"Ernest Hemingway And Tony Oliva: A Tale Of How The Great Writer Helped The Great Ballplayer"

Curt DeBerg, originally from Rock Rapids, Iowa, retired from Chico State as a business professor in 2020 and moved to Hendaye, France. Smitten with the travels and travails of Ernest Hemingway (who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954), he published "Traveling The World With Hemingway." But DeBerg is also a lifelong fan of the Minnesota Twins, a totally unrelated preoccupation, right? Maybe not.

Let's go back to the late 1950s, and zoom in on Cuba. A man named Joe Cambria (known as "Papa Joe") scouted for the Washington Senators there "and he liked to have a drink or two in Havana's Floridita bar" (no stranger to Hemingway). In 1961 the Senators moved from Washington and became the Minnesota Twins.

Papa Joe had his eye on a young slugger named Pedro and wanted the Twins to take him on. The trouble was that the young man wasn't so young; in 1960 he would be 22, too old for Twins owner Calvin Griffith to consider. 

Around the same time Hemingway (known of course as "Papa Hemingway"), a baseball fan himself, "was sixty years old and in failing health. He and his fourth wife, Mary, were forced to leave their bucolic estate in Havana. For nearly twenty-two years, the Hemingways had made Cuba their home base."

Could Papa Hemingway have met Papa Joe? DeBerg imagines it happening in his short tale, "Ernest Hemingway And Tony Oliva: A Tale Of How The Great Writer Helped The Great Ballplayer" by Curtis L. DeBerg ($9.95 in paper, self-published; also for Amazon Kindle). For Pedro was Tony Pedro Oliva, inducted on July 24, 2022 into baseball's Hall of Fame.

DeBerg imagines that with Papa Hemingway's help, Pedro was able to use his younger brother Antonio's "birth certificate to fabricate his age in order to obtain a travel visa to the United States." So Pedro became "Tony" Oliva, three years younger than he really was, signing with the Twins as a nineteen-year-old.

Did any of that really happen? Even Tony Oliva's biographer doesn't know for sure. DeBerg's earnest yarn invites readers to think that it could have.

"Resurgam (Rise Again)"

Long-time Chicoan David Dirks, now Brentwood-based, draws on childhood memories for a series of books about the fictional Janzen family. David Janzen tells the story of growing up in the Central California farming town of Del Rio Vista in a Walton-sized family, including his mom and dad (an elementary school science teacher), two brothers and three sisters (including smart-aleck nemesis Kathleen).

Two earlier novels ("The Art of Stretching" and "A Fickle Wind") detail David's balloon experiments; now, in "Resurgam (Rise Again)" ($8.99 in paperback, independently published; also for Amazon Kindle) David enters Del Rio Vista High School and sets his sights on rockets.

The author and I are about the same age, and old friends (I'm a friend and he's old), and he generously thanks me in the acknowledgements. These books evoke a nostalgic charm, a less frantic time when even one's rival-in-rocketry could lend a hand. 

Janzen and his experimenter pal Jack Johnson (fully recovered after a car accident) set out to build a rocket a few feet long, with a nose cone, and to mix their own rocket fuel, all in the name of science. This isn't a fireworks project; it's serious business on the nearby alkali flats complete with spotters and measurements of the flight path.

Not only is there neighborhood competition in rocketry, but rivalry at the upcoming school science fair. As with his balloon experiments, David's rocket launches rarely go off without a hitch but eventually, through some providential meetings with others, David and Jack manage to send something into the skies and into the notebooks for the science fair. Will they beat the others (including a team with attractive Mandy Sandy and her "beatific smile")?

Rocketry has its up and downs (literally), and David faces the deaths of the older town bully, JFK, and his beloved Aunt Martha, who tells him near the end that David must "promise you will not stop being the person God made you be." She teaches him "one Latin word—resurgam. It means I will rise again. On that day, I will rise."

Despite sadness, setbacks, and sputterings, young Janzen's hope burns bright as he faces uncertain years ahead. As do we all.

North State Writers

"I've just rotten a book!" "Uh, it's 'written,' not 'rotten.'" "You haven't read it yet!" An old joke, but if you've ever yearned for non-family feedback on the book you've just composed, or wanted to know how to publish it, or needed encouragement, or just wanted to meet local writers, this column is for you.

A writers group based in Chico has been nurturing authors (and would-be authors) since it was chartered in 2015. North State Writers (northstatewriters.com; also on Facebook under North State Writers Authors Group) is a chapter of the non-profit California Writers Club.

In recent email correspondence, NSW membership chair Gwen Willadsen (gwilladsen@csuchico.edu) noted that general meetings, free and open to the public, are held the third Monday of each month on Zoom and at the Chico Veterans Hall, 554 Rio Lindo, beginning at 6:00 p.m. 

The speaker for the September 19 meeting, Willadsen writes, "will be (novelist) Erin Lindsay McCabe, author of 'I Shall Be Near To You,' a USA Today Bestseller and a Goodreads Choice Awards semi-finalist. … (It's) the story of a strong-willed woman who disguises herself as a man to fight beside her husband in the Civil War. Erin will speak on writing a complete novel in first person, present tense."

Monthly programs "are designed to serve the needs of both published and aspiring writers. Speakers address writing craft, publishing, marketing, and other relevant topics."

There are now about three dozen NSW members; the group is "rebuilding our membership after the effects of the Paradise fire and pandemic and welcomes anyone who loves writing or even just reading books and would find it interesting to learn more about their creation."

If you have a manuscript that needs some attention, Vice President and editor Lynn Tosello has the goods "on what editors can do for writers and how to find and work with one. Our authors have used various methods of publication including print, eBooks, and internet sites." 

NSW leadership includes President Jim Henson and Secretary Susan St. Germaine; members include naval historian (and tracker of Chico running) Cmdr. David Bruhn, YA fantasy author Nick Hanson, and writer/illustrator/muralist Steve Ferchaud.

What better way to get the word out?

"Ice In The Guise Of Fire"

Logan Malloy, ruthless owner of a local gossip rag in a frigid, hoity-toity resort area of Plumas County, will never sip martinis again. "She sees a gun pointed at her heart, and awareness instantly reduces to the dark width of the barrel…. She feels a painless thud in her chest, a seizing sensation, followed by a white-hot deep burn…. The last image her brain records is the indifferent face of her murderer as she grapples, vacillates between gasps of incredulity and the terror of drifting, helpless, fading, and dying."

No one mourns her passing in the resort town of Moluku Lake, "nestled in the Sierra Nevada." Manipulative, conspiring, Malloy can make or break a person, and has lately become a partisan in the battle between owners of the exclusive Eagle's Nest resort and the insurgent Maidu who want to build a casino (which would cut the Eagle's Nest business in half). At least that's the view of the Nest's owner/operators, Atticus Flynn and Eli Lucas.

The problem for Moluku Lake's police chief, Howard Billings, is that pretty much everyone in town is on the suspect list. These are people with money and with lots to hide (good-hearted Billings himself is having an affair). So he calls in Butte County sheriff Jason Noble and two deputies, Kevin Rodriguez and Lt. Lauren Riley (for whom the divorced sheriff has a deep but hidden desire). Butte County has a morgue. And Billings himself may be implicated.

Thus begins "Ice In The Guise Of Fire" ($11.95 in paperback from Weston Writes; also for Amazon Kindle) by novelist Nancy Weston, who has fashioned a deliciously scandalous police procedural. Everyone is having some kind of affair; even sheriff Noble must overcome his longing for Lt. Riley, half European and half Maidu. Does Riley's Maidu mother, who lives in the area, know more than she's telling?

Throw in a mayor-on-the-take, trophy wives with things to hide, secret rooms, security cameras, a Logan Malloy understudy who wants to be the new king-maker, the sinister meaning of a flower, and, oh yes, a couple of other deaths--and readers are in for a wild romp in more ways than one.