2012: DEAD END IN NORVELT by Jack Gantos
School was finally out and I was standing on a picnic table in our backyard getting ready for a great summer vacation when my mother walked up to me and ruined it.
The thing about that cliche “those that don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it” is that it's very true, but I feel like wording it that way implies that most people are learning from history, like you're supposed to watch out to make sure you're not one of the few idiots that ends up repeating history. But that's not the case. We're basically all in the latter group of idiots. Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and very few of us are actually learning from it. The default option, for everyone, is repeating history, over and over and over.
In 2020 and 2021, in order to help pass the time while I was sitting tight in my home, I was working on two big writing projects that each required me to read some history. My old newsletter, Grift Of The Holy Spirit1, led me to learn a lot about the past few decades in the American Catholic church to better understand their political involvement today and how it, you know, got so bad. My 2021 novel Rosemont: A Novel Of Rosemont was about the history of this weird quirky suburb on the northwest side of Chicago2, and I had to read a lot of reporting and history covering Chicago and Illinois from the 1950s to today. And I worked on this all against the backdrop of a global pandemic that was treated more as a political crisis than a public health crisis, and police riots in response to the largest protest movement in my lifetime, and a presidential administration trying to overturn the results of a national election.
Here's what you learn when you start reading history: in your day-to-day life, you're not seeing anything happen for the first time. Every problem that you see in the world today is a problem that has been around for, at least, decades and has been repeating itself. People were ignoring a public health crisis? That happened back in 1980s. They were protesting pandemic safety measures? They did that back in the 1910s. The police in Chicago were beating up protestors? Well, they very famously did that back in 1968, and they did it to the strikers at McCormick Works in 1952. Politicians are trying to get their guys in election official roles so they can swing the results the right way? Buddy, let me tell you something about the history of Chicago and Illinois.
But obviously, some of the problems we have today are without any precedent. An accused sexual predator was recently put on the Supreme Court, something that had never happened before except when it already happened in 1991. The Catholic church openly aligned itself with the Republican party in opposition to a Catholic presidential candidate, something that had never happened before except when they were also opposing candidates like Geraldine Ferraro and John Kerry or various members of Congress. The recent cruelty of southern governors busing asylum seekers to blue states to make a cynical political point is completely unprecedented, until you hear about the “Reverse Freedom Rides” and learn what happened to Black Americans in the 1960s. Companies are having a hard time finding workers because "Nobody wants to work anymore", a completely new problem, except here are companies saying that at every possible point in time since the Industrial Revolution:
Pretty much everything that's happening has happened before, and I have very mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, there's a certain amount of comfort I can take in knowing I'm not the first person to be worried about things like this. On the other hand, the people who came before me clearly didn't find a way to fix any of these problems, and it's very possible that I won't, either. But dealing with this stupid broken world requires reckoning with history, understanding how this have played out in the past, and trying to figure out what we have to do differently now.
That’s not something I learned until relatively recently in my life. But one of the Newbery medalists is about this idea, about how we’re just all strapped to the wheel of history barrelling down the mountain, hitting the same sort of bumps again and again, possibly doomed to roll downward forever until we crash. Also the book is a comedy, and it’s a good one.
Norvelt, in which Jack Gantos' 2012 medalist Dead End In Norvelt is set, is a real place. It started as a New Deal-era homestead project for laid-off coal miners in eastern Pennsylvania. Jack Gantos, the narrator and protagonist of Dead End In Norvelt, is also a real person; he's the author, although in this story (which is definitely a work of fiction) he's a kid in 1962. After he gets into some mischief, Jack's mother grounds him for the entire summer, letting him out of the house only to go help out the old lady down the street, Miss Volker. Miss Volker is a retired nurse who still serves as Norvelt's coroner, and writes the obituaries and "This Day In History" column for the local paper. Because she's arthritic and can't type, she dictates all of her newspaper submissions to Jack. There's no shortage of obituaries to write; the generation that first moved into Norvelt in the 1930s is starting to die off, and the town is overall drying up. Miss Volker considers it her sacred duty to keep the history of the town alive:
"“You need to know the history of this town because if it dies out someone will have to be around to write the obit.” “How does a town die?” I asked. “One old person at a time,” she said deliberately."
Through his work with Miss Volker, Jack comes to a new understanding and respect for his quirky little town. And it is quirky: the volunteer sheriff's deputy rides an adult-sized tricycle, the post office gets filled with bees so nobody can get their mail, and it's possible the Hell's Angels have put some sort of fatal dancing curse on the town. Oh, and also those old people seem to be dying out at an alarmingly high rate, and Jack starts to suspect that maybe they're not dying of old age.
There is a lot going on in this bizarre and surreal and very funny novel, and not everything in the plot works exactly; the actual explanation for the murder mystery is pretty strange even by the standards of comedic novels for children, some of the plotlines like the Hell's Angels curse are dropped very suddenly, and the overall novel ends very abruptly. But Gantos' novel is full of big, powerful ideas about history, about whether we have actually learned it or if we're stuck repeating it over and over.
These ideas are all anchored to Jack's relationships with two characters: one is Miss Volker, who teaches Jack as much as she can about the history of Norvelt and how it's linked to other stories from across history, how the things Jack is seeing are things that have happened before, how Jack has to learn history “or any wicked soul can lie to you and get away with it," how "our hunger is related to their hunger. Our desire to work hard is related to their desire to work hard. Working people always share the same history of being kicked around by the rich.”
On the other end of the novel is Jack's dad, a veteran of the Pacific theatre who mocks and rails against the evils of Communism - he's having Jack help him build a bomb shelter in the backyard - but is also clearly shaken by his wartime experience and terrified of another world war starting in his lifetime, and terrified to reckon with history:
""Hey, Dad,” I called behind him as he walked toward the tractor. “Which do you think is more deadly? Past history or future history?” He didn’t even slow down to think about it. “Future history,” he yelled back without hesitation. “Each war gets worse because we get better at killing each other.”"
Through all of the weird occurrences in his town and his relationships with Volker and his father, Jack starts to think more about his town's history and history in general, about how "the reason you remind yourself of the stupid stuff you’ve done in the past is so you don’t do it again." Put another way:
"In a lot of the history books I read, I learned about dates and people and events, but I wasn’t always sure why people did what they did. Why wouldn’t the English king and church not share all their land with their own starving countrymen? And why did the conquistadors think it was okay with God to kill the Incas and steal their gold? And why would the rich coal mine owners work the miners so hard they died young with their lungs hardened up with coal dust? How could history be filled with so much horror and so few reasons why?"
And that's a powerful lesson by itself, but as it turns out, Miss Volker also gets this monologue, which was a tough one to read:
“History often sheds more light on the present than on the past. Many of us remember being plagued by the Great Influenza of 1918 which killed over five hundred thousand Americans and fifty million people worldwide. Out in the coal-mining towns and steel factories where people worked closely together the virus spread rapidly, and thousands died in days. Small towns lost half of their populations or more. Schools were closed. Movie theaters closed. Churches were shut and locked for fear that worshipping God would lead to the death of the congregation. Football and baseball and hockey games were canceled. Entire teams dropped dead. People were forced to wear cotton masks over their mouths and noses as they walked the streets. The whole country was terrified. Everyone pointed fingers at everyone else. The terror created fear and mistrust and neighbor blamed neighbor for the death of their loved ones. But no person was at fault. It was the influenza, which is as natural as the yeast that makes your bread rise."
Dead End In Norvelt was a very moving book for me because it reinforced what I've been learning for the past few years: history is vicious and history doesn't end and history doesn't stop repeating itself. But history also shows us a way out.
While composing one of her obituaries, Miss Volker teaches Jack the story of:
"Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman—two great American anarchists who wanted to improve the lives of all Americans.” “I never heard of them,” I said. “Because schools don’t teach the history of social reformers who were real American heroes and fought for workers’ rights and justice,” she said angrily."
Miss Volker is right, of course. I sure as hell never learned about Emma Goldman in school, despite her important role in Chicago's political history, her impact on feminist theory and activism, and the thousands of people who came out to each of her political lectures. I also sure as hell never learned about Fred Hampton in school, even though, as chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party, he aggressively organized and served the poor and working class of Chicago, forming the original Rainbow Coalition and uniting formerly-feuding gangs into a force for political change; after his assassination in 1969, five thousand people came to his funeral, and I didn’t know any of that until a few years ago. Eugene Debs had an important role in Chicago's political history, too, since he helped lead the Pullman railroad strike; he promoted a political platform built on compassion and shared humanity, millions of people voted for him during his various runs as a Socialist candidate for president, and I learned his name when I was 30. Mother Jones is buried here in Illinois, after a life spent leading child factory workers in a nationwide march on Teddy Roosevelt's summer home and organizing mine workers well into her eighties; I had no idea who she was, or that there was even a "Union Miners Cemetery" in my home state, until five years ago.
In our history, in every era of our history, there were people who stood up and said that we had dignity, that we had rights, that the rich could not kick us around anymore. If we feel strapped to the wheel of history, rolling downhill, hitting the same sort of bumps over and over again, we should know that there were always people who tried to push that wheel somewhere better. For some reason, we don't learn about those people as quickly as we learn about the wars and assassinations and atrocities. One of those people was Eleanor Roosevelt, for whom Norvelt was named, because she planned the town herself. I knew that Roosevelt was the famous and not-gay3 wife of the 32nd president, but I didn't learn until much later in life that she was an influential politician in her own right, and that she was also a champion of dignity and respect for the nation's poor. As Miss Volker writes in an obituary:
"When the government offered to help poor people build houses in Norvelt the architects drew up plans to have entire families live like farm animals in one barnlike room with a bathroom outhouse and a kitchen that was nothing but a wood-burning cook shed on the back of the property. The government’s idea of helping poor people was to give them some shelter to survive, but not to allow them to live a life of pride. But Godmother Roosevelt came to the rescue. She made sure people had real houses—little New England–style houses—and they had bedrooms and a living room and a useful kitchen and a bathroom with a bathtub, and even a laundry room with a washing machine. The government called this luxury living. But Mrs. Roosevelt called it living with dignity."
That story is true; Norvelt is a real place, and it's really designed like that, for that reason. Roosevelt, throughout her life and career, advocated for human rights and civil rights on a global scale, she was a prolific writer and frequent speaker on social issues both during and after her service as First Lady, and she also made sure the New Deal homestead project would allow people to live in dignity. She insisted that the town be integrated. She thought that the surest sign of a people's ability to govern themselves was their ability to live in communities like Norvelt, to have the ability to provide for themselves and support each other. She's obviously an exceptional case because of her position in the world, but she showed Americans what their government could do when it respected their humanity, and how we could live when we respected each other's humanity. There are still people like this. We can still live in a world like that. But I think most of us aren't even aware that this is a possibility.
In the words of Miss Volker, words that are a brutal indictment of the present day and all the days before it, "history lasts forever. And we will be judged by our history." But we do have history that's worth repeating. We just have to learn it first.
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. The next installment will cover the 1959 medalist, The Witch Of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare.
I am well aware that I keep calling this my ‘old’ newsletter even though I’m still publishing installments sporadically, I don’t know what’s going on either.
You wouldn’t think such an awesome-sounding novel would be available to download for free right now, but guess what. Also it's at Amazon but you have to pay for it there.
Well,