{"id":3475,"date":"2012-06-02T16:04:35","date_gmt":"2012-06-02T16:04:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/?page_id=3475"},"modified":"2012-06-12T16:02:16","modified_gmt":"2012-06-12T16:02:16","slug":"the-elmore-leonard-interviews-part-8","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/?page_id=3475","title":{"rendered":"The Elmore Leonard Interviews, Part 8"},"content":{"rendered":"

Crimeculture is delighted to be able to offer substantial extracts from a series of interviews that Professor Charles Rzepka conducted with Elmore Leonard in 2009-10. There were four separate interviews, arranged here in nine parts. Read the Introduction to the Elmore Leonard Interviews.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Parts: \u00a0Aug 2009<\/span>\u00a0\u00a01<\/a> \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a02<\/a> \u00a0 \u00a0 3<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 Sept 2009<\/span>\u00a0\u00a04<\/a> \u00a0 \u00a0 5<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Jan<\/span>\u00a02010<\/span>\u00a0\u00a06<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a07<\/a> \u00a0 \u00a0 June 2010<\/span>\u00a0\u00a08<\/a> \u00a0 \u00a0 9<\/a><\/p>\n

This is the first half of the interview of 7th June 2010, conducted by phone.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n


\n<\/a>\"\"<\/a>CR:\u00a0 Since we last talked, it occurred to me that you write so much about outlaws and criminals, and you seem to understand them so well, I wanted to ask, did you ever get in trouble with the law or do anything illegal when you were young, or did any of your friends?<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 No, just a couple of DUIs.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 But that would be when you were older, I suppose.<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 Yeah, right.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 Two particular experiences in your childhood seem to come up repeatedly in interviews and one is that 5th grade play about World War I, based on All Quiet on the Western Front<\/em>, and the other is your playing baseball, and they seem to have been really formative parts of your growing up.\u00a0 So one other question I had about the play was, did it include dialogue as well as action, and did you write lines for your characters?<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 I don’t remember.\u00a0 I gave a little talk before presenting it.\u00a0 I said this is an American play about American soldiers in the trenches in France during World War I and then I think maybe I described their situation, and that either the coward goes out and is caught in the barbed wire or he goes out to save the good guy who’s caught in the barbed wire, and I can’t remember now which is which.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 But you can’t remember any of them speaking to each other or yelling, “Here I am!” or anything like that?<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 No, uh-uh.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 Did you cast it yourself or did your teacher?<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 I cast it.\u00a0 I made my friends all the main parts.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 About baseball, I have a lot of questions about baseball and from what I’ve read of other interviews and books, you were on your high school varsity team, right?<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 I played first base.\u00a0 I was left handed.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 And when did you first get interested in playing baseball?<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 As a young kid.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 Before you moved to Detroit, or was it after?<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 After.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 And was that because your friends all played it and encouraged you?<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 Yeah, we just played on a vacant lot.\u00a0 There was no organized baseball at that time, and you had to get old enough to play American Legion baseball.\u00a0 That was the first one, and Detroit Sandlot League.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 How old would you be for that?<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 Thirteen, I think 13.\u00a0 We played class D, our school.\u00a0 It was 8th grade, on a team, we got uniforms and played Sandlot and we went right to the championship in class D.\u00a0 We got beat.\u00a0 Our pitcher was out of town and couldn’t make it.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 So your first experience in a uniformed team was going all the way to the championship?<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 Yeah.\u00a0 Class D is the bottom of the Sandlot.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 But still, that must have really encouraged you.<\/p>\n

EL: Oh, I know what it was.\u00a0 It was freshman year at Catholic Central and it was that baseball game that entered class D and we did very well.\u00a0 I forgot how many games we won but we won every game right up to the last one. We had a good pitcher.\u00a0 That was it.\u00a0 Yeah, we were in high school then and I was a freshman.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 Did you play any baseball with your dad when he was home?<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 We’d play catch once in awhile but not much.<\/p>\n

CR: \u00a0So he didn’t play as a kid?<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 He played in a league in New Orleans.\u00a0 It was a Sandlot League.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 And it was a uniform league, right?<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 I think so.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 Organized.\u00a0 Was he home very long between business trips?<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 It got so that finally when I was in high school he was home a lot more, yeah.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 After he got the office job at General Motors.<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 Right.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 But when he was still traveling and setting up dealerships he might be gone for as long as a week and then he’d come home for how long?<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 Well, it was probably just about as long; he wasn’t on the road all the time, but I don’t remember.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 What was it about baseball that really attracted you?\u00a0 Did you have a natural talent?\u00a0 Did you throw well, or bat well?<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 I was a boy and boys played baseball.\u00a0 I mean the ones who wanted to play baseball.\u00a0 Now, of course, everybody’s forced into playing organized ball and a lot of them don’t want it, a lot of them aren’t very good either.\u00a0 When we played we all wanted to play and we were all pretty good at it.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 So you were naturally pretty good at it.<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 Yeah.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 Did you have to practice anything in particular to improve?\u00a0 Did you have to practice certain things to get them right?<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 I was a first baseman so I read a book, or chapter, or I read something about footwork to make sure I got that right.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 So you’d have to train yourself a little bit?<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 A left hander–that’s the natural position for a left hander, other than the outfield.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 With the glove on your right hand, you mean, at first base.<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 Yeah.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 So you could catch from 2nd or 3rd base much more easily than a right-hander.<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 You don’t have to turn to \u2013 I remember, I would get a good first baseman’s mitt and then I would undo it, take all the stuffing out, and get some mattress padding and cut mattress padding into the shape of the mitt, and then stick that in.\u00a0 So there wasn’t a bulge around a pocket.\u00a0 The whole thing was a pocket.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 So you would sort of fiddle with the equipment and try to improve it.<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 Then I’d put a ball in it and tie it up for when I wasn’t playing.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 So you were interested in the technical and strategic aspects of the game, it sounds like, as well as just the physical.<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 Yeah.\u00a0 I couldn’t see very well.\u00a0 I didn’t realize that.\u00a0 I didn’t get glasses until the 2nd year of high school.\u00a0 So when I put the glasses on, I thought, “Oh my God, I can read the blackboard.”\u00a0 I played football too at U of D.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 And what position did you play there?<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 I played center my first year, which was my junior year in high school.\u00a0 My sophomore year we moved within a block of U of D High, which is the Jesuit school, and so I switched from Catholic Central to U of D.\u00a0 And my junior year at U of D I played on the reserves, what they called the Bantams. We played other reserve teams from other schools.\u00a0 And my senior year I tried out for the varsity and I remember one practice before the first game in the afternoon I made three tackles in a row, and the coach said you’re going to start Saturday.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 You had two different coaches at that point, baseball and football?\u00a0 Were you still playing baseball?<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 Yeah, sure.\u00a0 We had two different ones.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 And still playing first base?<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 Yeah.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 So do you remember either of your coaches very well?<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 One was named Madigan, who was the baseball coach.\u00a0 He was also the varsity basketball coach.\u00a0 Bob Tiernan was the football coach, and Tiernan had a place in Montana, Flathead Lake and he would ask certain boys, like five of us would fit in the station wagon.\u00a0 We’d go out there for about a month with him and he asked guys who were on the football team, so I did that my junior year.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 Went out to Montana?<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 Yeah, because he wanted to move me to quarterback, but I played center because I always started when they had the ball.\u00a0 The center always backed up the line and I made a lot of tackles.\u00a0 I only weighed 130 and then the next year he switched me to quarterback–wing quarterback where the quarterback does take the ball from the center sometimes, or maybe up to half the time, and then you hand off.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 So you remember both of these coaches pretty well, it sounds like.<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 Sure.\u00a0 In fact I lived with Tiernan for almost a year my senior year when I was playing quarterback.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 You lived with him?<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 My mother and dad moved to Washington and he said well come live with us.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 Why were they moving to Washington?<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 Well, my dad had something to do with the government then, through General Motors, that he was involved in.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 Was it war related?<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 I don’t know.\u00a0 I suppose.\u00a0 The war was on.\u00a0 I got out of high school in ’43, played football of course in ’42 for my senior year, as quarterback.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 So you lived with Tiernan for the year there in Detroit.<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 Yeah.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 Did he have any other players living with him?\u00a0 Did he have kids?<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 No, no other players.\u00a0 He had two kids.\u00a0 A son and a daughter and I roomed with the son and we got along fine.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 Was he about your age?<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 No, he was younger, much younger.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 So tell me about Tiernan.\u00a0 He sounds like a really good guy.<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 Well, he didn’t talk much.\u00a0 He was kind of gruff.\u00a0 He was what I thought of as a typical coach.\u00a0 He didn’t say many funny things.\u00a0 He was pretty much all business.\u00a0 He went to school in Montana, played football for the University of Montana.\u00a0 I don’t know what he played.\u00a0 I think he was a lineman.\u00a0 But he got pretty fancy as a coach and he wanted us to be sure that we all wore white laces in our football shoes, things like that.\u00a0 My senior year–no, it was my junior year–he got all red uniforms.\u00a0 First time they had new uniforms in a long time, so we all looked good.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 Did he teach you any important things about the game, like technique, or strategy?<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 He would teach basic things like how to turn to hand off and then how to block, things like that.\u00a0 But I liked to tackle so he didn’t have to teach me that.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 You like to tackle?<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 Yeah.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 Did you like learning things?<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 Sure.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 You enjoyed that aspect of it?<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 Yeah.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 And your baseball coach, did you have as close a relationship with him?<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 No.\u00a0 We didn’t have a good team either.\u00a0 I think we lost more than we won, but we had fun, it was alright.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 Does that make you wish you had stayed at Catholic Central?<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 Well, no.\u00a0 I don’t know if I’d have made the team at Catholic Central because the varsity team at Catholic Central would go on into the American Legion, played American Legion ball.\u00a0 They were good.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 So the football team was better than the baseball team at U of D High?<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 Yes, definitely, although we lost as many as we won.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 I can’t remember if I asked you this or not but do you have any memories at all of childhood friendships from before your family settled in Detroit, like from Dallas, or Memphis, or Oklahoma city?<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 No.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 That’s so interesting.<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 I know.\u00a0 I don’t remember.\u00a0 I must have had friends.\u00a0 Yeah, well in Memphis I did.\u00a0 I had a lot of friends in Memphis.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 Do you remember any of them?<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 [First Name?] Winchester had a pony.\u00a0 He lived down the street and had a pony in a little stable in the back.\u00a0 I’m trying to remember some other names. Leslie Gruber?<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 And you were in Memphis for a couple of years, right?<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 I think it was about two and a half because when we moved to Detroit in ’34. I think it was the first part of the year, so that fall of ’33 I spent in a Memphis school.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 Was it hard saying good-bye to your friends, do you remember?<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 Yeah, I didn’t want to leave.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 It interests me that you were faced with having to make new friends so many times, every time your family moved in those early years.\u00a0 You must have gotten pretty good at it.<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 Well, I guess.\u00a0 When we moved up from Memphis, we lived in an apartment hotel, and there were friends of mine living in the building.\u00a0 [First name?] Brandon was one, and some other guys and they would ask me to say certain things like “honey child.\u00a0 I’d say, “Honey chile,” with a southern accent, and I finally got over the southern accent, I don’t know when.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 They were interested in your voice.<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 Yeah.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 So you didn’t have any special techniques for making friends?\u00a0 Were you funny, or did you like to tell stories?<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 I always had a lot of friends and we always got along well.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 Do you remember any “first day of school” experiences from those days?<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 Well I remember the first day at U of D High, I thought, “Oh God, this is going to be tough,” because of what we had to do for homework, and the way the instructor was talking to us, we had to pay attention, and so on.\u00a0 But I got to really like U of D High a lot.\u00a0 In fact, I felt on graduating that I pretty much had my education, and was wondering what am I going to do when I come back from the service?\u00a0 Then I went to U of D and took English and minored in Philosophy just for something to do.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 Why did you choose English and Philosophy?<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 English, obviously, because I wanted to read.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 Not so much write, but read.<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 Yeah.\u00a0 And in high school I had four years of Latin, two years of Greek, so then I didn’t want to take Latin again in college.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 But there were other possibilities, right?<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 Well, History.\u00a0 History was a possibility.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 But why minor in Philosophy?<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 I don’t know.\u00a0 Sounded good I suppose.\u00a0 Rational psychology and things like that, instructors with heavy accents.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 So were their voices interesting to you?<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 Well, it was interesting, but it wasn’t that interesting.\u00a0 But in English at U of D, probably my second year, we were reading I think the romantic poets and we would write papers, and the instructor said, “Listen, why don’t you just come to my office once a week and we’ll talk about this, instead of in the class?”\u00a0 So we did that.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 Do you remember that English instructor’s name?<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 It started with a P.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 Was he the same one who encouraged you to enter the writing contest, or was that later?<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 No, that was the English instructor in my senior year of college.\u00a0 There was also a priest at U of D High, Father Skiffington, and he said, “You could have a future in writing” just from papers that I handed in.\u00a0 But I was always interested in writing even in grade school when we took spelling tests, and the Sister would give the word and then use it in a sentence, or we had to use it in a sentence. I always wrote a pretty interesting sentence using the word.\u00a0 It’d have something to do with a western or the police or something like that.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 From other interviews I’ve read and biographies I got the impression that you didn’t really get interested in writing until high school.\u00a0 But it sounds like you were interested in writing as well as reading way back in grade school.<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 I was, but I didn’t write.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 Just whenever you had the opportunity or an assignment, you enjoyed writing it.<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 Yeah.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 This Father Skiffington, was this the one who encouraged you to enter the competition?<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 No.\u00a0 No, he was in high school, that was in college.\u00a0 I remember the name of the college English instructor was [?Eugene?] Gruwe and he told the class, the writing club at the university, the “Manuscribblers,” was having a contest and anyone who entered would get an automatic B in his course.\u00a0 So I entered twice.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 One year and then the next year.<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 Yeah.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 And was he your teacher the next year, your senior year, too?<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 No, I don’t think he was.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 This is interesting to me because I’m trying to get the chronology of some events straight in your high school and college years.\u00a0 When your dad invited you to join him in opening a GM dealership in Las Cruses, New Mexico, were you preparing to leave college to join him?<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 No, it was once I graduated.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 So it was understood he was going to go out and start the dealership and you would graduate and join him.<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 Uhm hm.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 So this was just after you returned from the war and were getting to know him, you said, getting to know him well for the first time.<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 Right, we played golf together and we would go into the club and have a beer and things like that.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 And was he still working at his executive job at General Motors at that time?<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 Yeah, and then right after that I was still in college when he left and bought a dealership in Las Cruces, New Mexico.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 And that’s when he died, when he was in New Mexico.<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 Six months later.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 And that was 1947, right?<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 I think it was ’48.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 So was it just after your dad died that Mr. Gruwe encouraged you to enter the competition?<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 I don’t know.\u00a0 I think it was before.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 You sort of became interested in actually writing and getting people to read your writing at just about the time your dad died, right?<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 Yeah, I guess so.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 Those two things seemed to happen about the same time.<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 Yeah.\u00a0 He wanted me to come out and work for him once he had this dealership going.\u00a0 And the idea was first, I would go to the Chevrolet dealer’s son’s school, which was in Detroit.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 There was a school for dealer’s sons?<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 Yeah.\u00a0 It was part of the Chevrolet vision.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 And what would they teach you there?<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 I have no idea, I didn’t go.\u00a0 Then when he died my brother-in-law and I tried to hold on to the dealership, because my dad only owned half of it.\u00a0 He was paying, I think, “Motors Holding,” so much a month, for the rest.\u00a0 And then, of course, at that time they were selling cars as fast as they could get them.\u00a0 I thought, yeah, I guess I’ll go to work for them in a dealership and it did not appeal to me at all.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 So were you doing it just to please your dad?<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 I was doing it to please, well, finally, when he died, to please my brother-in-law.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 First your dad and then your brother-in-law.<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 Yeah, because then it would give my brother-in-law something to do.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 So this was your older sister’s husband, your brother-in-law.<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 Yeah.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 Do you think that if you had gone out to join your dad with the dealership that you would have ended up becoming a writer?<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 I don’t know.\u00a0 I really don’t know.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 You found the time to start a writing career when you went to work Campbell-Ewald.\u00a0 But do you think you would have found time to do that if you were working with your dad at the dealership?<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 It’s possible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Crimeculture is delighted to be able to offer substantial extracts from a series of interviews that Professor Charles Rzepka conducted<\/p>\n

Continue readingThe Elmore Leonard Interviews, Part 8<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":779,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3475"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/779"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3475"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3475\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3519,"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3475\/revisions\/3519"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3475"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}