08-11-2015, 06:15 PM
(This post was last modified: 08-11-2015, 09:21 PM by Joseph McBride.)
Dawn Meredith Wrote:Wow. Very moving and I daresay you have given voice to many teens who felt equally demoralized after the horror of 11/22/63.
Interesting too how you reacted so positively -with firm ambition- against your dad's alcohol- induced behavior. I too had this experience growing up.
Both the depression over the assassination, and the alcoholic dad. We both could have just as easily gone down that road, but rebellion would instead present
as a desire to succeed.
Well done. I hope your father eventually became pleased.
Dawn
Many thanks for your kind words, Dawn. I appreciate your support and response about
how I have given voice to others who had similar reactions to that trauma. Yes, we were able to take our trauma and grief
over the assassination and use it to fight back in various ways as writers and
researchers and teachers, and as people more wised up to the system. Both my parents
were alcoholics, both excellent newspaper writers. My mother, Marian Dunne McBride, covered the White House for the Milwaukee Sentinel. When she
was vice chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party at the time JFK
ran for president, she and state chairman Patrick Lucey gave Kennedy
a crucial boost in his primary campaign by supporting him rather than
Hubert Humphrey, who had long been regarded as "Wisconsin's third senator,"
the senator liberals went to for help during the years when Joe McCarthy and Alexander
Wiley represented us in the Senate. My mother got me involved in the Kennedy campaign and was more supportive of my writing ambitions than
my father, Raymond McBride, was. He saw me as something of a rival and never was able
to be as positive as he should have been. He was encouraging about
my first book (HIGH AND INSIDE: AN A-TO-Z GUIDE TO THE LANGUAGE
OF BASEBALL), which I wrote in high school, but not so much about my books on film or my screenwriting. I write in THE BROKEN PLACES how after my father
died, I felt more liberated as a writer. Sad but true. But out of those kinds of fuel
we make ambition.