...a VERY short story I wrote in 1973. Obviously I was just a stewed dent at the time.Back then, it was a big deal to write 500 words, or 1,000.
Dan Rattiner, who had a syndicate of newspapers on Long Island, was a very nice, encouraging guy (still is...I saw him at Book Expo a few years ago). He commissioned a bunch of food poems that later mushroomed (ha ha) into my first book,"Let Peas Be With You." His idea was to spice up (ha ha, again) ads for a local supermarket chain. Like "The Jack Benny Program" being sponsored by JELL-O, he thought the supermarket might get more attention by sponsoring wry food poems instead of just telling people there was a sale on rye bread.
Once the food poems became a weekly feature, I began to submit fiction and non-fiction. Most of that stuff was easily twice or three times the size of THIS item. Even so, you could read anything I wrote in five minutes.
I'll meet you after the break....
As one-time New York Yankees announcer Bill White might've phrased it, "that wasn't too shabby."
I hadn't read that thing since it was first published.
The most major change I'd make would be the title, which should've been "Harrangs at the Beach." In fact, I thought it was. Why I made Miriam Harrang more important than her husband, I don't know. She had less of a role in the story than her husband.
Among other items I wrote around the same time for the same paper, there was "The Road 'n' Rail Secret," "The Old 3 Stooges Trick Saves a Summer Art Show Opening," and "Newer Products for the Sunburn Market." The pieces never mentioned "fiction" or "non-fiction," which I guess was part of Dan's mischief.
I suppose the imagery in this story goes back more to when I was Hiram's age, and the family would sometimes drive out to Coney Island or Far Rockaway or some other destination that seemed a long away away.
My clipping is from the "Southampton Summer Day," but it appeared in probably a half-dozen other papers that same week. Dan had a different title for the newspapers he distributed to Hampton Bays, Montauk, Bridgehampton, wherever. These relied on a mix of local ads and ones that were general for Long Island. The editorial copy was pretty much the same, with just some of the ads changing. But that's more than you'd care to know.
Hot weather is a recurring theme in a lot of my short fiction, come to think of it. I'm not prone to setting a chilly scene in winter. There's more intensity when people are suffering with (or crazy with) the heat.
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