went off in Cornish regularly.
Why would anybody choose to kill their career by living in the middle of nowhere? Salinger would flip the question around. Why would anybody kill themselves for the sake of having a career?
And so he wrote. He adapted Catcher In The Rye for a local school show into an upbeat musical. It only sounds silly because Very Serious Authors don't do things like that. He wrote short stories, a novel and novella that will be released in the coming years.
There's plenty of time to focus on writing when you live in Cornish. It's just like lots of small towns in New England. But we have The Internet® here. We have grocery chains here. Ours are just quainter.
Uncle T texted me the other day from sunny Florida. "It's 62 degrees warmer here!" That's great, I said, I'll be sure to text you in August and ask how our weather compares. He persisted, remarking how nice it was on his back porch.
Almost nobody likes a high of 15 degrees. But I went for a two-mile walk today, grocery shopped and let the dog gallop off leash in the snow by our house. She went all Crazy Daisy on me. I get that it's warmer elsewhere and Christmas time isn't my favorite time of year, but life still isn't half bad. I don't have to drive to work. We can afford our house and save for retirement. We have amazing friends. Beer came in the mail last night.
That's my little life. Maybe Salinger would approve and maybe he wouldn't. Nobody has to approve of your life except for you. Salinger got that, and at 36 years old, maybe I'm starting to figure that out myself.
There were other conversations with Salinger. He called at least once a month. The Donald was a favorite of his, probably because the Donald is a talented writer and Salinger couldn't stand for him to turn in a less-than-perfect story.
I don't claim to know a lot about writing. There are grammatical errors in this blog. Salinger would post a blog a year but it would be spectacular. I'll never be J.D. Salinger. And that's just fine.
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