TV, Technology, and Depression

Lately I have been exhausted. Since Morgan's been gone, I've been going to bed around 6:30 or 7 every day. Sometimes I've managed to stay up until 9 or 10, but not easily, or often. The other night, I didn't even get to see who'd done it on Law and Order!!

While I agree that we, as a nation, might watch far too much TV, I love TV. Honestly, I have learned more from TV and books than from school, and I adore school, too! I hate to admit it, but I have probably learned as much from TV as from books, and now from the Internet, too. Or, at least, it has given me access to information sources that I can no longer imagine finding the old fashioned way.

My grandfather was a novelist. He went to high school at a boarding school in Minnesota, near where I grew up, despite his being from Iowa. My Mom taught French for a couple of years where he went to HS. Then, he almost finished a degree in advertising at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, after which time he moved away from the Midwest, to New York, and Madison Avenue. He was pretty successful in advertising, had 3 wives, the last of which was my grandmother, 4 daughters, and quit work to become a writer...

I believe he wrote 13 books, 12 historical novels, and one novel of the "not so distant future," about the 20-Minute War, which, among other things, destroyed the Panama Canal, and the strange effects that being born during this war had on those people who were born in just that 20-minute period of time. I have read a few of them. I haven't read "Central Passage," which is the one about the 20-Minute War and the Panama Canal, although I don't think it is really "about" either of those things.

Anyway, I read his first book, "The Burnished Blade," and it was good. No literary masterpiece, but perfectly reasonable entertainment. I read "The Revolutionary," too, which is about John Paul Jones. I never knew what an interesting, and sad, history John Paul Jones had. Most, if not all, of my grandfather's books were best-sellers. Then TV came along, and people stopped reading this kind of basically "pulp fiction" much. He probably would have kept generating best-sellers if he'd written romance novels, but, no matter.

My grandfather was an interesting soul. (And, do not despair, there is a point to this story!) He knew 5, 6, or 7 languages, I forget exactly how many. He had depression. His mother had depression, to the point that, when he was in high school, after she recovered from the flu of 1918 or 1919, or whenever it was, she spent a significant amount of time at the Battle Creek Sanitarium, which is the hospital for which Kellogg's first began producing hot cereal, and thereby got its start in life.

My Great Grandfather probably had depression, too, if you go by what my mother has told me of them and their lives. Both of their families were prominent, wealthy, banking families in Anamosa, Jones County, Iowa. They were also both highly prominent, high-ranking officers, or whatever they are called, in the Masons. My Great Grandmother died, when she was about 40, shortly after returning from the sanitarium in Michigan, after "falling" down the stairs.

Even prior to her stay in Battle Creek, my Great Grandfather had taken up with his secretary. You can imagine the controversy this would cause among the fine, upstanding folk of small-town American banking Iowa. My great-great grandparents were convinced that my Great Grandfather had killed my Great Grandmother. We have some of her letters, that someone found in the attic of the old family home in Iowa, and mailed to my aunt. Given their tone and content, I am not convinced that he didn't. Or that he didn't at least somehow cause her to fall or throw herself down the stairs. But that is another story.

After she died, my grandfather became even more reclusive, and he was in high school at the time. So much so that his high school yearbook (Class of 1923!) cites him as "That man of loneliness and mystery; scarce seen to smile and seldom heard to sigh."

I exchanged a few emails with someone at the school a few months ago. She was good enough to copy all of the information on him from their yearbooks, and, something unexpected, since he was somewhat of a celebrity in his day, and since he had been close to the headmaster of where he went to high school, they had a thick file of press releases and correspondence that she was good enough to send me copies of. She even sent their original press/advertising photo that Macmillan had sent to them many moons ago, and a copy of the text of my grandfather's "submission" to Murrow's "This I Believe."

Anyway, especially after he left advertising and started writing, my grandfather was quite reclusive. Methinks the trait genetic!! He had three homes in New York. One on Long Island, which was actually my grandmother's mother's home, and where she still lives, one right next to Jones Beach, on Lido Beach, which my grandmother sold to a NY Jet after my grandfather passed away, and one in Pound Ridge, in Westchester County, NY.

My great-grandfather was not ever tried in a Court of Justice, as the police claimed insufficient evidence to charge him with anything, but he was "tried," by the Masons, who found him guilty of contributing to my great-grandmother's death by neglect and emotional abuse, if not more, and he was banned from the Masons for life. My grandfather did not see him much after he married the secretary and moved to Florida, but he did do so occasionally.

There are two points to my story. Maybe I should get to them! The first is that, each of my grandfather's books would literally take him years to write. He would move among their three houses, and sometimes take off to the Poconos for months on end to write and research his subjects. I cannot even imagine the amount of work it took him to write historically-accurate novels, especially those written about actual real people (besides John Paul Jones, he wrote about Queen Isabella, Queen Elizabeth I and Sir Walter Raleigh, King Louis XI, etc.), without the Internet and the rest of our modern technology.

That said, he was a "techie" in his way, purchasing one of the first TV sets ever sold, etc.

He literally shot a TV once, too, though, because he didn't like what was on. Too bad he passed away in 1979, before cable really took over, and before I was old enough to really get to know him.

The other point was that, I can see a trend in how depression can govern people's lives and how it makes some people isolate themselves. when my grandfather was home, when his daughters were young, he would write all night, and most of every day. I remember him as always being in his pajamas. One summer we spent in Pound Ridge growing up, he would work at night, stay up all day in his pajamas, and watch the Watergate stuff in the afternoon and evening. He was a character. When he was about 30, he had trouble with his teeth. but, he hated going to the dentist, so he had the dentist pull them all out right then and there and give him dentures.