One day in the early spring of 2018 I traveled to a rural part of southern Indiana to attend to some family matters. (I live in Ohio, but I’m half Hoosier. My dad grew up in nearby Lawrenceburg.)
I spent most of that day in Switzerland County. You’ve probably never been there. Switzerland County, Indiana looks nothing like Switzerland. In early spring, that part of Indiana, along the Ohio River, can look a little bleak.
(Portions of the 1988 Molly Ringwald/Andrew McCarthy movie, Fresh Horses, were filmed in Switzerland County. McCarthy said of the area, “There’s the whole starkness up there; it helped the mood of the movie.” )
Southern, rural Indiana is home to several large casinos. I ordinarily have no interest in gambling venues. I ate lunch at the nearby Belterra Casino that day, though, because…there weren’t many other dining options in the vicinity.
My visit to the casino got me thinking: What if a young couple in debt visited the casino in a make-or-break effort to get ahead financially? What if they were lured there by a special offer? $300 worth of ‘free’ gaming chips?
What if their beginner’s foray into gambling went horribly wrong, and they fell further in the hole? Then suppose that a narcotics kingpin offers them an alternative plan…another way to get ahead.
All they have to do is run an errand for him. What could possibly go wrong?
That’s the premise behind my 2020 casino novel, Venetian Springs. Set in a fictional version of Belterra Casino, Venetian Springs is a story of two down-on-their-luck high school teachers who succumb to the lure of easy money. They soon discover that easy money doesn’t exist. But this is a lesson that may cost them both their lives.
How I wrote a horror novel called Revolutionary Ghosts
Or…
Can an ordinary teenager defeat the Headless Horseman, and a host of other vengeful spirits from America’s revolutionary past?
The big idea
I love history, and I love supernatural horror tales.“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” was therefore always one of my favorite short stories. This classic tale by Washington Irving describes how a Hessian artillery officer terrorized the young American republic several decades after his death.
The Hessian was decapitated by a Continental Army cannonball at the Battle of White Plains, New York, on October 28, 1776. According to some historical accounts, a Hessian artillery officer really did meet such an end at the Battle of White Plains. I’ve read several books about warfare in the 1700s and through the Age of Napoleon. Armies in those days obviously did not have access to machine guns, flamethrowers, and the like. But those 18th-century cannons could inflict some horrific forms of death, decapitation among them.
I was first exposed to the “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” via the 1949 Disney film of the same name. The Disney adaptation was already close to 30 years old, but still popular, when I saw it as a kid sometime during the 1970s.
Headless Horsemen from around the world
While doing a bit of research for Revolutionary Ghosts, I discovered that the Headless Horseman is a folklore motif that reappears in various cultures throughout the world.
In Irish folklore, the dullahan or dulachán (“dark man”) is a headless, demonic fairy that rides a horse through the countryside at night. The dullahan carries his head under his arm. When the dullahan stops riding, someone dies.
Scottish folklore includes a tale about a headless horseman named Ewen. Ewen wasbeheaded when he lost a clan battle at Glen Cainnir on the Isle of Mull. His death prevented him from becoming a chieftain. He roams the hills at night, seeking to reclaim his right to rule.
Finally, in English folklore, there is the 14th century epic poem, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”. After Gawain kills the green knight in living form (by beheading him) the knight lifts his head, rides off, and challenges Gawain to a rematch the following year.
But Revolutionary Ghosts is focused on the Headless Horseman of American lore: the headless horseman who chased Ichabod Crane through the New York countryside in the mid-1790s.
The Headless Horseman isn’t the only historical spirit to stir up trouble in the novel. John André, the executed British spy, makes an appearance, too. (John André was a real historical figure.)
I also created the character of Marie Trumbull, a Loyalist whom the Continental Army sentenced to death for betraying her country’s secrets to the British. But Marie managed to slit her own throat while still in her cell, thereby cheating the hangman. Marie Trumbull was a dark-haired beauty in life. In death, she appears as a desiccated, reanimated corpse. She carries the blade that she used to take her own life, all those years ago.
Oh, and Revolutionary Ghosts also has an army of spectral Hessian soldiers. I had a lot of fun with them!
The Spirit of ’76
Most of the novel is set in the summer of 1976. An Ohio teenager, Steve Wagner, begins to sense that something strange is going on near his home. There are slime-covered hoofprints in the grass. There are unusual sounds on the road at night. People are disappearing.
Steve gradually comes to an awareness of what is going on….But can he convince anyone else, and stop the Headless Horseman, before it’s too late?
I decided to set the novel in 1976 for a number of reasons. First of all, this was the year of the American Bicentennial. The “Spirit of ’76 was everywhere in 1976. That created an obvious tie-in with the American Revolution.
Nineteen seventy-six was also a year in which Vietnam, Watergate, and the turmoil of the 1960s were all recent memories. The mid-1970s were a time of national anxiety and pessimism (kind of like now). The economy was not good. This was the era of energy crises and stagflation.
Reading the reader reviews of Revolutionary Ghosts, I am flattered to get appreciative remarks from people who were themselves about the same age as the main character in 1976:
“…I am 62 years old now and 1976 being the year I graduated high school, I remember it pretty well. Everything the main character mentions (except the ghostly stuff), I lived through and remember. So that was an added bonus for me.”
“I’m 2 years younger than the main character so I could really relate to almost every thing about him.”
I’m actually a bit younger than the main character. In 1976 I was eight years old. But as regular readers of this blog will know, I’m nostalgic by nature. I haven’t forgotten the 1970s or the 1980s, because I still spend a lot of time in those decades.
If you like the 1970s, you’ll find plenty of nostalgic nuggets in Revolutionary Ghosts, like Bicentennial Quarters, and the McDonald’s Arctic Orange Shakes of 1976.
***
Also, there’s something spooky about the past, just because it is the past. As L.P. Hartley said, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
For me, 1976 is a year I can clearly remember. And yet—it is shrouded in a certain haziness. There wasn’t nearly as much technology. Many aspects of daily life were more “primitive” then.
It isn’t at all difficult to believe that during that long-ago summer, the Headless Horseman might have come back from the dead to terrorize the American heartland…
This is a promotional ad that McDonald’s ran in 1980. Breakfast customers were given a free Bic razor with the purchase of any breakfast entree.
1980 McDonald’s print ad
I don’t specifically remember this promotion, and my guess is that it didn’t last long. This is also one that you’re unlikely to see repeated in the twenty-first century. Clearly the ad appeals to one specific gender. (And in 1980, no one disputed the notion that there were only two.) But as we all know, women eat pancakes, too. So what’s going on?
My mother worked outside the home in 1980; but that was the very beginning of the Boomer-led “working woman” trend of the 1980s. The McDonald’s marketing folks probably figured that men would comprise the main market for fast-food breakfasts, presumably on their way to work.
This was the scene in my part of the world last night. (The photos below were taken about 5 miles from my house.) Storms moved through the area, with high wind and hail.
Tree fell on this home in Newtown on Church Street! Spoke with the home owner and fortunately nobody was injured! @WLWTpic.twitter.com/AykH3PstXa
My electricity remains on for the time being (fingers crossed). This morning, however, I did drive by a utility pole that had been snapped in half, presumably from last night’s wind. That was less than a mile from my house. Hopefully the electricity stays on.
Never a dull moment in the badlands of Clermont County, Ohio.
In 1938, the planners in Nazi Germany know that war is coming. They are eager to acquire the atom bomb.
They are working against Allied governments, operating both in Germany and abroad. (And not all of the Reich’s accomplices are German nationals.)
A group of ordinary Americans and Germans are forced to choose sides. Their choices will lead them into a web of betrayal, murder, and espionage.
Their paths meet in Cairo, Egypt, where the Reich is hunting a fugitive atomic physicist.
The main characters:
Betty Lehman is a 19-year-old girl from Dutch Falls, Pennsylvania. Her family is active in the German-American Bund. Betty has been recruited to betray her country in the service of the Reich.
Rudolf Schenk is an undercover agent of the German Gestapo. He wants to do his duty. But can he abandon his last shred of conscience?
Jack McCallum is an American treasure hunter in Cairo. He falls for two women: one who is working undercover for the Third Reich, one who is fleeing the Gestapo.
Heinrich Vogel is a physicist who fled Germany for Egypt. He and his young adult daughter, Ingrid, face a daily game of cat-and-mouse with the Gestapo. His goal: to reach Britain or America before the Gestapo reaches him and his daughter!
I have long been interested in the French Revolution. I was first introduced to it in my high school European History class. In the many years since then, I have read Simon Schama’s Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, and various other books on this violent, fascinating period.
But the French Revolution is a subject that should really be explored in French, if at all possible.
My comprehension of French is not as good as I would like it to be. But I enjoy this young woman’s YouTube channel: French Mornings Podcast. The content is designed for people like me: those who have some knowledge of French, but need some hand-holding.
The above video is entitled, “Petite histoire de la guillotine”. If you have a basic grasp of French and you like European history, I recommend that you give this a listen.
Also consider subscribing to her YouTube channel. Your French will definitely improve as a result!
Only a few months ago, pundits and major employers were bemoaning the tight labor market and a perceived shortage of workers. Would there be anyone to man the counters at Starbucks—much less program the computers?
What a difference a shift in the economic headwinds makes. Given the recent spate of corporate and public sector layoffs, the pundit class has found a new, and opposite, phenomenon to worry about: the increasing number of Gen Z NEETs. (The acronym refers to those “not in education, employment, or training”.)
And with that has surfaced the perennial debate about college and “worthless” degrees.
On my Facebook feed, I came across a thread in which this shifted into a debate over liberal arts degrees in general. In this particular exchange, an older adult was chiding some real or imagined youngsters who had (he assumed) unwisely majored in English or Renaissance Art History. Shouldn’t they have known better?
This led to arch replies about “ignorant Boomers” from a group of people under 30. (I think the older person making the original comment was about my age—technically a Gen Xer, not a Boomer.)
As another “old person” (another Gen Xer, not a Boomer) allow me to add some perspective here.
I was a college student between 1986 and 1991. (Yes, five years: I had an education “gap year” for employment.) Even then, you were cautioned against majoring in English, history, art, etc. The opportunities, you were told, were in engineering, accounting, etc.
In the summer of 1986, I sat down with a college guidance counselor to plan out my fall semester schedule as an incoming freshman. I told the guidance counselor that I wanted to be an English lit major. She informed me that I would be “paying to read books”. I.e., wasting my time and money.
What happened after that is a long story. I didn’t major in English literature, but I didn’t graduate with a degree in engineering or accounting, either. I ended up majoring in economics.
I also learned Japanese, and started working as a translator while still an undergrad. (That’s why I took the gap year.) I had only minimal difficulty finding a job when I graduated into the lean 1991 job market. (That, too, was a time of layoffs.)
Should you major in the liberal arts in 2025? Perhaps not. But the corollary question: “What should you major in, then?” has no simple answer.
A lucky few of us actively want to major in engineering or accounting as 18-year-old college freshmen. I knew a few people like that in 1986. Bully for them! But for most of us, it’s a matter of trial and error, and gradually finding a balance between work that interests us, and work that can provide a paycheck.
For me, 1987 will always be the Year of the Cicada. They were everywhere that summer.
Local FM radio constantly played the jingle, “Snappy Cicada Pizza”. This was a parody of the jingle for “Snappy Tomato Pizza”, and the sort of thing prone to tickle my quirky sense of humor, both then and now.
I was 19 years old in the summer of 1987, and that was my first experience with a cicada outbreak. That summer I was taking courses at the University of Cincinnati. I remember seeing them clinging to the trees on campus. Cicadas don’t live long; and soon their desiccated husks were everywhere.
In the intervening years, I’ve experienced perhaps four or five more major cicada broods. I’m not sure. Novelty, as they say, is a one-shot deal, and the novelty of cicadas has long since faded for me.
Nevertheless, I do notice them. Everyone does. During an outbreak, they are impossible to miss.
According to local news reports, the Indiana-Ohio-Kentucky tristate area will soon be swarmed with yet another brood. It appears, then, that 2025 will be yet another Year of the Cicada.
Whenever I go to Japan, a book haul is always near the top of my to-do list. Japanese-language books are not impossible to acquire in the United States; but it’s seldom as convenient as placing an order on Amazon.
This title would loosely translate as History of the Showa Era that Citizens Don’t Know.
As the cover image suggests, there are numerous chapters about the Japanese Imperial Navy and World War II.
One of the many rewards of learning a foreign language well is that your potential reading list will be vastly expanded. Some of my favorite books are Japanese-language titles.
Amid all the current events and weather-related entries of late, here is a quick mini-review of Flint Kill Creek: Stories of Mystery and Suspense. I have recently worked my way through the stories in this volume by the extremely prolific Joyce Carol Oates.
Speaking of Oates: she was born almost exactly 30 years before me, in the summer of 1938. Oates will turn 87 this year, and she continues to write and publish. This is a testament to both a sharp mind and a solid work ethic. Her style has not deteriorated, nor even changed much in recent decades. Her latest books are very similar to the ones she published years ago.
Flint Kill Creek, as the full name of the book implies, is a collection of dark tales. Many of these stories involve a crime, but not all of them do.
These stories are what JCO does best: explorations of the dark corners of the human mind and its motivations. These stories often have surprise twists. Oh…I didn’t see that coming.
Joyce Carol Oates is known as a writer of literary fiction. This means, among other things, that her work sometimes requires some effort to get through. And so it is with Flint Kill Creek. Some of these stories are quite accessible and fast-paced. (I particularly liked the opening, titular story.) Others are slower and more abstruse.
As is always the problem (for this reader, anyway) where JCO is concerned: few of her characters, even the innocent ones cast in victim roles, are very likable. I often find that in a JCO story, I have no one to root for.
If you already like Joyce Carol Oates’s work, you’ll like Flint Kill Creek. If you don’t like her style, this book will do nothing to change your mind.
As for me: I have always been somewhere in the middle regarding Joyce Carol Oates’s fiction. I most always admire her work; but I enjoy it to varying degrees.
During the 1970s and throughout most of the 1980s, it was common to see full-page cigarette ads in glossy magazines. Advertisements for cancer sticks had already been banned from television, but print ads were still legal, and considered fair game.
Camel ad, circa 1978 to 1983
Much has been said about the “Marlboro Man” over the years. But the Camel Dude (shown above) got a lot more female attention. I remember seeing variations of the above ad in a number of magazines that ended up in my hands during the late 1970s and early 1980s, including Field & Stream, which I read with some regularity.
We can assume that the Camel Dude got lucky on the day presented in the above ad. But one wonders: is he still alive? Perhaps not, with that smoking habit of his.
I was a pre-adolescent and adolescent in those days; and I may have been slightly influenced by the marketing message. A “great-tasting blend of Turkish and domestic tobaccos”, and hot women on the beach? Count me in, said the adolescent version of me.
Speaking of which: I haven’t smoked cigarettes at all as an adult; but I did smoke them on occasion when I was 12 to 13 years old. Another thing about the 1970s/80s: cigarette vending machines were everywhere, and underage people had no difficulty accessing them.
I certainly tried Camels. The hot blonde, as I recall, was not included.
We’ve had about 7 inches of rain here in the Cincinnati area since Wednesday night. The Ohio River is now above well above flood stage.
My house is approximately 4 miles north of the river. Closer to the river, there are evacuations and some roads are closed. A handful of river towns in Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky have been evacuated.
Luckily, my sump pump did the job and my basement stayed dry. Prior to Wednesday night’s initial round of storms, I mowed both my lawn and my dad’s lawn.
According to the weather forecast, this period of extended rain is over. So now it’s just a matter of waiting for the world to dry out. I’ve had more than enough rain until…August, thank you very much.
I am a resident of Cincinnati, Ohio, and a frequent visitor to Indiana. My father grew up in Indiana. I have many childhood memories of family holiday gatherings in Lawrenceburg and nearby rural Switzerland County.
I have always considered myself an “honorary” Hoosier (the nickname of a person from Indiana), because of my familial ties, and also because of my affection for the state.
Family reunion in Switzerland County, Indiana, 1987.
But there are famous Hoosiers, too.John Cougar Mellencamp was born in 1951 in Seymour, Indiana, and he grew up there. Mellencamp, now in his seventies, is a proud son of Indiana. He has long incorporated small-town Indiana into his musical brand.
Mellencamp was one of the most popular solo artists of my teenage years. He was also a frequent presence on MTV. (This was back when MTV actually played music videos, as every Gen Xer will remind you.)
Many of Mellencamp’s songs and MTV videos incorporated small-town themes. Whenever possible, he inserted an Indiana-related Easter egg or two. I have become aware of some of these only decades later.
Consider, for example, the MTV video for “Hurts So Good”. This song hit number 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1982. In the summer and fall of that year, it was hard to turn on FM radio without hearing “Hurts So Good” within the hour.
The “Hurts So Good” MTV video was also popular on MTV. Little did I know, back then, that this video was filmed in the small town of Medora, Indiana. Medora is close to Seymour, where John Cougar Mellencamp grew up, and about ninety minutes from Lawrenceburg, where my father grew up.
The lesson here, for me, is that great art—and great artists—can come from anywhere. John Cougar Mellencamp would not have been the songwriter and musician he became, had he spent his formative years in Los Angeles or New York.
Many people grow up in small town or rural environments and do not find art, of course. But it is a mistake to assume that every denizen of LA is working on a screenplay, or that every NYC resident is an aspiring novelist.
I was in a minor accident in January. As a result, my Toyota Venza spent a week in the body shop for repairs. During that time, I drove a rental vehicle, as provided for under the terms of my insurance policy.
When I arrived at the Enterprise office, I was given two choices: a Chevrolet Equinox or a Jeep Wrangler. I had to make an on-the-spot decision.
Without any hesitation, I opted for the Jeep. The Equinox, I knew, would be another hyper-computerized, overly engineered vehicle marketed at suburbanites. Boring! But the Jeep Wrangler would be, for me, a novel driving experience. I had never driven a Jeep before, nor even ridden in one.
The novelty got to me. Driving a Jeep is a fun exercise in driving. And I do mean exercise. When you drive one of the basic Jeep models, you feel every bump in the road. Steering the Wrangler reminded me of steering my grandfather’s 1975 Ford pickup truck, back in the day.
But hey, it was an adventure. For a few days, I imagined myself as a Jeep owner.
Then I learned about this Jeep ducking thing. When I was first told about it, I thought that my interlocutor was pulling my leg.
Then I started paying attention: I began to notice Jeeps with little rubber ducks mounted on their dashboards. They were everywhere.
If you’re unaware of the trend, look around a parking lot sometime: you’ll see that at least half of all Jeeps have dashboards adorned with rubber ducks.
Apparently, Jeep owners leave ducks on each others’ vehicles as a way of expressing their esprit de corps. And when a fellow Jeep owner gifts you a duck, you’re supposed to mount it on your dashboard.
Jeep ducking is just a bit too cutesy for my tastes. But it’s harmless; and if Jeep owners enjoy doing this, why not?
Nevertheless, I’m glad that there is no similar custom of placing bath toys on Toyotas. No way I would drive around with rubber ducks mounted on the dashboard of my Venza.
In early April of 1974, I was but a wee lad in kindergarten. My dad worked in sales. My mother and I sometimes accompanied him on business trips.
And so it was that on April 3, 1974, my father, my mother, and I traveled to Louisville, Kentucky—just in time for that city’s historic 1974 F4 tornado, which was part of the equally historic “super outbreak” of that year.
Why was it called a “super outbreak”? Between April 3 and 4, at least 149 tornados were documented across 13 states. Over three hundred people lost their lives. It was a big news story, for anyone alive and sentient then.
My parents and I were staying in a one-story motel not far from the Louisville F4 tornado when it hit. I was not yet six years old, and so I had only the vaguest idea that something bad was happening. But I realized that all was not well.
For one thing, my parents were visibly alarmed. When you’re a young kid and your parents are nervous, that probably means that you should be concerned, too.
I remember the high winds and the freight train sound of the tornado. I did not see the tornado itself, but I certainly saw its aftermath. Louisville looked like a war zone. On our drive home to Cincinnati the next morning, I recall seeing a swing set thrown into the middle of the highway by the tornado. I particularly remember that.
So far as lasting traumas go, there were some minor ones. For a number of months, I had recurring dreams about a giant lifting off the roof of our house. And to this day, I don’t like violent spring and summer storms. I learned at an early age how quickly such storms can turn deadly.
