137: The Book That Changed Your Life

People called it the country of the future.

“There are songs, "O Brasil, Paliz do futuro"”

because it seems like we have it all, man. But then the music stopped. On the planet Money Podcast, a lot of countries these days aren't rich, they aren't poor, they're just kind of stuck in the middle. Why is that?

Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. When she was seven, when she would visit her grandmother, Alexa would hold through the books that her grandfather had owned. Back when he was alive. What she liked especially was finding the books where he'd made little notes in the margins.

So that was the part that was really compelling. Because they were hints about who he was. Exactly.

And they were a lot of times they were really critical.

He would just write, "I steadfastly disagree or something like that." Wow. Or he would write, "Ah, if you really liked something." As a kid, over the course of about a year, she systematically divided the books into two piles,

the ones with markings, and the ones without. And then she tried to read all the ones with markings.

“Her grandfather was a playwright and a teacher,”

and the books were creaky old books from the 1930s about theater, and about how to write plays. It was thrilling. And she was alive and she wrote her very first play, using the rules in the books. Rules from another generation.

These were archaic rules. Like start your play with lots of exposition, which was really invoked at the time. So I started mine with a butler,

whose name I believe was Manson,

picking up a phone, saying stuff like, "No, the lady in gentlemen are not home right now. Why at a fancy charity ball?" Yes, he's still drinking too much. And she's having a fair with a gardener,

whom shall I say it's calling? I'm not kidding. You were alive then. By the time I got to college, and I started actually taking writing classes,

it was brought to my attention that, you know, stage directions, shouldn't be things like, there follows a mighty howling of wind, and one of the things my teacher,

who was not a young man by any means said, he was like, sweetheart, we don't use sort of Oche anymore. To mean he whispers. I just write whispers.

But if all the books on her grandfather's shelves, there was one book that affected her more than the others. It had lots of her grandfather's writing in the margins.

And he was very critical,

so there was very rare that he would write, oh, exclamation point. And there were more odds in moss hearts out of biography, which is called Act One,

“than I think almost any of the other books that he had.”

Moss Heart was a broad-right playwright. The man who directed my fair lady with Julie Andrews and Rex Harrison, who is married to another then-womenary name, Kitty Carlow, who people these days mostly remember as a game show panel, back in the 1960s.

The book details how he started as a kid in the Bronx, found something he just loved to do. Which was to make players. Reading it as a child, Alexa had that experience that you have sometimes as a kid.

She did not understand everything in the book, but she understood enough to know that she really, really liked it. Like a new what was going on in this book was fun. It drove him so powerfully, and it made it seem to make him so happy.

She read Act One by Moss Heart over and over. She memorized long stretches. She tried to memorize the entire book. Even today, she recalls where specific odds were penciled into her grandfather's copy.

Because it felt like I was recognizing an old friend. It felt like a familiarity of, "Oh, I found a home. This guy likes the same home I want." Yeah.

So these are my people. Yeah, yeah. You don't mean many people who tell you that a book changed their lives. The idea that is appealing, I think, because it's nice to think that archives could be changed by the vision of the world

that happens between the pages of the book. Instead of what archives are usually changed by, you know, dumb luck, tragedies, coincidences. Today, I have no radio program. We have stories of people whose lives were changed by books.

Really changed. From WB Easy Chicago, this is Mary from Life. I'm Eric Glass. I've programed today in Forex. That one is called,

Well, back one, where somebody gets clues about how to live their life. From notes scribbled by their dead grandfather and the margins of the book. Back two, the family that reads together. In that act, the story of how when David Sedaris was a boy, he stumbled upon a dirty book in the woods.

He made his sisters view all adults with newfound suspicion, and sent him to the dictionary. Back three, Roger and me, and Lewis and Clark.

and this question, "Can your life be changed by a book

“that you have never seen and have not read?"”

Back four, a little thought houses for you and me. This one is the old old story of my friend, New York Girl, leaves the big city, heads out to a small town on the prairie with a dream, and a bonnet.

Stay with us. This American life. Today shows a rerun. Back one. Back one.

Back one.

So, Lexi Young says that she never meant for most hearts

or to biography. Back one. To be a blueprint for her life. Pulling back on the events of what happened. Every decades.

That seems to have been the case. Basically, what I did was, like he did in his life story, I moved to New York. I think I kind of followed him there.

Really, you consciously followed him there. I don't think it was conscious, but there are so many things that I did that he did. I wasn't as good, I mean, he was more sort of, he could fake it better than I can.

But you know, he wrote, he went, he had to get money at a certain point. He was like, "I need money." So you thought, "Who's the richest person I know?" And he wrote, "You wrote a letter to this woman,

“I think, and then showed up on her doorstep and said,”

"I'm lost hard, and I have a play, give me money, we'll put it on, and she did."

And I went, I said, "Amazing."

And I wrote letters to strangers and said, "I'm Alexa, and I have a play, and if you fund my play, you can be part of the theater." And did that work? I did one time, yeah.

At some point, did you start to get a crush on him? Yeah. It definitely turned from kind of a mentor, a make-believe mentor, to a pretend husband to be kind of situated.

Yeah. Somehow, I think, I decided that time had completely screwed up and sent moss to key Carlisle, and that if he hadn't, if he just hadn't died two years before I was born,

then me and moss might really have had a chance.

How would this that manifest itself in daily life?

Like, you'd be out on dates and just thinking, not moss. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, it would be like, there'd be something missing. You know, just wasn't quite what you'd want, and it's like, why can't I find some guy, and we'll work on this play together, and we'll be like an out-of-town tri-hooks in Philadelphia,

and we'll be up for 48 hours trying to fix our play, and then we'll crack it, and then we'll order room service. So how far did the whole thing go?

“Well, I think, maybe right before the end of college,”

Kitty Carlisle spoke, one evening, and at your college. That's right. She was very active in the New York art scene. She was extremely a huge advocate of the arts in our country,

and so she was talking about that, I think, and I stood in line after she spoke to meet her, and there were all these people around me, and they were like, you were really good on that game show, and I was just like disgusted, like,

oh, please, she was in a night at the opera. She was like a singer, she's not just a game show lady, but by the time I got to the front of the line, I went up to talk to her, I said, I wanted to say sort of,

which was, you know, my husband changed my life, and I moved to New York to be a playwright like him, and I think I said something along the lines of, your husband met so much to me,

and she just looked at me, and she was so, she's so elegant and so classy, and she just said, I don't understand darling, did you know him? She was just terrifying.

I'm very, she looked terrifying. Yeah, because I think I, she probably heard some kind of ownership or possessiveness in the way I said, your husband met so much to me, as if I knew him.

So I think it was confusing, since she probably could figure out that he probably was dead before I was born. But it was disturbing, and I felt terrible,

you know, just far from reality,

this thing had taken me, and you know, it was a scary to scare her, because, you know, she's the person that he loved. But my friend that was with me was really nice,

'cause we walked home afterward, he was like, "Ah, don't worry about her. You're much better from us than she was." He knew the whole story, too. And Moss was just spent in time with her,

because she happened to be alive. You know, he talked about how you felt faded, for him in some way, and drawn to him in some way. Have you thought about what is the line that divides that,

“kind of dreamy, healthy feeling, I think,”

from a scary, stalky feeling? Yeah, sure, because the truth is, really the way he functioned in my life was, like, as a comfort.

And I knew, I mean, I wasn't really broke, it wasn't a break from reality, but it was the sense that, you know, when you read a book and something speaks to you, and you feel like you feel understood,

and so it makes the world the less lonely place. Well, it's a how much of your feeling about Moss is connected to your feeling about your grandfather, who you didn't really know. I think they're intimately connected.

I really do. I think that, because I didn't know my grandfather, I couldn't talk to him about what his life and the theater was like,

and so this book gave me 444 pages of what it would be like to want to be in the theater and how you might try to make that happen. And so it was like he was the sort of stand-in for my grandfather in a lot of ways.

And the other part about it is that the way people talk about him, because I then, of course, went and read every single book I could get my hand on about him, or that even had any mention of him in it,

is with such love and appreciation and affection. It's just staggering.

“It's, I think that that was how people spoke”

about my grandfather, and I recognized it. That same enthusiasm and sort of the way their eyes would light up. Today, before I interview you, you've faxed over to our office,

here at WBEZ. Hey, you know, pull it out here. A letter that your grandfather wrote. In 1969, obviously it was quite, quite ill. And it does have this quality of just,

it's like, it's one of the most beautiful, beautifully written things I've ever written. It's really something. He spends, I should say, most of this thing, he starts off,

this is to a student, right? Dear friends, he says, I asked Donald Davis, so I would assume it's one of his students. One of his co-workers. Co-workers, okay, to read this to you.

It's intended to tell you as much as I know

“about my present situation, and thereby, of course,”

to let you know what the prospects are for the future of the work we've begun together. In planning this letter in my mind, I've been pulled this way in that by very conflicting impulses. I prefer to consider any of my own sickness,

any deep trouble, as a very personal matter, possibly to be shared with close members of our family,

but never to be inflicted on anyone else.

At the same time, I'd just test mysteries, and those of you who have called, have I hope been told the truth and so far as we knew it. But the truth has been shifting,

sometimes very swiftly, and what you may have heard a few weeks back is now untrue. And then he has this really pretty paragraph. He says, besides,

there's some of you are relatively recent friends, some of our common ties go years back. And old friends are new, the depth of my feeling for you. A blige is made to be entirely honest with you.

And so I'm going to put the next several paragraphs and parentheses, and I'm asking that I'll not to read them aloud. Each of you who wishes to can read it for himself. Anyone who dislikes these semi-clinical details

can avoid them, and then there are a couple paragraphs

that basically describe the state of his illness.

And then he talks about the prognosis, which is not very good, and through another few paragraphs and then to this last paragraph, which one, why don't you read that?

Sure.

uh, doubtless, all of that sounds very gloomy.

“I do admit I could think of happier matters.”

For one thing, I don't at all approve of my own extinction. I don't like the idea of it one bit. The reason it sure's me that the world can get along very nicely without me.

I can't quite believe that it will. Still, there are a few small compensations. For one thing,

I had always hoped that I could face my own death

with some equanimity, but it's a bit of a satisfaction to find that I can. Only talks about my mom and my grandmother. And it says,

and that's really what I'm finally wanting to say. I think you're a great bunch, and in case there isn't a chance to say it again, thanks for your concern, your calls, your note,

but above all for your love, you've had my love, and I've had yours, and I'm a damn fortunate man. So, thanks, and good luck.

Marvin Browsky. And to answer this to you, feels very much like heart, too. Less heart. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like guys who said, you know, I'm a damn fortunate man. You're a swell kid. Yeah.

Yeah. After spending her 20s in New York, a Lexi young move to Los Angeles, as a grandfather did, to write screenplays for Hollywood.

She's written on shows like Friends, the West Wing, big love, Grace and Frankie, and lots of love.

Back to the family that reads together. Sometimes a book can change your life, but just in a small temporary way, and not for the better. We have this cautionary tale

of how a book infected an entire family from writer David Sedaris,

“quick warning to listeners before we begin.”

Some of the content of this story might not be suitable for every listener, though there is no graphic language, no nasty words, no graphic scenes,

nothing in fact we even had to bleep. I found the book hidden in the woods beneath the sheet of plywood. It's covered torn away and the pages damp with meldil.

I read, "Brock and Bonnie rivers stood in their driveway, waving goodbye to the Reverend Hasselbach." "Goodbye," they said, "waving."

"Goodbye," the Reverend responded. Tell those two teens of yours, Josh and Sandy, that they'll make an excellent addition to our young person's ministry.

"They're fine kids," he said, "with a wink." "Almost is fine and foxy is their parents." The river's chuckle, raising their hands in another wave.

“When the Reverend's car finally left the driveway,”

they stood for a moment in the bright sunshine before descending into the basement dungeon to unshackle the children.

The theme of the book was that people are not always what they seem.

Highly respected in their upper middle class community, the river's family practiced a literal interpretation of the phrase, "Love thy neighbor." Limber is gymnasts. These people were both shameless and insatiable.

Father and daughter, brother and sister, mother and son. After exhausting every possible combination, they widened their circle to include horny sea captains in door to door knife salesmen.

Yes, these people were naughty, but at the age of 13, I couldn't help, but admire their infectious energy and spirited enjoyment of life. The first few times I read the book,

I came away shocked, not by the character's behavior, but by the innumerable typos. I had nobody bothered to proofread this book before sending it to print.

In the opening chapter, the daughter is caught fondling her brother's kek in the dining room. On page 33, the son has sex with his mother, who we are told, possesses a fond power of tots.

I showed the book to my sister Lisa, who tore it from my hand saying, "Let me hold on to this for a while." She and I often swapped babysitting jobs and considered ourselves fairly well-read

in the field of literary pornography. Look in the parents bedroom beneath the sweaters

in the second drawer of the white dresser,

she'd say, "We'd each read the story of Owen, the collected writings of the Marquis decide with one eye on the front door, fearful that the homeowners might walk in

and torture us with barbed whips and hot oils. "We know you, our looks would say as a parents checked on their sleeping children. "We know all about you."

The book went from Lisa to our 11-year-old sister Gretchen,

non-fiction, expose on the American middle class.

“I'm pretty sure that this exact same thing”

is going on right here in North Hills, she whispered, talking the book beneath the artificial grass of her Easter basket. Take the Sherman family, for example.

Just last week I saw Heidi sticking her hands down Steve Jr.'s pants. The guy has two broken arms, I said, she was probably just talking in his shirt. Would you ask when he was lost

to tuck in your shirt, she asked? She had a point. A careful study suggested the Sherman's were not the people they pretended to be. The father was often seen tugging at his crotch

and the wife had a disturbing habit of looking used right in the eye while sniffing her fingers. A veil had been lifted, especially for Gretchen, who now saw the world as a steaming pit

of unbridled sexuality.

“Seated on a lounge chair at the country club,”

she would narrow her eyes, speculating on the children, crowding the shallow end of the pool. I have a sneaking suspicion, Christina Youngblood might be our half-sister,

she said. She's got her father's chin, but the eyes and mouth are pure mom. I felt uneasy implicating our parents, but Gretchen provided a wealth of frightening evidence.

She noted the way our mother applied lipstick at the approach of the potato chip delivery man,

whom she addressed by first name

and often invited in to use the bathroom. Our father referred to the bank as doll and sweetheart, and their response is suggested that he had taken advantage of them one time too many.

The Greek Orthodox Church, the galley dressed couples at the country club, even our elderly colleague Duchess.

“They were all in on it, according to Gretchen,”

who took the piling furniture against her bedroom door before going to sleep at night. The book wound up in the hands of our 10-year-old sister Amy, who used it as a textbook and then make believe class she held after school each day.

Dressed in a wig and high heels, she passed her late afternoon standing before a blackboard in imitating her teachers. I'm very sorry, Candace, but I'm going to have to fail you,

she'd say, addressing one of the empty folding chairs arranged before her.

The problem is not that you don't try.

The problem is that you're stupid. Very, very stupid. Isn't Candace stupid, class? She's ugly too, am I wrong? Very well, Candace.

You can sit back down now. And for God's sake, please stop crying. Okay, class, now I'm going to read to you from this week's new book. It's a story about a California family

and it's called Next of Can. If Amy had read the book, then surely it had been seen by eight-year-old Tiffany, who shared her bedroom, and possibly by her brother Paul,

who at the age of two might have sucked on the binding, which was even more dangerous in reading it. Clearly this had to stop before God out of hand. Even our ancient Greek grandmother was arriving at the breakfast table

with suspicious looking circles beneath her eyes. Gretchen took the book and hit it under the carpet of her bedroom, where it was discovered by our housekeeper Lina, who eventually handed it over to her mother. I'll make sure this is properly disposed of, my mother said,

hurrying down the hallway to her bedroom. Panetration, she laughed, reading out loud from a randomly selected page. Oh, this ought to be good. Weeks later, Gretchen and I found the book hidden between the mattress

and box brains of my parents' bed, the page is stained with coffee rings and cigarette ash. The discovery seemed to validate all of Gretchen's suspicions. They'll be coming for us any day now, she warned. Be prepared, my friend,

because this time, they'll be playing for keeps. We waited.

I'd always made it a point to kiss my mother before going to bed,

but not anymore. The feel of her hand on my shoulder now made my flesh crawl. She was having a pair of my pants one afternoon when standing before her on a kitchen chair, I felt her hands graze my butt.

I just want to be friends, I stammered. Nothing more, nothing less. She took the pins out of her mouth and studied me for a moment before a sign. Damn.

And here you've been leading me on all this time. I read the book once more, hoping to recapture my earlier pleasure, but it was too late now. I couldn't read the phrase,

without thinking of Gretchen, barricading herself in the bedroom. I thought I might throw the book away, or maybe even burn it,

“but like a perfectly good outgrown sweater,”

it seemed to shame to destroy it when the world was full of people who might get to muse out of it. With this in mind, I carried the book to the grocery store parking lot and tossed it into the back of a shining new pickup truck.

I then took up my post beside the stores outdoor vending machines, waiting until the truck's owner returned, pushing a cart full of groceries. He was a wiring man with fashionable mutton chopped sideburns

and a half cast on his arm. As he placed his bags into the back of the truck, his eyes narrowed upon the book. I watched as he picked it up

and leafed through the first few pages

before raising his head to search the parking lot. He took a cigarette from his pocket and tapped against the roof of the truck before lighting it. Then he slipped the book into his pocket

and drove away. David Sedaris, the story appears in his book, "Naked." His latest book is called "The Land and its People." Coming up, "The Frontier." "Then."

"And then." That's in a minute, which I got a bubble gradio. What I program continues. It's an American live from our class.

Each week in a program, of course, we choose a theme,

“bring you a variety of different kinds of stories”

on that theme. Today's program is a rerun. The book that changed my life. We've arrived at Act 3 of our show. Act 3, Roger and me.

Lewis and Clark. There's book as literature. There's book as filth. And then there's book as pure physical object. This is the story of somebody

for whom a book changed his life. Though it is almost random. Then it happened at all.

That he got to know this book in the first place.

Jeremy Goldstein tells the story. Roger was 34 working in construction and looking for things to do in his spare time. And one day he noticed this plate he'd been given by his grandmother,

a plate from a 1905 fair celebrating the Centennial of Lewis and Clark's expedition to explore the Western Frontier. He looked at the plate and wondered if there was

“anything else left from the fairs to the round.”

It turned out there was a lot. And he started buying it up. It was a fun hobby collecting the various memorabilia from that fair. But when you reach a point where I had about 1100 items,

one of the larger collections known, it was, you know, the end of the treasure hunt. And I couldn't find anything I didn't have. And somebody mentioned, "Well, why don't you collect books about Lewis and Clark?"

I thought, "Well, that might be kind of fun to do." So in 1984 he went to a book dealer in Vancouver and picked out an 80-year-old set of books that chronicled Lewis and Clark's expedition. The price?

$695. I had the difficult time right now at that check because at that time, in fact, I really didn't know much about books. I proceeded to take that set of books down town

in Portland to an established book dealer, whose name was Prest McMann. And I showed him the set. I said, "Well, that's it, isn't it? That's all the journals."

He kind of chuckle, he said, "No, there's a lot more publications than that about the journals about Lewis and Clark." And so I went ahead and said, "Well, I tell you what, as you give me about five years,

I'm going to have every book published about Lewis and Clark." And he laughed so hard, he about laughed himself out of his chair. He was a heavy set gentleman. It was late '60s at the time. And he said, "There's people that have spent

lifetimes looking for every book of Lewis and Clark

and have never succeeded.

Well, I told him well. Maybe I won't have every book, but I'll have the best library of anybody in the United States." And he laughed harder.

[music] Strange as it may sound, this is all the took to send Rajra on his path of amassing in just 14 years. What did become?

The largest known private collection of Lewis and Clark books in the United States. And all this time he kept working in construction, excavating landscapes, laying pipes for sewers and paving roads. I decent living, but it was never enough.

Anything after house payment and basic expenses for living would go toward buying books. I would have to work 10 to 12 hours a day, normally six days a week. Some summers I wouldn't take a day off

just so that I could work and have a little better check. So maybe I could get that next book

because I was now beyond my means.

“At one point, Rajra had 12 credit cards.”

And then, of course, I had a house I could refinance, which I did three times. I don't know how to explain it exactly, but if there was a book out there that I didn't have, I would find the means to acquire it.

When you get something in 18th, 19th century, you open up the book, and you look at the discoloration of the pages, and the smell. And that's when you really feel the true energy of history.

Not what you would read, but you've got more senses than just your eyes. You can smell, you can feel, you can touch. This actually points to one of the strangest things

“about Rajra's relationship with his collection.”

He knew all about the different Lewis and Clark books, marbled end papers, obscure hand-tented plates, and the value of original boards.

But Rajra never became an expert on what was inside the books.

He didn't collect books to read them. He just wanted to own them. It turns out that your life can be changed by books you didn't even read. In fact, Rajra never been a reader of books. He didn't read books as a kid, he didn't go to college,

even having habits didn't change as an adult when his house was full of books. As a collector, Rajra was undeterred and he was methodical. But after ten years, one book still alluded to him. It's the cornerstone of any serious Lewis and Clark collection, a first edition copy of the first official account of the expedition.

It's a two-volume set, published in 1814, fewer than 1,500 copies were ever printed.

But the price tag, often around $10,000, had always scared Rajra off.

Then in 1994, he took a $49 flight to Los Angeles for the LA book fair. That particular day, I got there early. And then there was somewhat of a race when they opened up the gate. They would actually have to stand slow down, slow down, don't run. It was like kids running, running for the opening of a carnival.

I saw under just casually, I didn't run, to William Reese's booth. And introduced myself, oh yeah, I arrived here.

“And I said, did you bring anything about Lewis and Clark with you?”

He turned and looked toward the glass case. And there sets a two-volume set of 1814 Lewis and Clark journals. And this set was beautiful. And I was just, oh, I was shaking. I wanted this set so bad.

And I looked at him and I, what, what, what, what's the price? Bill said, I don't have $12,500. I was crushed. I knew it was beyond me. You know, as I kind of backed away and started to walk away from the booth. Just knowing, shaking my head to myself, I can't afford them.

There's no way I can get, I've got to have this set of books. Somehow I've got it, I can't afford these books. I can't. There's no way I've got to have this set of books. How the hell can I do it? She's, I better go to the bar. I walked to the bar, got to shot a scotch.

I walked back to the booth with my scotch in hand. And I, I, I, I, kind of look at those again. Bill, yeah, sure. Took him off the shelf, sat him on the counter. He's, well, Roger, what, what can you afford?

I says, I don't know. I says, We're not working. This is a slow time of the year. I might be able to do a thousand a month. But, ah, Bill, I, you know, we're not working now. I don't know. Maybe, maybe in May or June, you know,

when we start working over time. And he said, well, do you want to, when I said, yeah, but, gosh, I can't, and before I could finish the conversation, Mr. Reese had turned around and took these books,

put him in the bag, wrapped him up, turned around, put out his hand and shook my hand and said,

[music] The 1814 became Roger's calling card.

“It established him as an expert in all things written about Lewis and Clark.”

And then something happened. Roger started to read his books. Before this, he'd occasionally pull out a book and read a random passage. But now he started to plow through whole books front to back. Now, it's my time to study the books.

Let's look at this book, it's in front of me. I've got it open to, just by chance, a passage that brings a lot of, just a lot of pleasure to me is the fact that-- The passage comes about halfway through the expedition

after 18 months of looking for a route to the ocean.

They finally reached the Pacific.

And here they finally-- we are in view of the ocean, this great Pacific Ocean, which we have so long anxious to see. The roaring and the noise made by the waves, breaking on the rocky shores,

maybe heard distinctly, ocean in view. Oh, the joy.

“So in this passage, place yourself on the banks”

of the Columbia River, looking out toward the ocean. You know, I mean-- Right. You know, I'd be jumping up and down, screaming, where is that gill of whiskey,

which they didn't have at that time? Unfortunately. I mean, they would have taken a gallon and all chugged it, and they'd have just been slashed on the banks and just party and forever.

I mean, it's great. What a feeling of success. It just brings a great pleasure to myself. Ocean and view over the joy. Last week, Roger made a pilgrimage of sorts to see

for the first time, the original handwritten journals

that Lewis and Clark kept during their expedition. They're the books that everything Roger ever bought are descended from.

“Most of the journals are stored at the American Phil-Sophical Society”

in Philadelphia. They're in remarkable condition. As a librarian turn the books, Chris Pages for Roger flipping past detailed maps and intricate drawings of animals,

Roger barely moved or spoke. Oh, it's Clark's map. Freefalls of the Columbia. You're seeing it up, say, you know. Do you want to go or die?

No? Okay. Freefalls of Columbia.

At one point, Roger asked could he touch them.

He was told no. And after less than an hour with the journals, we wandered back into the library's main reading room. The book has altered my life from being a manual labor to being a scholar of knowledge

from the interior of the book. And back on Professor at Lewis and Clark once said that, "Well, Roger, you can't put yourself down for being a construction form." And he said, "That's a school of another type." He says, "You know, I love school and I love education."

And he says, "Now that you're entering that field with us." He says, "I have great respect for what you've done and what you know." And it makes me feel great. In the years since Roger began collecting the value of all things Lewis and Clark his sword, Stephen Ambrose wrote a popular book on Don't It Courage.

Ken Burns did a documentary. These fueled the fire. And last fall, Roger arranged for Lewis and Clark College in Portland to purchase his entire collection for what amounts to a small fortune. He promptly retired from construction at the age of 54.

I just smiled. I just smiled. I walked in, sat down, leaned back in the chair, and thought, "Wow, a whole new life." I don't have a alarm clock now.

I mean, I've got one, but it's not in use. When my body says to get up in the morning, I get up. I stretch, do some light exercises. Have a nice relaxing breakfast.

Any of those in construction industry now in listening to this. Eat your heart's out. Most of Roger's days are now spent in the library of Lewis and Clark College, where Doug Erickson is the chief archivist. Roger's known him for years.

Roger would off times get off of work when he was still working construction, and not even clean up and come over to Lewis and Clark and spend time with me. And we chat and talk about books, go on the internet, and look at books on Lewis and Clark, and other things, and he was tired.

He looked like, you know, he just gone through a hard day of labor on a construction site.

“Now you see Roger, he strolls in sometime in the morning,”

whenever he feels like it. He walks in feeling like a king. And then I usually go up to the herded room. And I just sit there and immerse myself into that. And of course, I'm surrounded by the books.

It's a wonderful feeling being in there. And he goes up there and he works. And every couple of every hour or two, he'll come down all excited. Doug, you've got to come here and see this. And I'll come upstairs and he'll show me something and we'll get excited about it.

And I see him in the herded room for many years to come. Writing books and having people coming and talking to him. And just to join the rest of his life. [music playing] That's very bad Jeremy Goldstein.

In 2023, years after the first broadcast this story, Roger Wendwick died.

Before he did, he wrote a book called Shotgun on my chest, memoirs of a Lewis and Clark book collector. [music playing] Act four, little side houses for you and me. When you really love a book, what exactly you're supposed to do with that feeling

after you finished reading the book? And then perhaps finish reading about the book. If you feel strongly enough about the book,

“I think there is this impulse to somehow get closer to the book,”

to somehow try and congear the world of the book right here in the real world somehow. So if you read about a Broadway playwright, maybe move to New York City, start writing plays. Or if you already live in New York City, but the book takes place somewhere else, you head out there.

Megan Downe has this story. I'm moving to Nebraska. No one understands why. I've lived in New York City for seven years, which is essentially all of my adult life.

And a few months ago I started making plans to head out west, not all the way west to California or Oregon, which people from around here might understand, but to the great plains. I wanted to move someplace flat and treeless.

Some place that gives off a sense of how big this country used to be, before automobiles in the jet age, before you could be cavalier about traveling from one place to another. There are a lot of reasons behind my move, but one of the reasons has to do with a book.

With nine books, as a matter of fact, they are the books written by Laura Engels Wilder, about her childhood as a pioneer girl on the vast Midwestern prairie in the late 1800s. When I was a little girl, growing up nearly 100 years later in the 1970s,

I wanted to be like Laura so much that I made my mother so me a sun bonnet, which I wore constantly. Like Laura, I wore my hair and braids. Before I knew how to write,

I drew picture books featuring the entire Engels family.

It was always a variation on the same theme,

a family moves to a new home and counters hardships. And through a particular combination of self-reliance and hard work makes a life for themselves in the new place. A place so remote, so unsettled, so cold that no civilization, not even most Indians,

had ever dared to live there. To me, this kind of uncharted life was the best kind to have, and it was even better that it required a sun bonnet. [Music] She taught at three schools, the first one was the Brewster School,

and that's where I'm handle would take her down and pick her up. This is about 12 miles to the south left. I'm into Smith, South Dakota, writing a horse-drawn wagon around the actual land that the Engels lived on. Our tour guide is Tim Sullivan.

Tim and his wife, Joan, on the 154 acres of land that Laura's father, Charles Engels, claimed in 1880 as part of the Homestead Act. This is an old trapper's cabin that we're going to pick up. We haven't got it, we haven't got it.

“That's the only thing we haven't got for.”

A lot of people think the Engels are from Walnut Grove, Minnesota, because that's where the television series was set. But in fact, they only lived there for a few years. Laura came to Dismet in 1879 when she was 12. It was where she grew up, became a school teacher,

and met and married a Monza Wilder. Six of her books are set there. For those who remember, it's the place where Laura and her sister, Mary, who was blind, got lost in the tall, wet grasses, known as the big slew.

It's the place where the family survived the long winter,

and it was the place she always considered home.

So, when she talked about walking through the cool ground, walking to the very school, if you see when we go home, it's left there. That's why it would have been cool. There's a certain kind of town that is defined solely by one industry,

Dismet is sort of like that too,

“except the industry is a series of books.”

Every year, for the past 29 years, the towns people have put on a pageant based on Laura's life. Just about everyone in this town of 1,200 has participated in the pageant. Or at least had one family member who was put on 1880-style clothing at one time or another, and given tours at the museum,

or given some hapless tourist directions to the cemetery. Where caravans of family cars wind around the grounds, looking for the burial sites of Charles, Caroline, Mary, Carey, and Grace Ingles. Almost every establishment in Dismet,

even the local bar, has restrooms, labeled Ma and Pa. But even though Dismet is for all intents and purposes,

a tourist town, it doesn't feel like one.

Instead, it feels like a town with a hobby. A place where a lot of people devote a lot of time to one particular idea. The tourists, though they're greeted in that typically warm, Midwestern way, feel almost incidental to the larger cause of celebrating Laura.

I talked to a man who had acted in the pageant for 27 years, missing only two performances the whole time. One of them because of a combine accident in which he lost his finger, and his son was impaled and almost died. He was back on stage the next night.

His wife, El Dina, had driven them to the hospital and witnessed a pretty gory series of medical procedures, performed by the way without anesthesia. The night of the accident, her husband had one request of her.

“He says, "Well, you have to go on. I was playing Ma at the time."”

And so I did perform that night. And I think I was probably in shock myself because it went fairly well. But it was on Sunday night because where I kind of fell apart, I did it. But I forgot a few lines, but it really made it. Laura's books have a lot to do with the notion of rising to the occasion.

And the pageant demands countless hours of volunteer effort, cooperation, and manual labor done without complaint. In a way, this kind of idyllic romantic work ethic is not what I expected when I came to dismiss, or I should say, "It is what I expected." And that's what took me by surprise.

Traditionally in a story like this, the writer goes to the place she's dreamt of, and finds that it's not like what she imagined at all. But the remarkable thing about dismet is that it really is the little town on the prairie. The people are a bit like the people in Laura's books. They're proud of the land they live on.

And in a strange way, it's as if Laura's powers of description have affected the way they talk about the place. And it's beautiful out here in the prairie this evening, when we came to Big SLU, heard a cattle over there. I think it looks just like it did in Laura's day.

Now all the buildings on the other side, but the big SLU is the same. I like the way the blackbirds swing in the reeds, the way the cat tails bloom, the puddles of water. Sometimes the action geese come in land. Marion Cramer is the author of the Laura Engel's Wilder pageant.

We're sitting in a picnic table on the Engel's homestead. A busy day of tourism is winding down. Visitors are getting back in their minivan. Tim Sullivan's eight-year-old son, Brian, is assembling his costume for the pageant dress rehearsal.

Marion is 65. So how much different was your life from Laura's when you were reading these books? Well, I guess my childhood was before electricity before running water. And I lived on a working farm and there were chores. There was responsibility.

“A lot of the cent, that's why I liked the Laura book so well,”

because Laura had to do the same things. I had to do, we had cattle and hogs and sheep, and we grew wheat and corn. It was a wonderful time. Family was very important.

Life seems simpler than because we didn't do so many things and go so much, but I'm not sure that it was.

You remember when you first got electricity in water?

And what was that like? It was just lovely. We had electricity came in 48. And they had been working for a long time putting the lines in. And finally the lines were all in.

And they were all hooked up. We were just waiting for the major flow of energy. And the electricity was on. And it was the first time. And that night as it got dark.

I remember my father and my mother and my sister

We stood there and looked because suddenly it wasn't a block.

Country anymore. We could see our neighbors' lights. Made it seem. A lot less lonesome. A lot less isolate.

[Music]

“Marion was a music teacher for many years,”

before becoming a pioneer school teacher on the Ingles homestead. Every day she hangs out in the one room schoolhouse, which looks exactly the way Lord describes her classroom with a Brewster school in her book, "These Happy Golden Years." Marion gives brief music and math lessons to the tourists,

and then has the class read a quote from Laura off the blackboard. The quote goes something like, "It's best to be truthful and honest

and make the best of what we have."

Somehow it sounds revelatory. [Music] The prairie is the only place I've been to in my life, where you can make the simplest, sweetest, even I dare say most cliched statement about the virtues of a simple life.

And it sounds like anything but a cliché. It's as if the wind, which burrows through here like a wild animal, just knocks the irony out of everything. After a long day working at the Ingles homestead, Joan Sullivan, Tim's wife, walks me down to the edge of the big slew.

The grass is taller than we are. And it's easy to see how Marion Laura could have gotten lost here. There's still some honesty in the world. And that's what Laura talked about. It's good to be truthful and honest, and to do what's right.

“And that's what I guess being here isn't always easy.”

It's a lot of hard work, and you wonder will the whole thing work out to be able to keep it running? But there's something about taking those morals and passing that on to a family. Do you think that has to do with farming?

Or do you think it's something about the time that Laura was living in or a combination of those? Probably a combination of those. Trying to make it honest dollar. Trying to farmer works hard.

They feed the world. Why? Hello? I'm glad so many of you have come to our little town on the prairie, Indie Smith. This is especially fine country.

This prairie. At this time of the year, this is the hour that daylight softens and twilight falls. Oh, please forgive me. Sometimes I get a little carried away.

The Laura Ingalls Wilder pageant runs for three weekends each summer. Admissions five dollars. About 700 people come each night. It's held right in the middle of the prairie. Unlanded Jason to the Ingalls homestead.

From the pageant site, you can see the five cottonwood trees that paw planted. One for each of my girls, he said, meaning Ma and his four daughters. The dialogue in the pageant has been pre-recorded. When the pageant is actually performed, the cast members lipsing the words and pantomime the action.

This technique has its benefits and its perils.

During the first performance this year, the actor playing paw missed his cue

and his words came booming down onto the stage even though he wasn't there. The actors playing Mary and Laura and Ma carried on. Talking to an invisible paw like he was the voice of God.

“Pa, is it on Indian land or land will have to move from?”

Not on Indian land, my pretty girl. This is surveyed land. Just wait for us to call it home. I want to place that's open, where I can run with the wind. Lots of room, Laura.

It'll be the Ingalls homestead. Doesn't that sound fine? I am completely charmed by this pageant. Yes, there are mistakes. Yes, you can hear places on the soundtrack where the tape has been edited.

But all I can think is I watch these people on stage. Many of them farmers, retired farmers, and the wives and kids of farmers, is how effectively they capture the feeling of the book. They're not selling anything. There's no agenda other than to celebrate Laura and the fact that she cared enough about this town

to write these books about it. It's dusk on the prairie, literally. That doesn't sound like something you'd say in earnest. It sounds like a lyric in some cowboy folk song, or a particularly bad line in a romance novel. But it's not.

It is simply dusk on the prairie. Little girls and sweaters and pants from the gap are wearing sunbarnets and standing on the benches to get a better look. Fathers with fussy babies stroll around the field so their wives can watch the pageant undisturbed.

the wind whipping through her hair, her sunbarnet flying out behind her.

The pageant is a huge hit. When the show's over, the audience storms the stage to get the autographs of cast members.

“People are saying it's the best thing they've ever seen, that this trip to dismiss is the best vacation they've ever had.”

It's remarkable, really, that in a time when families can take vacations to Disney World, or visit great adventure, or even just stay home and watch TV, people will travel all the way to South Dakota to see a world that's described in a series of books. The Ingles family managed to make homes for themselves and some of the most unforgiving conditions imaginable, in a cabin in the deep woods, in the banks of a creek, in a shanty surrounded by hundreds of flat empty acres.

But no matter where they lived, paw played its fiddle, modded her sewing, and Laura managed to find delight in the world around her. Maybe that ability to merge the indoors and the outdoors, the familiar and the unfamiliar, is what all these people are responding to. Maybe that's why there's so much romance in the whole notion of a cabin stuck out in the middle of nowhere.

People want to find comfort in an inherently uncomfortable place. They want to see if they can make it through the long winter, and still see the beauty in the snow.

“Megan Down, two weeks after we first heard this story, Megan left New York City for Nebraska,”

she'll give her several years. She sends her in a bunch of books, move back and forth across the country a few more times, just like Laura Ingles Wilder. She'll find Megan's writing, and it'll link to her podcast, her very interesting podcast, at Megandown.com. By the way, these days, the actors in the pageant about Laura's life on the prairie,

actually speak their own lines themselves, thanks to the advent of inexpensive wireless microphones. They no longer goipsing to a pre-recorded track. [Music] [Music] [Music]

Well, I hope I'm as produced today by Julie Snyder and myself, with Alex Wimburg, Susan Burton, Blue Shavonean, Nancy Optiic, drinking editors, Paul Tuff, Jack Hitt, Marguerock, and Louise Spiegel, and Concierge, Sarah Vow, production help from Todd Bachman, Sterley Klein and Sylvia Weamis, musical help from Marie Capartridge and Terry Hacker.

Help once a day's rerun from Adrian Lily, modeling Marcelo Stone Nelson and Ryan Rumory. Special thanks to Bob Carlson, a case to your W, a Gary Josephson at the Radio Foundation, our website, thisamericanlife.org.

“This American Life is a little bit of public radio stations by PRX,”

the public radio exchange. Thanks today to this American Life partner, Sam McVidi, and Jordan Goldwarg, Dr. Emily Vierin, Matt Stoner. I hope that you will get sort of joining us in becoming a life partner.

Basically, that helps us keep making the show.

A big chunk of our budget now comes from our life partners, accounting on that number to grow. As I thank you, you get to listen to ad-free, you get dozens of bonus episodes, you get a special greatest hits archive

that appears right in your podcast speed, so when it will be for a show or something to listen to, there they are, greatest hits right there, join at this American Life.org/life-prighteners. That link is also in the show notes.

Thanks as always to our program's co-founder,

Miss Torrey Malantia, who wonders into our workspace, looking at all the new stuff we bought and asked. What, what, what's the price? I'm here at Glass. Back next week with more stories of this American Life.

Oh, the joy. Tumbling bed, my tie of the loose leavey, to a prairie, bla-ba-ba. The order they order they, the order they, the order they, the order they, the order they, the order they do.