Book Signing This Saturday

On a low, levee-protected slice of Illinois river bottom land 70 or so miles north of the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, there sleeps a remnant of an 18th century Spanish era fort. Either at the hand of hostile natives, river pirates or disease; the 243 original settlers/soldiers were all within a decade dead. Red Bud, IL got off to a rocky start. It is depressing to think of such young men dying so far from home in such dank surroundings.

But, eventually, a next wave of risk takers came, this time under the French flag and by moving 12 miles up into the river bluffs and fortified by grit, were able to grab hold of a root and survive. In the 19^th century the Germans first and then the Irish followed to make up what is today Red Bud, IL, a heterogeneous lot  - as long as you like brats, cold beer, are a Republican and a diehard Cardinal baseball fan.

My wife Shawna and I stopped in Red Bud late last summer for a “all you can eat” pork rind special and stayed to write a book on high school volleyball. The magic of road tripping is to roll with the chance encounters; schedules and itineraries hex the charm.

Saturday we will be in Red Bud for the release of the book “Just Let ‘em Play: Title IX and a Magical Season.” I hope readers will find juxtaposed within its pages both easy reading and stimulating intellective social awareness. Storytelling is for most of us, if we are honest, a poke at making sense of what is too often an entropic life. A college professor told me seven years ago that she could tell from how I wrote that I was struggling to come to grips with unresolved conflicts of my youth. She said, kindly but definitively that I needed to grow past the emotional age of 18. But I told her I liked being 18 and if I kept trying, someday I will get it right. I still have time.

After a life of seeking out “character” adopted hometowns, both rural and urban, I refuse to admit, at 65 years of age, I now live in the suburbs. No, I hibernate there. Vicariously, since August I have set down roots in Red Bud, fixated on a volleyball season of 47 years ago. I hope Saturday to sell a bunch of books and in a vain way validate this exercise in self-indulgence. I hope to make at least enough profit to pay the bar bill at the after party, which I anticipate being significant. Come next Sunday, my eyes return to the road in search of new stories. I have a very understanding, a very patient and a very suburban wife.

Like the 65-year-old women who this story is about, we have at times all lived both foolhardily and idealistically but survived. They came of age in a small town at a time when small towns did not like what was happening in America. In the Red Bud’s of America in 1975 divisive forces like hippies, socialists, academic liberals, civil rights activists, anti-war protesters and progressive environmentalists were not welcome. And yet from such an entrenched slice of Richard Nixon’s silent America came a group of high school girls who rode a crazy new liberal law called Title IX for all it was worth, and the town embraced them for it. That paradox makes this a cool story, a tribute that has nothing to do with racist nicknames or walls but with what has always made America great: a Quixotical quest seeking fairness, equality, dreams, and inclusion.