{"id":342,"date":"2010-09-02T22:53:18","date_gmt":"2010-09-03T03:53:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnstrawn.com\/?p=342"},"modified":"2010-12-15T19:55:09","modified_gmt":"2010-12-16T00:55:09","slug":"larry-colton-celebrating-the-publication-of-no-ordinary-joes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/golf\/personalities\/342\/larry-colton-celebrating-the-publication-of-no-ordinary-joes","title":{"rendered":"Larry Colton: Celebrating the Publication of “NO ORDINARY JOES”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Larry Colton has a new book coming out next month, one he\u2019s worked on for almost ten years.\u00a0 Called No Ordinary Joes<\/em>, it\u2019s his fourth book and, unlike the others, doesn\u2019t rely on Larry being a participant observer in the events he\u2019s writing about to drive the narrative.\u00a0 No Ordinary Joes<\/em> is about a group of men from his dad\u2019s generation, the guys who fought WW II.\u00a0 I read an early draft, and was moved by it, and over the last couple of weeks have read the final version, which I think is superb. \u00a0<\/p>\n

All of Larry\u2019s books have been about small groups\u2014fraternity brothers, basketball teams, and now the crew of a submarine.\u00a0 Perhaps because of his own background in team sports\u2014he had an espresso\u00a0in the big leagues and played baseball professionally for six years (seven if you count his summer with the Portland Mavericks)\u2013Larry understands the dynamics of a small group.\u00a0 He recognizes the signs prefiguring conflicts, he appreciates how losing can plant a kernel of bad karma and destroy harmony, and he knows how leaders can emerge in a crisis.\u00a0 He paid a price to acquire this knowledge, riding buses in the boonies for endless hours in the minor leagues as a kind of clandestine anthropologist.\u00a0 He\u2019s put what he learned to excellent use as a writer, moving from an introspective gaze to a broad and detached analytical perspective. \u00a0But in offering up this praise to No Ordinary Joes,<\/em> I must confess that I am not a disinterested party\u2014Larry\u2019s my amigo<\/em>, and if I thought this book was bad I wouldn\u2019t be saying anything about it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0Over the last forty years, I have spent more time with Larry than anyone not related to me.\u00a0 We\u2019ve watched each other\u2019s kids grow up, commiserated about marriages, whether enduring or disintegrating, and celebrated the arrival of our grandchildren.\u00a0 We\u2019ve followed oblique career paths, each going our own ways but never so far into the woods that we couldn\u2019t hear the other\u2019s whistle.\u00a0 We\u2019ve dead-ended and back-tracked and yet somehow managed to find our mutual ways forward.\u00a0 Nothing has ever interrupted our friendship.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve also played hundreds of rounds of golf together, plodding along innumerable fairways, often in despair as our games have melted away over the years, oozing out in a demoralizing arc from respectable to mediocre to miserable.\u00a0 We enjoy each other\u2019s company, but we don\u2019t have discussions when we\u2019re playing\u2014we\u2019re both too preoccupied with this irritating and irreversible deterioration of our golf swings and the delicacy of our emotional states accompanying it to focus on anything but ourselves.\u00a0 In this sense, at least, we\u2019re like real athletes\u2014we\u2019re in the moment<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Larry and me. September, 2010<\/p><\/div>\n

What we have in place of conversations is parallel monologues.\u00a0 It\u2019s not babble–we don\u2019t speak at the same time.\u00a0 We listen to one another, but we just don\u2019t respond in the ordinary way of listening and answering, the old give and take.\u00a0 We concentrate on the give.\u00a0 I talk about what\u2019s on my mind and Larry talks about what interests him.\u00a0\u00a0 Larry always makes me laugh, and I have never once been bored by what I am hearing, even when it\u2019s not for the first time.\u00a0 \u00a0What mostly interests Larry is also Larry, so our curiosity about this particular subject coincides. \u00a0Besides, listening to Larry talk is like hearing Tony Bennett sing\u2014what, you wouldn\u2019t want to hear \u201cOnce Upon a Time\u201d again?\u00a0 Larry\u2019s cycle of stories about the life of Larry is filled with all the elements of classical myth\u2014great tests and abject failures, feats of recovery and the resilient bounce of hope and always, perpetually, heroically, a good laugh at the end.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Larry plus narrative equals what I call the larrative, which is the evocative and lucid report from the battlefield of the endlessly fascinating, complicated and admirable life of Larry Colton. \u00a0\u00a0I am really glad that I have had the privilege of being around Larry all these years, even though sometimes life has dealt some lousy blows.\u00a0 But that\u2019s what life is, right?\u00a0 It\u2019s how you handle it that matters, and no one I\u2019ve ever known is more resilient, uncomplaining and \u00a0droll than Larry.\u00a0 He may love himself, as we all should, but Larry\u2019s lesson is that humor can keep the hounds of narcissism at bay. \u00a0Larry likes to act uncomplicated, but he\u2019s not.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I have watched him evolve from a recovering jock ex-high school teacher trying to find a voice for his first published piece of journalism to one of America\u2019s most accomplished writers of literary non-fiction.\u00a0 He\u2019s had success for sure with his last two books: Goat Brothers<\/em> (a main selection of Book-of-the-Month club, a quaint institution back in the day when people bought books printed on paper); and Counting Coup<\/em>, a report of the year he spent in Hardin, MT, watching the high school girls\u2019 basketball team, half white, half Crow Indian, try to win the state championship, which won an award as the best e-book of the year, but alas, a decade before the invention of the Kindle.\u00a0<\/p>\n

No Ordinary Joes<\/em> grew out of an unlikely request by a financial supporter of a wonderful foundation Larry founded, Community of Writers (COW), his response to local school districts around Portland cutting funding for the arts.\u00a0 He raised money to run writing workshops for teachers and then to place working writers in their classroom to help students do projects ranging from journals to newsletters to poetry and song-writing.\u00a0 Larry created this program from scratch and fury, found a way to fund it (mostly by begging a lot of really nice people in Portland who have money who also like Larry to fund his idea), and ran COW until it was time to start writing again.\u00a0 No Ordinary Joes<\/em> was a book he needed to get back to.<\/em><\/p>\n

The project started when the donor asked Larry to look at a manuscript written by an uncle who had served in WW II.\u00a0 This is the kind of request writers dread and have to resist if they\u2019re ever going to get any work done, but given that Larry was wearing his COW hat when the request was made and already had his hand out, he wasn\u2019t in a good position to make a fist when the pages were proffered.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The manuscript was brief and not particularly well-written, but it conveyed the outlines of a chilling and gripping tale: a WW II American submarine sunk, its crew captured by the Japanese and forced into slave labor, but not before their families and friends have been informed that the men are missing and likely lost.\u00a0 Giving it context as he builds towards its complicated finale, Colton tells this extraordinary story in No Ordinary Joes<\/em>.\u00a0 The epic tale of the USS Grenadier will linger in obscurity no longer now that Colton has given it form.\u00a0 The handful of survivors alive to read No Ordinary Joes<\/em> deserve the gratitude and praise of their countrymen, even if it has been late in coming.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Larry Colton, author of "No Ordinary Joes"<\/p><\/div>\n

The book officially launches in early October, with a party at Wordstock, the literary festival that is another Colton contribution to Portland\u2019s cultural life.\u00a0\u00a0 Originally conceived as a fundraiser for COW, it now has a life of its own, and it\u2019s fitting that this year Wordstock will celebrate Larry\u2019s wonderful new book as a centerpiece of the literary banquet.<\/p>\n

Jack Ramsay, coach of the one Trailblazer team to win the NBA championship and another legendary Portland character, was a Navy Seal in WW II.\u00a0 Jack and Larry became friends when Larry was writing his first book, Idol Time<\/em>, a chronicle of the Trailblazer\u2019s championship season of 1976-77.\u00a0\u00a0 Knowing that he was a naval veteran of WW II, Larry sent Jack the uncorrected proof of No Ordinary Joes<\/em>, which Jack read over the next two days, dazzled by what Larry had written.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Now Jack is coming to Wordstock to share the stage with Larry and Tim McCoy, one of the main characters of No Ordinary Joes<\/em> and a true hero of the Grenadier\u2019s grim saga.\u00a0 Their reunion comes during a difficult time, when America isn\u2019t in much of a mood for celebration.\u00a0 But men like Jack Ramsay and Tim McCoy, annealed by the toughest forms of competition, set a timeless example for all of us of what determination and purpose can achieve.\u00a0 And Larry, too, despite his habit of self-deprecation and his aw-shucks shtick, deserves his place with them as a person who has struggled energetically and with great conviction to build a society that will take its arts as seriously as its wars.<\/p>\n

\n
\n

No Ordinary Joes: The Extraordinary True Story of Four Submariners in War and Love and Life (Hardcover)<\/span><\/h2>\n<\/div>\n
By Larry Colton<\/div>\n
$26.00<\/div>\n

ISBN-13:<\/strong> 9780609610435
\nAvailable for Pre-Order Now
\nPublished:<\/strong> Crown, 10\/01\/2010<\/span><\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.wordstockfestival.com\/#\/page_id=951&article=118\/<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Larry Colton has a new book coming out next month, one he\u2019s worked on for almost ten years.\u00a0 Called No… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":346,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,9,18,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-342","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews","category-golf","category-lifestyle","category-personalities"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/2010\/09\/cover1.gif","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=342"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":353,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342\/revisions\/353"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/346"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}