Harold Stuiber, 1922-2013

            When World War II ended and my dad left the Navy, he decided to take one more stab at making it as an actor in Southern California. He went back to the Pasadena Playhouse, which groomed such famous stars as Raymond Burr, and was doing bit parts in the plays when he met a kid from Wisconsin who also wanted to be an actor.

            Harold Stuiber (pronounced STEE-burr) was 15 years younger than my dad at the time and so green he didn’t know how to drive a car. My father taught him and they became close friends for life. Harold ended up doing my dad a favor for which I will be forever grateful.

            At the time there were three women — two sisters from Idaho and an older friend — who were working at Huntington Memorial Hospital and sharing an apartment. Harold got serious about one of the sisters and thought that perhaps her older friend would be a good fit for his older friend. He arranged an introduction, which was how my father met my mother.

Intertwined Lives

            My parents got married in May of 1949, not long after Harold and Virginia, and Harold was Best Man at the wedding. The other sister, Patty, married a man named Walt Brecha (BRECK-uh) around the same time. My dad and Harold gave up their acting careers and both did pretty well in business. Harold became a textile salesman and kept some of his clients well into his eighties.

            I grew up with the Stuibers and Brechas and their kids a constant presence. Harold was my godfather, and I recall that he felt it incumbent upon him to teach me the value of a firm handshake. He was the first person I knew who owned and drove a Volkswagen. Like most salesmen, he was a great talker — funny, tolerant and well read, with opinions and observations that were always worth listening to. He was a liberal and my father was a conservative, but politics never came between them.

 In 1980, when my father was diagnosed with cancer, Harold began coming over every Sunday night without fail. He did that for a year and a half, until my father finally succumbed to the disease. Harold told me more than once that my dad was the dearest friend he’d had in his life.

The Unanswered Phone

After my mother moved away from Southern California, I rarely saw Harold, but we talked on the phone from time to time, and I think we both enjoyed the conversations. On Sunday I called him for the first time in a few months to wish him a merry Christmas. Nobody answered the phone, but even at 91, Harold was busy so I didn’t worry.

A few hours later his daughter, Lisa, called to say Harold had died that morning of complications from a pacemaker replacement. Despite his age and the fact he’d had a great life, the news hit me hard. It was a double whammy. I felt the loss not only of the man himself, but also of the end of the most powerful living connection to my parents, both of whom have been gone for years.

Lisa and I talked for a while, and toward the end of the conversation she said something that reminded me of the Mad Men days of the fifties and sixties, in which we had both grown up.

“I’d like to think Dad’s in heaven now,” she said, “having a martini with your dad and Walt and catching up on old times.” I hope so, too.

           

A Question of Literary Timing

            Time, in the fictional sense, has always been a vexing problem for the writer, and especially for the writer of a series of books featuring a recurring character or characters. Different writers have handled the issue in different ways.

            In the mystery genre, to which I am a recent contributor, two polar examples come to mind right away. Martha Grimes, an American who writes books featuring a Scotland Yard superintendent, Richard Jury, wrote the first book in the series in the early 1980s and established that Jury had been orphaned when his parents were killed in the London Blitz during World War II.

            When her first book, The Man With a Load of Mischief, was published in 1981, this was no problem. Jury was a healthy bachelor in his early 40s. As the series grew in popularity, it became more of an issue. Jury was still going strong a couple of years ago, but by all rights he should long since have been pensioned off.

Still Working With Typewriters

            Then there is the approach taken by Sue Grafton, author of the Kinsey Millhone mysteries. The first, A Is for Alibi, was released in 1982; the most recent, U Is for Undertow, came out in 2009. Kinsey, the female detective, has been in her thirties throughout, and the penultimate book in the series, T Is for Trespass, was set in 1987, with the characters still using typewriters and pay telephones.

            I’m not in the same league as those two authors, but had a time-frame decision to make when I recently published my mystery novel, The McHenry Inheritance.

            The first draft of the book was written in the latter part of 1994, and had a number of contemporary references. It was revised a few times over the next few years, then put away when no agent could be found. It sat in various computers for a decade until I decided to put it up on Amazon this summer.

            In doing yet another revision for publication, I had to make a determination about the timing. Should I leave the book set, as originally written, in 1993, or should I try to update it? Pretty quickly I decided to go the first route.

Hindsight Helps the Author

            A big reason for that decision was that the book’s story revolves around a “citizen militia,” something fairly prevalent at that moment in history. The militia in my book was headed for some sort of uprising or spectacular “statement” action, along the lines of the Oklahoma City bombing, which took place in April 1995. Leaving the story set in the fall of 1993 kept it at a point in history between the Waco and Ruby Ridge debacles, which inflamed the militia movement, and Oklahoma City, which was the “payback” for the first two and the point at which the militias began to fade.

            Beyond that reason, it seemed to me that there was a certain pleasure in looking back on things of that period through today’s eyes. At that time, the laptop computer was a wondrous new invention, owned by few, and CompuServe (remember that?) was a cutting-edge online service.

            Finally, I decided I liked the idea of being able to riff off the past from the perspective of the present, sort of like Mad Men. In the book, I was able to have the lead character cashing in on the stock market boom of the 1980s; in a future book, I might have him solve a mystery by knowing something everyone knows now but that few knew in the time the story occurred. There are no mulligans in my life, but I can experience them vicariously through my detective.