Because I Said So: Launching youngest daughter in first grade has its hurdles

As a kid growing up with books of science fiction and black-and-white movies ful of creatures and oddities from outer space, my entire universe consisted of Earth and Mars. Sure, the Moon was there, but the Moon is a neighbor, as familiar to us all as the property fence or a dog's bark. But Mars is the next neighborhood over, familiar for its proximity, yet alien with its different trees, styles of houses, cars and people who look just like us, though they're not neighbors; not completely.

And yet Mars is close. Certainly close enough for alien beings to fly a saucer over for a cup of sugar or to sit on the porch for a spell and, eventually, eat that neighbor's dog. It's close enough for me to have thought as a kid that we Earthlings would one day put a craft, if not a person, on Mars. It was doable. Of course it would be possible, we put a man on the Moon and Mars is just around the corner from there, isn't it?

Probably a stranger concept to a 7-year-old boy than one day touching the surface of Mars is parenthood. Being a father was an entire galaxy away from where I was, and as alien as whatever that was that came from the ship at the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. At that age, there is no way a parent could understand what we feel, our fears, our interests, our complete inability to comprehend time and distance in outer space. And yet, when I took G to first grade last week and she melted into me with tears and pleading not to have to go to school, I knew exactly where it was she was coming from. It wasn't Mars, or even the Moon, it was a time and a place I remember well. It's another world called Childhood and it is as strange and exotic a place to me now as a planet called Parenthood seemed to me 35 years ago.

We're all explorers going through new worlds blindly whether those worlds encompass another planet, another continent, the next street over or being responsible for another little life. It's all exciting and, we find out, it's all very reachable. What we need to do is keep our eyes and ears open, learn as much about the landscape as we can and try to enjoy the ride.

This week's Because I Said So column from The Commercial Appeal:

Launching youngest daughter in first grade has its hurdles

Last week, I scattered my four kids like comet tails and left them with their various teachers at their various schools. For the older kids, this is old hat, they're pros who have been at this for years. They may not like it — in fact they don't — but they understand the routine and joined the countdown to the launch of another Memphis City Schools academic year.

But then there's Genevieve. She's the youngest and the most spirited, some will say. A challenge, her parents say. Things did not go well that first morning of first grade. There was a lot of clinging and tears, and even some desperate pleas for her sentence to first grade to be commuted. Alas, I left her there in the capable hands of Mrs. Armstrong and the whole Richland Elementary crew.

I came home, walked the couple of blocks back, and turned on the Internet to see that NASA's Mars rover Curiosity had landed safely the night before. Space exploration fascinates me, and I was enthralled watching video images from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, as the rover touched down and the scientists went crazy with exultation.

That celebration was rightly deserved. Those people landed a buggy on a planet 35 million miles away with more ease and less drama than I had landed my daughter in a first-grade classroom two blocks away. Granted, they're rocket scientists and I'm only a parent, and parenting isn't rocket science. Or is it? Maybe when scientists come upon a complex theorem that becomes easily proven, they say, "Well, it isn't parenting."

Adam Steltzner, a mechanical engineer with the laboratory, said the rover's landing "is the result of reasoned engineering thought." Reasoned thought is as unnatural to a 6-year-old as space travel. When told that school can be fun or that it won't last so long or that her friends will be right there with her, all she can imagine is an endless expanse of black sky, a vacuum of loneliness.

Upon re-entry into the school's atmosphere, while dodging other children and supply-laden parents, my daughter began to break apart, the heat from the classroom too much to bear; the promise of another school year built up until not even her protective khaki jumper could withstand the pressure and she exploded in a barrage of tears. And what could I do? I'm helpless. I'm a parent. I'm ground control, yet I failed to keep her grounded in any sense of safety and serenity, while floating there among her friends and siblings.

They call it the "seven minutes of terror." That's how long scientists had to wait upon Curiosity's entry into the Mars atmosphere before they found out whether their rover was intact on the surface of the planet. It takes us about seven minutes to walk to school in the morning, but I had to wait seven hours to find out that Genevieve did eventually compose herself, that she acclimated to the foreign surroundings of first grade and that her own curiosity about it all proved to be stronger than her home's gravitational pull.

Richard J. Alley is the father of two boys and two girls. Read more from him at uurrff.blogspot.com. Become a fan of "Because I Said So" on Facebook: facebook.com/alleygreenberg.

© 2012 Memphis Commercial Appeal. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

The Boost of the Olive Tree

Okay all you bookish people out there, it's time to rally the troops. My good friend Courtney Miller Santo has a major book release next Tuesday, Aug. 21, with The Roots of the Olive Tree (William Morrow). She has a lot of author events upcoming in places like San Francisco, Seattle, Nashville, Portland, Oxford and Asheville, so if you're in any of those cities, get out there and support her. And tell your friends!

Courtney also needs some reviews circulating out there, so give the book a read and tell the world what you think. Doesn't have to be long, just a few sentences, a paragraph or two, on your connection to the characters and stories. Now, we here at Urf! are big on books - paper, binding, covers, the whole package - but for those of you who like to download a novel and read it on your computer phones, the publisher has a great deal for you. For the rest of this week only, you can download The Roots of the Olive Tree eBook for only $4.99. You can do that right here. So go do that, I'll wait ...

Now, once you've read it, say something about it at the following sites (your review can be copied and pasted into each site to make things simpler):

Barnes & Noble (Scroll to the very bottom of the page to review)

Amazon (You can review the electronic copy now, but not the hardback)

Books-A-Million (Scroll to the lower third of the page, account creation required)

Reviews are also accepted at the Apple Store if an iPad or iPod are your preferred mediums

I was lucky enough to read an advanced reader's copy back in the spring and said a little something about it here.

I also wrote a feature on Courtney for The Commercial Appeal that ran in the paper on May 31, 2012. I'll copy that below so you can get a feel for where Courtney's story began and how it evolved. If this isn't enough, you can read her winning story for the 2012 Memphis Magazine Fiction Contest right here.

Thank you all for your help!

Writer's first novel followed storybook path to publication

Courtney Miller Santo grew up in conditions fertile for a burgeoning writer, a conservative Mormon household with seven children where there was no television to be found. Instead, the large and close family told stories and created plays. They interacted in ways almost unheard of today. And they read.

"My dad was always reading, he would go to bed at 9, and he would always have a book," Santo said of her father, an elevator mechanic.

Santo, the oldest of those seven children, describes her childhood just outside of Portland in Milwaukie, Ore., as "chaotic," yet a bookish manner set in and has paid off for her in a big way as she prepares for her debut novel, "The Roots of the Olive Tree" (William Morrow), to be released in August.

The story is threaded along one olive-growing season, taking a look at the lives of five generations of firstborn daughters and Anna, the 112-year-old matriarch, who wants to be the oldest living human being in the world.

The story, set at Hill House and the family's olive groves in northern California, centers on a geneticist coming to study the longevity of the family just as the youngest, Erin, returns home alone and pregnant.

It's a combination that, the dust jacket of an advance reader copy explains, "ignites explosive emotions that these women have kept buried and uncovers revelations that will shake them all to their roots."

It's a novel with a road to publication almost as intriguing as the tale within the pages. Santo entered her manuscript in Amazon's Breakthrough Novel Award competition in 2011. Out of 5,000 entrants, she made it to the semifinals and the remaining 50 hopefuls. And then she was eliminated. But that's only the beginning of the story because she was then contacted by an agent with the Janklow & Nesbit Associates literary agency who had read the manuscript excerpts posted at Amazon, and wanted to represent Santo.

It is on the West Coast where olives grow and fantasies are realized, and it was there in summer 2011 that Santo's life changed. "I was in the middle of this cross-country vacation that had been planned forever ... and the day after we get home to my grandmother's house in Vancouver (Wash.), she (the agent) calls me and says, 'Sit down, I have an offer, and it's a really good offer,' and she told me the offer, and I was glad I was sitting down because I did not believe it."

That offer was that the book, along with an unwritten second book, would be sold to William Morrow, an imprint of Harper Collins, for six figures. Foreign rights for "The Roots of the Olive Tree" have already been sold to Italy, England, Spain, Germany, Holland and Turkey.

Santo doesn't downplay luck in this adventure. "It just doesn't seem real; it didn't seem real for a very, very, very long time," she said. "This is the dream; this does not happen that you get a company that is so excited about a debut novelist that they put this much publicity and effort into it. I feel crazy lucky."

The women of her novel might be illustrated by a photograph Santo keeps in her office, a tiny concrete bunker on the University of Memphis campus. It's one of her and her daughter flanked by her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother. Santo is a collector of stories. "My mother is a storyteller," she says. "I come from a long line of storytellers on both sides." Some she recalls verbatim in her fiction, those from decades of family lore, and others from time spent as a journalist, and others she presses like olives for the oil and essence that add flavor to her characters.

Though her love of reading and the idea of writing began in the Pacific Northwest, at the age of 18, she "decided to get as far away from home as possible" and went to school at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va. She met her future husband, Charlie, there and studied journalism. "I'm very practical, so to say something like, 'I want to write a book' seemed very stupid; it's like saying 'I want to be an astronaut.' Whereas being a journalist, you get your name in print every single day and you automatically get the title of writer. I think sometimes writers have a hard time owning that title."

She worked for the Roanoke Times and the Charlottesville Daily Progress. From those days as a journalist, Santo learned to love fact-checking and says that when she gets writer's block now, she does research. "Whenever I would get stuck, I had this huge stack of books that I checked out from the library about olive cultivation, and if I got stuck writing, I would just pick it up and start to read about how to take a branch from one olive tree and splice it into another olive tree, or about blight."

She would eventually end up in Memphis, where her husband took a job as associate professor of city and regional planning with the U of M, and it was here that she really began to own that title of writer. She worked as the editor of The Lamplighter, the newspaper of the Cooper-Young neighborhood, and was accepted into the Moss Workshop in Fiction, a community writing workshop with novelist Richard Bausch. "Once I got into his class, I realized all kinds of things, like there was such a thing as an MFA program," she said, laughing. "So Richard encouraged me to apply, and I got in and I got serious about writing."

The Moss Workshop took the idea of being a writer, in her mind, from being "abstract and foolish, to something that seemed plausible. But even though it seemed plausible, it's still not something I ever expected to happen in the way that it did." Through the MFA program, she met and worked with mentors such as Tom Russell and Cary Holladay.

"Cary really taught me that if you're going to write for somebody besides yourself, it comes down to revision," Santo said. "You have to be willing to roll your sleeves up and get into the prose and redo it, it's never perfect the first time out."

"She really listened, and she can recognize a good suggestion, and then she can just tear into it," Holladay said of her student and friend. "She's a very aggressive reviser of her work and, of course, it helps that she's got terrific talent and she's extremely well-read."

Last year was a good year for Santo, who also won the 2011 Memphis Magazine Fiction Contest for a short story that will appear in the upcoming June issue. "Her stories are just fun to read," Holladay said. "They're rich, and they're revelatory in terms of human character and experience."

Santo has her hands full with two children, Sophia, 9, and C.J., 7, and the writing of her second book as she anxiously awaits the release of "The Roots of the Olive Tree." But she loves teaching and intends to continue doing so with her undergraduate fiction and literature classes, saying, "I'm a better writer because I teach; it keeps me honest. It's very difficult to critique a student's work and see an error, or a way that it could be written stronger, and then not go back to your own work and recognize every single mistake that you've made."

Says Holladay: "I was eager to get her in the classroom, and right away I saw how comfortable she was as a teacher and how much her students liked her."

Though she writes these days in a place far from the Pacific Northwest, it's a land fertile with writers, where the streets teem with character. It's where her family has put down roots and made a home. "I feel like if you're on the right track, you get little nods along the way," she says. "So I feel like we made the right decision to move to Memphis as a family, and it's been the best decision we've made personally and professionally."

Type

Photo from Smith Journal

Because I Said So: It's not about who wins -- oh, who are we fooling?

Years ago I got caught up in playing chess online. It was a lot of fun, but maybe a little too fun as I found myself consumed with it, having half a dozen or more games going at once. Some matches were quick, back and forth games, while others, those being played with people on the other side of the planet, were longer affairs with turns being taken during each of our waking hours. I finally had to let it go. I finished a final game and never went back to the site. I was spending too much time thinking about my next moves and checking the status of ongoing games.

So when I received an invitation from Andria to play Words With Friends, Facebook's answer to Scrabble, I hesitated (which would be a great Words With Friends word), and when Kristy then joined in the fray, I wavered (also a good play), but I finally had to sip from the pitcher of Kool-Aid being served me.

I've really only dipped my toe into the pool of possible number of games, but I've found Words With Friends to be just as big a time suck as chess was. But it is highly entertaining, and I keep telling myself that I'm using my brain. I'm using language! It's probably educational.

I've won quite a few games while a couple of opponents (Caleb and Steph) seem unbeatable and are probably cheating, though I haven't figured out how yet. My uncle Aldo from Georgia challenged me to a game out of nowhere and thrummed me soundly. In a follow-up game he seemed to have other things on his mind, or perhaps I was actually playing his son, my 7-year-old cousin Aldo, the entire time, because I managed to eek out a win.

It's been fun, if not time consuming. I'm not sure I'll keep up with it, I may just drop it the way I did cyber-chess. Until that time, though, I'll keep searching for the perfect use for this 'Q' and gleaning whatever column fodder I can from the distractions the Internet offers.

Today's "Because I Said So" column in The Commercial Appeal:

It isn't about winning and losing.

I have a child who comes home from school each day, tackles his homework (always homework first!), and then it's straight to the computer or the Wii for an afternoon of video games. Within a half-hour, I can hear his anguished cries of defeat and near, so very near, expletives.

It's an addiction, the video games. I can see the sweat beading on his forehead when he's away from it too long, the trembling in his thumbs. On Saturday mornings, he's the first one up and standing in front of the television playing whatever his current obsession might be. These days, it's one featuring an elf who may or may not be riding on a seahorse and wielding a large butter knife. I'm awakened by the vocal frustrations of his losing a round to a gnome riding a starfish, or something.

The blips and bright lights of this simulated world are all too real for him, the losses far too personal, and this is an issue.

So we stick with the tried-and-true mantra -- it isn't about winning or losing; it's about enjoying the challenge itself. This, of course, falls on deaf ears, or ears too stimulated by the bells and whistles of the game.

I know of what I speak. I should admit to you that I've stopped writing this column no fewer than three times to check on the seven different games of "Words With Friends" that I have going at the moment. I'm happy to say that I'm winning five of them. This makes for a good afternoon regardless of what we, as parents, insist.

If you're not familiar with "Words With Friends," it's the online version of what we used to call Scrabble. Alec Baldwin was recently and famously removed from an airplane for refusing to end a "Words With Friends" game; it's addictive enough to forfeit first class.

As a child, I spent long evenings with my family around the dining room table attempting to parse vocabulary words from the "Q," "P" and five "E's" in my rack. Aunts and uncles would come over, and we'd make a night out of it with snacks and good-natured competition. The adults appeared to be more interested in winning and not losing.
I'm still playing with my uncle Aldo, who is 500 miles away in Cordele, Ga. And I'm playing with my wife and a friend, who are sitting 6 feet away on the sofa (I'm winning all three of these games).

Is this a new era of family game night? Games are being played, perhaps not in the same room, or even the same time zone. The fun is in the games themselves and not necessarily the winning face-to-face (I just took the lead in a sixth game), and my win over a friend in Midtown is no more enjoyable than the experience of the humiliating defeat at the thumbs of one in East Memphis.

My son isn't yet into "Words With Friends," though I expect he will be soon enough. And when he is, I'm sure he'll be a force to reckon with if his scores on vocabulary tests and his skill maneuvering that seahorse-riding elf are any indication.

Until the time I'm able to crush his spirit in cyber-Scrabble from across the house, or across the room, though, I'll continue preaching the ideology we've discussed.

And, of course, to always do as I say and not as I "D-O" (3 points!). 

Richard J. Alley is the father of two boys and two girls. Read more from him at uurrff.blogspot.com. Become a fan of "Because I Said So" on Facebook: facebook.com/alleygreenberg. 

© 2012 Memphis Commercial Appeal. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Because I Said So: Sci-fi has become fact for wired-in generation

Column 12/8/11

I recently had the pleasure of sitting in on a lecture given by hometown son Joel Seligstein, Memphis City Schools graduate and current Facebook software engineer. He was in town from California to visit family and to speak to the eighth-grade CLUE class at White Station Middle School about his work.

It was like going back in time for me, sitting in a school auditorium again, a time machine lacking in leg room with the same small seats, the same smell of adolescence and apathy I remember from so long ago. Except this was the future. We were all there to hear about how the machines make Facebook run.

As a testament to Facebook's popularity, it wasn't until close to 20 minutes into the talk that Joel even asked the assembled 100-plus students how many use the social network. Naturally, nearly every hand went up, including mine.

But I wonder. Certainly many of those students, if not all, have accounts, and have for years. But how active are they? Two of my four children are online, yet their interaction seems limited to a status update here, a snarky comment there. My theory is that their lack of activity is due to the fact that I and their mother, and our friends, are on it. Many people still tend to think of Facebook as a kid's toy, some sort of video game, yet I know close to 700 adults who participate.

When we were kids, our parents' social network consisted of neighbors and work colleagues whom we never saw. We didn't want any part of their social networking. We preferred them to be as anti-social as possible, to focus all of their attention on us and our need for action figures and the new fad of cable television.

People my age find the Internet and its social networks so fascinating, I think, because it's science fiction to us. It's all 1970s drive-in movies, it's George Lucas and Stanley Kubrick, it's "Logan's Run" and "Alien." And, with such a large population in cyberspace and on social networking sites posting so much detailed information about their users, not unlike a menu, I'm afraid it's a little bit of "Soylent Green" as well.

Social networks satisfy our nostalgia for the future.

While our children have grown up in the computer age, we never even dreamed we'd be living in a world that requires secret passwords. Secret passwords! And computers in our pockets. Pocket-size! To do anything as simple and mundane as banking these days, we have to have a username. A code name! I regularly receive text messages on my pocket computer from my 13-year-old son that require a decoder. Aggravating!

Short of jetpacks and flying cars, it's everything we were promised as kids, running around outside (the Internet has deleted any reason to even go outside anymore) and pretending to be The Six-Million Dollar Man, Luke Skywalker or Charlton Heston.

But our children take it as a matter of course. iPod? Same-old, same-old. They take their 4G Network for granted just as we must have taken, I don't know, sticks, for granted.

As our kids grow, they'll expect more and better. They'll expect faster and no spam (there was no spam in our childhood scenarios on Tatooine or in the Fortress of Solitude). Kids today will walk in the clouds, in a cloud technology that allows a middle school student in Memphis to show and tell with his new Facebook friend in California.

Richard J. Alley is the father of two boys and two girls. Read more from him at uurrff.blogspot.com. Become a fan of "Because I Said So" on Facebook: facebook.com/alleygreenberg. 

© 2011 Memphis Commercial Appeal. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

To Great Lengths

Before I went to interview Emil Henry for yesterday's story in The Commercial Appeal (Writing mountaineer bio a career pinnacle, Oct. 17, 2011), I was given detailed instructions for how to get to his house inside the gated community within Chickasaw Gardens. E-mailed instructions that included the suggestion I bring my cell phone along just in case something comes up.

And something did come up! The power was out in the whole subdivision, so the electric gate didn't work. Someone standing on the other side of that gate sent me around to the south side of the community where there is an emergency gate used by the fire department, service vehicles, etc. At that gate there was a line of cars waiting to get out, we were all waiting on the security guard to come let us out and in. When he showed up, he had trouble manually opening the large, iron gate by himself, so I jumped out and gave him a hand.

It's arduous, sometimes, what we go through to get a story. Take Emil Henry, for instance. He scaled the Matterhorn in the Swiss Alps in 1984 at the age of 55. When I asked him about it, his answer reminded me of George Costanza telling that woman that he built the addition on the Guggenheim: "Didn't take very long, either."

Was it difficult? I asked Mr. Henry. "No, not really," he replied. Seems they have ropes attached to the summit to help a climber pull him or herself up the rest of the way. That's helpful. It took him nine hours total, from bottom to top and back down - a regular work day without a proper lunch is all. He was quick to say, however, that 431 people have perished trying to scale that summit.

The story was in the writing of the book about the first man ever to scale the Matterhorn, Edward Whymper. Henry traveled to Switzerland, France, Italy and England for the facts; all on his own time, all on his own dime. I don't write nonfiction, other than these pieces for the newspapers and magazines, but there is something appealing about traveling halfway around the world for an in-depth story. It's work, certainly, but what an adventure.

Speaking of work, Henry was the chairman of the FCC for a bit, appointed at the age of 34 by John Kennedy in 1962. There are stories about that that had no place in the newspaper story about his book. For instance, when he first traveled to Geneva as an FCC representative, it was for a conference on radio frequencies to be used in space. Moscow and Washington were in a race to the moon and it needed to be determined who would use which frequencies up there. Isn't that civil?

And, as chairman of the FCC, Henry was the last official visitor to the White House before Kennedy was assassinated. He was in the Oval Office escorting a dignitary from England or some place, immediately after which JFK and Jackie left for New Orleans and then Dallas the following day. Henry was having lunch with his English counterpart when the Brit was called to the phone, returning to inform Henry that his president had just been killed.

Incidentally, the last unofficial visitor to the White House was Nat King Cole, who Henry saw there taking photos with JFK as he left.

There are stories everywhere! Stories on mountaintops, stories locked behind dead gates in Chickasaw Gardens and stories that might be realized in the following days with a phone call or a communiqué over an as-yet determined radio frequency.


Writing mountaineer bio a career pinnacle

To hear Emil Henry tell it, climbing the Matterhorn at 55 years old wasn't so difficult. There was little training, only to be tested on skills, endurance and altitude sickness; it wasn't even a life's dream.

"As tall, high mountains go, it's probably the easiest of all the high mountains in the Alps now," Henry said of the summit that has seen 431 deaths, 58 in the 21st century alone.

Researching and writing a biography of Edward Whymper, the first person ever to scale the 14,690-foot mountain, however, became a monumental task of endurance, travel and expense. And a challenge he wouldn't give up for anything.

"It turned out to be the most enjoyable occupation of my life," Henry said of the book, "Triumph and Tragedy: The Life of Edward Whymper" ($18.31).

Henry, now 82 with three children and five grandchildren, began life in Memphis, growing up in Chickasaw Gardens before going away to a boarding high school in Pennsylvania and college at Yale. He joined the Navy during the Korean War, spending three years on a destroyer in the Pacific Ocean, and then went to Vanderbilt for law school.

After practicing law in Memphis for five years, he was appointed to the Federal Communications Commission in 1962. When the chairman resigned only eight months later, Henry was appointed, "at the ripe old age of 34," chairman of the FCC by President John F. Kennedy.

It was in 1963, while in Geneva for a conference as the FCC representative, that Henry was first approached with the idea of climbing the Matterhorn. "I don't do that," he said. "It's not my thing." He reconsidered 21 years later when a business colleague suggested he contact mountain guide Rickie Andenmatten.

"My guide (Andenmatten) said, 'Emilio, you're going to get waked up at 4 o'clock, get dressed, eat a light breakfast, we're going to walk out the door at 4:30 and it's action, action, action'," Henry said. "We got to the top of the Matterhorn at 9:30."

It took five hours to scale the mountain and four hours to descend, Henry said. "My legs were jelly."
The Matterhorn is part of the Swiss Alps and sits on the border of Italy and Switzerland. With its iconic summit and difficulty to conquer, it was known during the Golden Age of Mountaineering (1854-1865) as the "impossible mountain."

Edward Whymper was a young Englishman -- only 25 at the time he became the first to scale the Matterhorn in 1865 -- who would also become an accomplished author, artist, photographer, lecturer and natural scientist who researched the causes of altitude sickness. "He was many things, and this book is about all of those things."

It was the discovery in a Zermatt bookstore of Whymper's own book, "Scrambles Amongst the Alps," first published in 1871 and still in print in an abridged version in 1984, that led to Henry's fascination with the adventurer. Whymper wrote several other books, but the only full biography on the man was one published in 1940. "It was highly dated and highly opinionated, and it did not give a full picture of the man, in my opinion," Henry said.

So Henry set about to write a comprehensive book about not only Whymper, but also the circumstances surrounding the Golden Age of Mountaineering, the physical challenges, triumphs and tragedies, and the majestic mountains themselves. "Part of the allure of this book was due to the romantic appeal of the Alps themselves and the Alpine regions," he said. "Chapter 3 is only about the Alps, how they were formed in geological time, what they look like, how they differ from the Himalayas, the spirited amateurs who climbed them, the chalets and haylofts where the climbers found shelter. I compare the early mountaineers to the aviation pioneers."

The writing was an expedition in itself, taking Henry to England, Wales, Switzerland, France and Italy. "I wanted to do justice to the man, I wanted it to be a serious biography ... so I spent a lot of time at the Alpine Club Library in London."

It was all research paid for out of his own pocket, he said, adding, "I'm not in it for the money." There were several publishing houses and agents interested in the manuscript, including several in the United States and Random House in London. "I finally decided that companies and agents were not going to publish an octogenarian, unpublished lawyer." He ultimately self-published the 428-page book through Troubador Publishing in the UK, where Whymper is vastly better known.

The book is for sale through all online retailers, as an e-book and at the Booksellers of Laurelwood, where Henry recently held a reading and book signing.

The Golden Age of Mountaineering ended with Whymper's ascent of the Matterhorn in 1865, not because he proved the "impossible mountain" could be conquered, but quite the opposite. On the descent, four members of his team plummeted thousands of feet to their deaths, the worst tragedy in mountain climbing history. The sport has changed over the years with improved technology and a better understanding of the conditions the human body can withstand.

But what haven't changed are the public's fascination with the environment and man's need to push himself and challenge the unknown within. In his book, Henry explores the life of a true adventurer and a theme which helped Henry push himself to the summit.

"What I tried to do and what I've done, I think, is to create the story of this man's life and, in so doing, illuminate as best I can his character and the things that set him aside from other people," Henry said. "So it's not just about mountaineering, but mountaineering ... goes a long way in explaining the kind of man he was."

© 2011 Memphis Commercial Appeal. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Because I Said So: Low-tech telecom new frontier for digital kids

S reads

The kids get a kick out of seeing their name in print. G's teacher still has a column featuring G hanging in the classroom and G reminds me of that almost daily. When I told S that today's column mentions her, she demanded to read it beforehand. I didn't let her, I have enough editors as it is. Instead, she waited until this morning and read it in the newspaper while she ate her waffle. She seemed pleased. It doesn't seem to matter whether I'm making fun of them or not, they just like knowing they got a mention. And that their names are spelled right.

Being in the same room with S as she tries to learn the nuances of an actual, land line telephone is maddening. I couldn't even describe it all in the limited space - the way she'll answer the phone with silence, waiting for the person on the other end to speak first; or the way she is stopped cold with her deer-in-the-headlights eyes when someone other than the kid she's calling answers the phone. Don't even get me started on her use of the speaker phone.

I couldn't catch it all, but I think I got the gist of it down for today's Commercial Appeal. It's something we all go through, it's something we all went through. So, if you will, please take the phone off the hook and give today's column a read.

For more than a decade, we haven't had a home telephone. Like so many others, we grew tired of telemarketers, wrong numbers and the double billing on top of our cell phones.

But our kids continue to age and become more social. It had become time for either a home phone or pockets full of cell phones when a giant corporation made us a deal promising free HBO, a land line and terrible service.

How could we say no?

The kids have never known a home phone. It was like a prop from one of those classic films they like, one from the 1980s. They approached the thin, silvery wand the way a pet might advance on a new animal in its territory. They walked around it, sniffed it and pushed at it with their filthy paws.

Once we convinced them that it was OK, that it was like any other piece of technology they know, they relaxed. It was lifted gingerly from its cradle to be further scrutinized and then pointed at the television. It was aimed at the Wii and searched over for an Internet portal. In an effort to dial up YouTube, my son may have dialed Japan.

Alexander Graham Bell shouted into the first telephone, "Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you!" My 9-year-old daughter first shouted into her new telephone, "It's Somerset! Hello? Is this thing even on?"

The receiver was not a room away as he had been in 1876, but blocks away, and I'm certain Somerset's friend heard her as much through the windows and over air as she did through the telephone.

A recent cartoon in The New Yorker shows two children walking, each carrying a backpack as if to school, and one says to the other, "So, hw ws yr smmr?" The caption reads: First Day Back To Verbal Communication.

We've taught our children to say "please" and "thank you," to clear their dirty dishes and to hold the door for those behind them, but phone etiquette is a new frontier. They've grown up in a world of cell phones, texts, instant messaging and the shorthand required to navigate these networks. It has seeped into their speech. The phrase, "May I speak to ..." is as foreign to them as how and why to make an emoticon is to me.

Technology is not lost on kids today. They are able to grasp the intricacies of buttons, touch screens, mice and cursors. It's the concept of technological regression they can't quite fathom. The rotary phones of my childhood would have been out of the question for these children of the 21st century. They would lose interest in whatever it was they or their friends had to say by the fourth digit in the telephone number.

"My voice travels through wires?" they said that day, looking at the cordless phone.

"Eventually, yes," I said, exasperated. "It's like a telegraph machine. Go look it up on Wikipedia. No, you can't get to Wikipedia on that phone."

Richard J. Alley is the father of two boys and two girls. Read more from him at uurrff.blogspot.com. Become a fan of "Because I Said So" on Facebook: facebook.com/alleygreenberg.

 
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