Keepsakes & Other Stories

PUBLISHER'S NOTE

PUBLISHER'S NOTE SouND THE TRUMPETS! This first collection of short stories by Jon Hassler deserves royal fanfare!! Five of these stories are published here for the first time. Two-"Chase"and "Chief Larson"-appeared in literary magazines in the 1970s, before Jon began his meteoric rise to fame as a novelist. Gon's first book, Staggerford, was chosen Novel of the Year in 1977 by the Friends of American Writers.) Most of these stories were written during the five or six years preceding Staggerford. They weren't publishable then, Jon told us, "because I didn't have a name." He wrote twenty-some stories in all, and in the process of publishing just six of them, collected eighty-five rejection slips. He went right on writing, he said. "I loved writing, and the stories seemed good to me." Last year the Afton Historical Society Press was pleased beyond words when Jon agreed to write our annual holiday book. This small volume, Underground Christmas, was actually the first short story Jon had published in twenty years, and it became our best-selling book ever. When Jon subsequently offered us this collection of short stories, we promptly said yes. We also asked him to tell us something about each of them-what, if anything, in his life had enkindled them. Most of these stories are rooted in his own experiences. The introductory story, "Chase," was Jon's first piece of "memory" work, and he had always intended it for a book of this nature, he said. It led eventually to his book Grand Opening (1987). "I started to write boyhood memories 11 at random in the late 1970s," Jon recalled. "Some of them proved pretty provocative so I developed them into stories . Then it occurred to me that maybe I had a novel in my reserves, so I started Grand Opening." Jon's favorite among these stories is "Christopher, Moony, and the Birds"; "I pictured this college professor living in this conservative neighborhood and having one of his hippie students come over and embarrass him in front of his neighbors. I love some of those neighbors. The descriptions of them are very interesting to me. At the end of the first draft, I discovered that the hippie was the professor 's son." As for the professor, well, there is a lot of Jon Hassler in him. Jon taught at Brainerd Community College from 1968 until1980. "Keepsakes" and its sequel, "Resident Priest/' are set in the 1950s, when Jon was growing up in Plainview, Minnesota. The ascetic and anti-social Father Fogarty is based on the parish priest (who in reality was named Father O'Connor). Like teenaged Roger Rudy in "Keepsakes," Jon helped the priest pack to move away when he retired. "I remember that day-a hot August day-and all those birdcages I found in his attic. He had them from a former housekeeper who loved birds. Every time a bird died, he said, she'd buy a new cage because she didn't want any 'death cages' around. "Father O'Connor was a hard man to get to know," Jon said. "I cut the grass for the church for two or three summers and every time I went to the rectory to be paid, he asked me what my name was." Jon helped the priest bum a lifetime of "keepsakes"letters , photographs, old newspapers, sheet music. In one 12 yellowed diocesan newspaper, he discovered a poem that Father O'Connor had written many years earlier when he edited the paper. "It seemed so unlike him to have written a poem," Jon said. Jon went home that day with a piece of sheet music the priest was discarding, "Red Sails in the Sunset," which is now one of his "keepsakes." In "Resident Priest," Father Fogarty ends his days as the priest at St. Mary's Convent. Jon located the nuns' house on an isolated promontory on the Mississippi River. "I cut the grass for a banker who had a cabin on a similar promontory in Kellogg, about thirteen miles from Plainview," Jon said. "It was so interesting being there, watching the river coming towards you, just like being on a ship." Jon patterned Mother Superior Sister Simon after his first grade teacher, Sister Simona: "She was bossy like that. Most nuns I knew in those days were bossy. They told you how to live your life and what to do. I could just imagine Sister Simona as mother superior...