The Eisenhower Eight
The year was 1952 and Dwight David Eisenhower was elected President of the United States in November, beating Governor Adlai Stevenson. My father, David Eskey, was a student at Penn State at the time, learning to write fiction from his English Composition teacher, Joseph Heller. Heller would later go on to write Catch-22.
My father wrote 8 stories and one book prospectus, one for every year that Eisenhower was President. One of his characters was named Dave Ellas, and another was Madeleine; two of the stories were entitled Madeleine, Goodnight and Dance Every Saturday Night.
Dave Ellas was also a character in a story called Ono. Ono was completely handwritten, whereas the other stories were typed. Comments from Joseph Heller were written in green and red pencil in the margins of some of the stories, but there were no comments on Ono. My best guess is that the story was written while my father was a student in Dr. Christie's class, who took over teaching English Composition after Heller started writing Catch-18 in 1953.
While sitting at home one morning in 1953, Heller thought of the lines, "It was love at first sight. The first time he saw the chaplain, [Yossarian] fell madly in love with him." Within the next day, he began to envision the story that could result from this beginning, and invented the characters, the plot, and the tone that the story would eventually take. Within a week, he had finished the first chapter and sent it to his agent. He did not do any more writing for the next year, as he planned the rest of the story. The initial chapter was published in 1955 as Catch-18, in Issue 7 of New World Writing.
The characters' names in my father's stories parallel names of the Eisenhower family: Milton S. Eisenhower was the President of Penn State during the time that Joseph Heller was teaching my father how to write good fiction. Milton was Ike's brother. Mamie Doud was perhaps the inspiration for Madeline. Dave Ellas may have been a character based on a young Dwight David Eisenhower. It's hard to say, as my father did not leave any notes or instructions with his file of short stories when he gave them to me in 1995.
In Catch-22, the characters were sometimes based on people Heller knew at Penn State, and also matched the title of his book.
Chaplain Captain Albert Taylor Tappman (A.T. Tappman) (usually referred to as "the Chaplain") is a fictional character in Joseph Heller's 1961 novel Catch-22 and its 1994 sequel Closing Time. In earlier editions he was called Chaplain Robert Oliver Shipman, but this was changed to Albert Taylor Tappman. Editions published in some other territories, notably Britain, have continued to use the original name. Heller named the character after Charles Allan Tapman, a Penn State University boxer and Class of 1938 graduate that Heller met socially in the early 1950s.
Milton S. Eisenhower and Elizabeth McKee
Dave Ellas may have first appeared in one of my father's stories called Dance Every Saturday night. Heller had by then introduced my father to his literary agent, Elizabeth McKee. Mavis McIntosh and Elizabeth McKee had started their own agency, and had advised my father to keep working on his stories, which showed promise, but were still too "fragmentary" to be marketable. Dave Ellas shows up in five of the eight stories: the others are How High; Worried Man, Worried Song and then finally as the narrator in an untitled story that I am calling A Shiny Jigger.
Ono, may have been named for a place: Ono, Pennsylvania. At the top of the story is a quote from a song by Ruth Brown called "Wild Wild Young Men." The story revolves around a college holiday party at a local bar. The young men arrive with their dates, and visit with friends who have joined the service and are living on military bases. They order Fort Pitt beer, which back then was the best selling brand in Pennsylvania. Dave Ellas arrives with Susie, from Dance Every Saturday Night.
My father was the co-editor of Inkling, the campus literary magazine at Penn State. Ono, Pennsylvania may have been chosen because of its similarity to onomatopoeia. Onomatopoeia is often used by writers because it allows the reader to visualize a scene by creating a multi-sensory experience, all with words.
My father's girlfriend at the time was Pat Ellis (later Spock), who introduced my aunt, Jane Porter Yahres, to my uncle, Kenneth Dallmore Eskey. Jane was a runner up for Miss Penn State in 1954. Ken would later go on to become a reporter for Scripps Howard in Washington DC. Ron Bonn was also in Dr. Christie's class, who would go on to work for Walter Cronkite. Dave Jones was the editor of The Daily Collegian, and would go on to work for The New York Times in Detroit, Washington and New York. As national editor, he directed the Times national news report for 14 years, including coverage of four presidential elections. It was a heady time for journalism and writing at Penn State in the 1950s.
The Cold War was raging and book clubs were a popular way for the literary crowd to stay up on best sellers and trending topics. Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man was originally published in 1952 as the first novel by a then unknown author. It remained on the bestseller list for sixteen weeks, won the National Book Award for fiction, and established Ellison as one of the key writers of the century. It is widely known that Ellison was taken by the message of the communist party in the 30s, thinly disguised as an organization called "The Brotherhood" in his book.
1939 was the year that the first Madeline book was published, written by Ludwig Bemelmans about 12 little girls living in an old house in Paris covered with vines. The smallest was Madeline. That was the year that Ike and Mamie returned from Manila, Philippines to the US. Ike was assigned to General DeWitt Clinton, Commander, 15th Infantry, for a short term in Ft. Ord, California. Later, he would become the 13th President of Columbia University, before announcing his candidacy for President of the United States in June 1952 in Abilene, Kansas. He became the 34th President, and served two terms.
My father’s stories are mostly based on stylish dialogue, with references to historical artifacts that actually existed, like Fort Pitt beer and Paule’s Lookout. Paule’s Lookout has since shut down, but the old Fort Pitt brewery is back in operation again as Hitchhiker Brewing Company in Sharpsburg, PA.
Ono describes scenes and people in a way that is much more timeless, using alliteration and adjectives that are evocative of a mood. It appears that my father was starting to bring some of these techniques into Dance Every Saturday Night. Here is the only typewritten section from Ono:
Fine, coldly brilliant, the thin crescent of the new moon edged the dead shadow of the old, reachless high, incontestable, cat's eye of night, the restless immensity of the dark sky rolling over, and down around and away.
From Dance Every Saturday Night:
He lay back and heard the slow squish of the cars passing back and forth over rainy Ridge Road as if from far away. It rained all day Saturday. The spring rain fell like early tears, an hour and hour downpour, big warm drops tumbling down one after another and spattering quietly in the street, as though a sad god were crying softly over the town. He tramped down the same old thirteen steps and out onto the Ridge Road sidewalk, into the rain.
Ellas found himself thinking suddenly of how far apart they were, he and Bill, for all the years they had known each other how different...
The Eisenhower family: Father David; Mother Ida; Brothers: Dwight, Edgar, Earl, Arthur, Roy, and Milton
The stories are mostly based in post-war Pennsylvania, where my father was born and Ike considered home during his Presidency. Eisenhower first came to Gettysburg, PA in 1917. He was in charge of training army soldiers at nearby Camp Colt.
In 1950 he and his wife, Mamie Doud Eisenhower, bought the 189-acre farm for the equivalent of $425,000, spending another $2 million in renovations. A PGA-installed putting green sits in the shadow of a helicopter landing pad. It's only a 10-minute ride from Camp David and 30 minutes from D.C. It's where President JFK came for advice on the Bay of Pigs crisis. Here Eisenhower grew diplomatic relations with world leaders, like French President Charles DeGaulle and Russian President Nikita Khrushchev. Winston Churchill was the Prime Minister of the UK.
My father’s stories take place in different locations such as an elegant apartment in NYC on the 14th floor, an empty soda shop with gutted booths, a modest two-story house where Madeline lives with her parents, a house where Ellas tells the story of his friends' New Year’s Eve escapades in retrospect, a modest home where Jug lives with his parents, and a rural music bar called the Tippin' Inn. There were pay phones on walls and white rotary telephones on small end tables and desks. This was the 1950s and the world looked different.
There are multiple references to the number 14. In A Perfect Flower, the apartment where the Merrimans live is on the 14th floor. Dave Ellas reserves the 14th dance with Susie in Dance Every Saturday Night. In A Shiny Jigger, Ellas is reflecting back on a New Year's Eve in 1944. Jug reserves the 10th and the 13th dances, but Dave Ellas takes Susie home.
Milton S. Eisenhower was an advisor to Ike while he was President at Penn State. Not only did he make frequent trips to the White House, but he also represented his brother on official missions to Latin America, about which he wrote in The Wine Is Bitter (1963), and to the Soviet Union. He drew even closer to his brother in late 1955 following the death of his wife from cancer and the president's heart attack. These two factors, plus the ardent appeal of the board of trustees of Johns Hopkins University, largely accounted for Milton Eisenhower accepting the presidency there in mid-1956.
The Mystery Book
I am still searching for my father's missing book prospectus, sent to Joseph Heller in December 1952 or 1953, the same year that Joseph Stalin died and was replaced by Nikita S. Khrushchev. Catch-18 was published in 1955, the first chapter of what would eventually become Catch-22. The remaining five stories in my father's file are How High; A Perfect Flower; Worried Man, Worried Song; and two without titles that I will call Run, Bobby and A Shiny Jigger. My tentative title for the entire collection is A Perfect Catch: The Dave Ellas Series.
To learn more about the Eisenhower Administration, I recommend Mandate for Change, 1953-1956: The White House Years.
