"The Last Lead Holders: Quest For Fulfillment"

Construction Superintendent and architect Richard Deatherage of Citrus Heights retired his lead pencil in 2009. Drawing by hand he became "the youngest Project Coordinator/Architectural Draftsman in the State of California's history by the age of 20."

He offered to pick up his pencil once again after he learned his friends Andy and Barb Pilgram of Paradise, and their twin daughters' families in Magalia, had lost their homes in the Camp Fire. He ended up designing a home for one of the twins, Jessica Anderson and her husband Elijah, and it's now being built in Magalia.

Deatherage tells his own story, through 2009, in a rollicking memoir, an homage to his parents, especially his late father who "showed us how to live our lives to the fullest and to dream, as we each grew into manhood." "I had no sisters," he adds, "only brothers, and we just beat each other up for entertainment."

"The Last Lead Holders: Quest For Fulfillment" ($19.76 in paperback, self-published; also for Amazon Kindle) details his "adventures growing up in the 1960s and 1970s throughout America as an official United States Air Force Brat (USAFB)." Before he developed much of a conscience, he writes, he was not exactly an angel. (He set up a bootlegging operation to make extra cash when he was underage.)

The book is replete with "now it can be told" hijinks, but they are laid out against a somber experience of "racism in Mississippi in the late 1960s as a young white child; ... being involved in the bussing of all-white children to an all-black school in second grade; ... my parents' unknown struggles at home while my father was being transferred overseas and while he was in the war in Vietnam."

The turning point comes in 1979 when Richard's San Juan High School mechanical drafting teacher puts him on detention and challenges him to design a custom home. At 16 his plans are accepted by the building department. And so a career is born.

Lessons learned? We all need erasers, the "Last Lead Holder" puts it, and we all need to recognize "until the end of racism" that "we were always one." 

"Going Out In Style: The Architecture Of Eternity"

With books such as "Stories In Stone: A Field Guide To Cemetery Symbolism And Iconography" and "Forever L.A.: A Field Guide To Los Angeles Area Cemeteries And Their Residents," Chico writer-photographer Douglas Keister has unearthed extraordinary tales of the dearly departed. His interest in funerary art began with a ground-breaking collaboration with Xavier Cronin, an editor at American Cemetery magazine, in a book first published in 1997.

A new edition is now available. "Going Out In Style: The Architecture Of Eternity" ($24.95 in hardcover from Echo Point Books & Media, echopointbooks.com) features an introduction by Cronin and hundreds of Keister's full-color photographs and captivating captions. As a blurb notes, "mausoleums, statues, and memorials are a connection between the modern world and the generations that went before us."

"The word mausoleum," Cronin writes, "is derived from the name Mausolus, king of Halicarnassus, a great harbor city in the kingdom of Caria in Asia Minor (modern Turkey), whose tomb was a huge fortress build in 353 B.C. by Mausolus's wife Artemisia (who happened also to be his sister)." Some years later, in 1831, "the rise of the American mausoleum begins with our first 'rural' cemetery--Mount Auburn, just down the street from Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts."

Keister's chapters focus on architectural styles, what's inside the tombs, the depiction of humans in the cemetery, public buildings in the cemetery, and creative funerary arts (such as the Cogswell Monument in Oakland, a "70-foot granite obelisk crowned with a 10-inch rose crystal star and surrounded by curious carved stone sculptures" depicting Faith, Hope, Charity, and Temperance; dentist Henry Daniel Cogswell, who died in 1900, "was an ardent foe of demon rum").

Inside the Blocher Monument at Forest Lawn Cemetery in New York one can find a statue of Nelson Blocher, who passed away in 1884, "resting peacefully on his back," carved from "gleaming white Carrara marble." It's said Blocher died of a broken heart when his philanthropist father fired Blocher's true love, a maid who worked for ol' dad, who, "perhaps motivated by guilt," honored Blocher "with this eccentric memorial."

Who better to bring these stories to light than Keister, Chico's premier "crypt-ographer"?

"Storybook Style: America's Whimsical Homes Of The 1920s"

Chico writer/photographer Doug Keister (www.douglaskeister.com) has teamed with architect and syndicated columnist Arrol Gellner for a study of what they call “consummate artifice.” Their sumptuously illustrated coffee-table book examines the development and spread of "Storybook Style: America's Whimsical Homes Of The 1920s" ($34.99 in hardcover from Schiffer Publishing).

Blame it on Los Angeles; “… it is perhaps inevitable that the the epicenter of the Storybook style—that most theatrical of design modes—lies in the capital of make-believe: Hollywood.” In the Roaring Twenties “movie people” wanted homes to match their status. “Unlike the sedate manors of bankers and businessmen,” the authors write, “these houses would be fanciful monuments to the pathologically flamboyant, … evoking the appearance of long-gone eras and faraway lands.”

Period Revival included more than just Storybook homes but as motion pictures brought exotic styles into theaters around the country, whimsey took hold. “The Storybook style’s arrival into the mainstream was all but certified when Sears, Roebuck and Co. offered a medievalizing English cottage in its catalog of 1931, complete with catslide roof and rubble-stone trim around the entrance.”

The history of the Storybook style is a bit more complicated than that, and the book details many of the complexities. But readers will also find an abundance of anecdotes and hundreds of photographs, including of a Storybook house on Arbutus Avenue in Chico (showing “a curiously tentative use of random brick in the chimney”) and four pages on Chico’s Eastwood Park tract, developed by Oroville E. Tracy from 1926-1929.

Clinker bricks make frequent appearances. At first “considered discards, having been vitrified by over-firing and hence emitting a distinctive clinking sound when struck,” their “distorted shapes and dark purplish colors” proved to be irresistible to the Storybook sensibility.

Readers will revel in this serious history of a fanciful period.

Doug Keister is scheduled to be interviewed by Nancy Wiegman on Nancy's Bookshelf this Friday from 10:00 - 11:00 a.m. on mynspr.org, North State Public Radio (91.7 FM). This marks the tenth anniversary of Nancy's Bookshelf, and it’s fitting that Keister will open his "storybook" as a kind of tribute to Nancy’s long and fruitful series of author interviews.