Maw Books Blog

If you missed my review of Jimmy’s Stars by Mary Ann Rodman, hop on over to and then come back here for a wonderful interview with the author.

First things first, authors are awesome!  Authors who make themselves so personable and available to their readers are even more awesome.  And Mary Ann Rodman is one of those awesome authors.  You only have to read on to see what I mean.  She gives us so much insight not only into her book but her family as well.

Maw Books:  Welcome Mary Ann!  It’s a pleasure to have you!  I know you were inspired to write Jimmy’s Stars after reading letters from your family wrote during the war.  What was it like to research not only your family history, but the culture that existed during that time period?

Mary Ann Rodman: I adore research! I could research for years on end, but that won’t get my book finished. I usually go into my research with a “shopping list” of preliminary questions or information that I need to get started.  Here is a partial list of things I needed to know about 1943-44 before I put one word on the computer screen.

1. What sort of radio shows did people listen to in Pittsburgh?  What time did they come on and on which days?  My big investment for this book was buying THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF NETWORK RADIO which told me everything I EVER wanted to know about the Golden Age of Radi.  There is a similar book for TV, which I also own, and update every time there is a new edition.  That one is in paperback so I don’t feel quite as bad about buying it.  Also, I know the radio book will never be “updated”.  And since I have two books that take place in the 20’s and 30’s coming up on my “To Write Next List”, I figure I will get my money’s worth out of them.
2. The rationing system.  When did it take effect?  Which items were rationed and how?  More and more item were added to the ration list as the war went on, so I had to make sure that the items I had rationed in 1943-44 actually were.  It was a rather Byzantine system.  Only people over 15 were entitled to a coffee ration.  Hard sole shoes were restricted to one pair a year, no matter how much your feet grew since your last pair.  On the other hand, shoes with  cloth uppers and “synthetic” soles were considered “slippers” and not rationed.  Lots of people wore three-inch wedge “slippers.”  I wish I could’ve worked in something my aunt told me about the soles of some of those slippers melting and sticking to the sidewalk in summer (”It was like walking with flypaper on your feet” she said).
3. I always work with a calendar for the year I am writing about on my desk.  There is a website where you can print off the calendar for any year you want.  That way I can keep track of my story’s time line, what day Christmas fell on, Easter’s date, etc.
4. A list of companies that converted to war work in the Pittsburgh area.  I originally invented the factory that Toots and Mom worked in, until my ever vigilant fact checker at my publisher discovered there really HAD been a company with a very similar name in Pittsburgh…and they made Christmas ornaments!  Blaw-Knox is a real company that made the first radio towers, and then retooled for war work.  What they actually made during the war, I never found out, and it wasn’t important to the story.  After all, it was all very “hush hush”.  (Although one of my aunts, who is one of the roll models I used for Toots used to tell everybody “Yeah, I’m working at Such and Such plant making bomb sites!)
5. A map of the Pittsburgh trolley system.  Believe it or not, there is actually a streetcar museum in Pittsburgh, and any number of streetcar fanatics who find and restore the old cars (they went out of commission in 1971, so I have very clear memories of riding them myself as a child).  These fans then post pictures of their refurbished masterpieces on the museum website.  I returned to them over and over.
6. The way the draft worked. There were so many classifications and deferments, age requirements (although if you LOOKED 17, had a birth certificate, and a piece of paper that your “parent” signed, nobody looked too closely at these boys.  The uncle that I based Jimmy on was 16 and a half when he joined the Merchant Marine.  Another one of our shirttail relatives was only fifteen when he died on D-Day at Omaha Beach.  On the other hand, one of my uncles who was eager to join the Marines, told his wife he was “drafted,” even though he was over 30 and had three kids!
7. Another major reference book investment—an atlas of WWII battles and battlefields.
8. THE single most important reference tool I had was an actual (if battered) 1941 Sears and Roebuck catalog I picked up at a flea market years before I ever thought of writing a WWII book.  I got it because I am an antique buff, and in flipping through it, discovered that about 90 per cent of the furniture in my house (also flea-market purchases) could be found in the catalog. But seriously, this was like stepping back in time and becoming totally immersed. In those days, you could literally buy anything you needed by mail order…farm equipment, wallpaper, radios, ladies “underpinnings,” cosmetics, patent medicines.  If I needed to know the name of a popular cologne (and what the bottle looked like) or what kind of caps boys war (cloth “flyers’ helmets”…with the straps unsnapped and the side flaps worn up),  it was all in my Sears catalog (which now has a new home in an acid-free archival storage box.)

Of course, as you go along, you add more items to your list.  What was basic training like for an Army medic?  Which Army bases provided it. (Again, I was lucky…Camp Jackson, South Carolina is less than a mile from my late in-laws’ house, and my retired career military father-in-law got me in to wander around at will).  How long did it take to get from Washington D.C. to Pittsburgh by train?  Which train line would you have taken?  In which of Pittsburgh’s two train stations would you have arrived?  How much was a trolley token in 1943?  For these questions I could call my mom (who sadly suffered a massive stroke the same week I finished the book) or my surviving aunts, uncles and cousins, all most all of whom still live in Pittsburgh.

Researching my family, per se, was not that big of a deal.  I come from a family that loves to hash and re-hash family stories.  These were my bedtime stories as a child.  I never heard CINDERELLA or SLEEPING BEAUTY.  Instead I was told THE TIME MY BROTHERS AND SISTERS AND I DUG A SWIMMING POOL IN THE FRONT YARD WHILE OUR MOTHER WAS SHOPPING DOWNTOWN.  (My mother was the middle child of eight, so there was lots of mischief . . . and good stories . . . to go around.)

WWII as an era has always fascinated me . . . the weird hairdos, the music, the dances, but most importantly, the sense of duty that 99% of the country felt toward their foreign allies.  I was also impressed that it wasn’t a war fought by the working class or the poor.  EVERYBODY went (as I said in the book). Clark Gable, Jimmy Stewart, Glen Miller.  My mom was a WAVE, working as a codebreaker.  Eunice Kennedy worked in her building.  So did one of the Simon and Schuster heirs. (I asked Mom about Eunice and she said “She was so friendly to everyone, someone had to tell me that her father had been the Ambassador to England. She was kind of messy . . . always had runs in her hose, a rip in her skirt hem and bushy hair that looked like she never combed it).  One  of Moms basic training instructors was the tennis champ Helen Will Moody.  Jacoby, the international bridge champion was the head of her section in Intelligence, along with an Ancient History Professor from Harvard.  My mom?  She quit beauty school to join the WAVES, and never did go to college (although she worked as a Russian translator for NSA after the war…but that’s another story.)

So . . . to sum up all of THAT . . . I really didn’t have to research the family. I KNEW my family, both as adults and children.  As as I said before, the ones who are still alive were thrilled to answer my questions at any time.  Sometimes I didn’t have to ask.  I have 30 plus first cousins, some of whom I’ve never met.  One got wind of my project, and wrote me a long, long email of what she remembers of that time (she was three to seven in those years), plus a little picture my uncle carried in his wallet throughout the war . . . of all seven brothers and sisters and mother.  I had never seen these, mostly school pictures.  I framed them and put them on my desk to remind who I was writing about . . . not my relatives as adults, but them as children.

Not that this is in anyway a ”family history” . . . some characters are more like their real-life models than others, Sal and Toots are composites of several family members, including some from my dad’s.  When I am creating a character, I start off by picturing someone I know . . . almost like casting a movie.  As the writing goes on, I find that my characters slip off their “real life leashes” and take on identities of their own.  This is fortunate, since no one has ever realized they were my inspiration, unless I chose to tell them.

Maw Books:  Thanks!  Love the details!  Ellie’s voice was so authentic and real.  I truly felt for her as she continually kept her hopes up as she waited for Jimmy to come home alive and well.  How did Ellie’s character emerge into a life of her own?

Mary Ann Rodman:  One of the best pieces of writing advice I ever heard came from one of the instructors at Vermont College, Graham Salisbury. This is an approximation of what he said, but he said that there should be some part of our heart and emotions in everything we write. If there isn’t, there is no life to the story.

Ellie’s emotional trajectory comes straight from something that happened to me as a nine-year-old.  I won’t go into the details because they would reveal the end of JIMMY’S STARS, and I am a big believer in NOT spoiling the book for those who haven’t read it.  Suffice it to say that I have kept journals since I was seven or eight, and I have them all.

On those pages, I could read my nine-year-old self struggling, day by day, with this incident, something very close to what Ellie experiences in waiting for her brother.  (I should say at this point that despite my mom’s huge family and vast number of cousins, I am an only child.)  Also, the dynamics of the relationship between Jimmy and Ellie was based very much on the relationship my youngest aunt and her youngest brother had . . . a relationship that continued into adulthood.

Maw Books:  Jimmy’s Stars deals with the unknown and the fear of losing loved ones seen through the eyes of a child.  Do you think Jimmy’s Stars is an appropriate read for children who have family members currently serving in the military?

Mary Ann Rodman:  That’s a hard question.  It depends on the child, the relationship they have with the parent, and of course, the child’s age.  And here, you have hit on the “seed” upon which this book was written.  When this country first became involved in Iraq and Afghanistan, I read a NEWSWEEK article about military parents trying to make their children understand what was about to happen when the parent(s) would be deployed.  Invariably, the soldiers who were mothers would say something like “Everything will be fine. Mommy will come home and we’ll go back to the way things were.”

THAT statement brought to mind my own similar incident (it did not involve someone going to war) in which an adult made a promise that really was not in their power to control or make come true?  I know these parents were tying to make their children feel better, and to keep them from worrying.  But even if Mom or Dad comes home from war physically whole, there will always be a dark closet in their soul where they keep what they experienced at war.  A closet that is never opened, or even mentioned. I know this from people I personally know who were deployed . . . and from my uncles and cousins who fought in WWII, Korea, and Vietnam.  When I asked my cousins what their fathers had told them about the war, they blandly said “We’re not supposed to ask.”  (My parents spent the whole war sitting in an office breaking codes, so I couldn’t ask them.)

I really did write JIMMY for these kids whose parents are away now . . . but writing about something you see every night on the news is too close, too immediate to ask middle graders to read about it.  But perhaps, if  set my concept in a time they DON’T know . . . it would seem less obvious and threatening.  At least I hope so.  And I don’t think every reader is going to make the correlation.

My suggestion, as always, is this; if you think the book is going to be too upsetting for your middle grader, read it yourself first, and then decide.  I hope that some of today’s military kids read it and find some comfort and hope there.  (If this means anything, both the American military school library system in Europe and the Royal Air Force in the U.K. have purchased copies for their base and school libraries.)

Maw Books:  Tell us about your next project.  Are you currently working on anything?

Mary Ann Rodman:  I am currently working on a three-voice-historical YA verse novel.  (Do you think I have enough tags on that??) It’s called THE STORM and is about the Great Tri-State Tornado of 1925, which my dad’s family just happened to be smack in the middle of (sorry about that dangler).  In the space of a little over 2 hours, 1200 people were killed in Missouri, Illinois and Indiana by a SINGLE TORNADO.  My dad’s hometown, which only at a population of 12,000 to begin with, was pretty much Ground Zero.  The “storm” (has it is called to this very day, in typically laconic Southern Illinois style) hit five out of the six public schools, killing 37 school children, and 300 residents in total.  One of these was my great-grandmother Rodman.  Again, “The Storm” was a story I heard over and over from my grandmother and trust me, she didn’t spare the details (which is why this one is going to be YA).  Yet, there are only two adult non-fiction books on this subject, and is known as the Forgotten Storm.

Again, I was prompted by current events to write about the past.  I live on a cul-de-sac in suburban Atlanta.  My neighbors are from New Orleans.  When Hurricane Katrina hit, my neighbors suddenly had 30 people (plus dogs, cats, gerbils, etc) camping out on every square inch of their floor.  I found myself with two black Labs in my fenced yard (who totally intimidated my own Lab . . . but that’s another story.) The kids enrolled in school, played ball, shot hoops in the cul-de-sac . . . did the usual kid stuff.  But what struck me was the total lack of expression or emotion these kids displayed.  Crying, screaming, begging to go home . . . that I could understand.  But these kids were just blank slates, moving from day to day.  I realized they were in emotional shock.  After all, these kids had just seen their entire lives disappear in a day . . . their schools, teachers, homes, relatives.  Even if some of the people survived, they had been dispersed to the four corners of the country, and life would never be the same again.  How do you deal with that load when you are 9 or 13 or 17 or an adult?  In a flash, it came to me that this is exactly what my dad’s family went through with the storm . . . death, injury, evacuation, loss of livelihood . . . the town never really recovered from The Storm.

But how does a child go on when your life is wiped out forever in less than a minute?  So this is what I am writing now, with endless phone calls to my 86 year old dad for details.  (He doesn’t remember the actual storm, but for a few brief and scary memories.)

Maw Books:  What a wonderful interview!  Thanks Mary Ann!  I especially liked all the details about your family and how you did your research.  It made a huge difference in the book.  I really felt like you had captured the era.   My husband wants to write a book, but is frustrated because he doesn’t know the era in which he’s writing.  Research, I say!  Maybe, one day, he’ll actually start doing it!  I wish you were already done with The Storm.  I so want to read it, right now!

If you enjoyed my review and interview, you may want to check out these fellow bloggers who are also all hosting the Jimmy’s Stars tour today:

01 Charger, A Childhood of Dreams, A Christian Worldview of Fiction
A Mom Speaks, All About Children’s Books, Becky’s Book Reviews, Book Review Maniac, By the Book Reviews, Dolce Bellezza, Fireside Musings, Home School Buzz, Looking Glass Reviews, Maggie Reads, Small World Reads, The Friendly Book Nook

That’s not all folks!  Jimmy’s Stars was chalk full of yummy (???) recipes.  Tomorrow in part two of Mary Ann Rodman’s interview we’ll learn how to make Salmon Pea Wiggle and Tomato Aspic.  Hungry anyone?