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Arts & Entertainment

Beach Cities Novelist Evaluates American Experience

Author John Paul Godges talks to Patch about digging deep into his family roots, unveiling the story about a mentally ill sibling who would hold the family together.

When John Paul Godges was growing up next door in Redondo Beach in the 1960s and '70s, he watched as his immigrant parents raised children in a place and time of cultural movement.

Godges' collective stories of a generation are told in his new memoir Oh, Beautiful: An American Family in the 20th Century. The author and RAND Review editor-in-chief spoke with Patch about his book and upbringing here in the South Bay.

Hermosa Beach Patch: When did the idea to write a book grab you?

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John Paul Godges: The idea for the book came at my parent's 50th wedding anniversary in 1999. I had never really planned to write a book, but as I thought about the anniversary and the experiences of my brothers and sisters and the reflections at the anniversary for several months, and I wrote all of these yellow Post-It notes to myself. They were very disorganized. I was just toying with the idea of the book.

Slowly, over several months, I started to construct an outline and the real challenge was to make the individual lives of my family members correspond to social or national movements in U.S. history. And I got enough of those that I conviced myself that this might work. Once I got into it, there was no turning back.

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Patch: How long did the research take?

Godges: It took me all of 10 years to produce the book. I have to work for a living, so this was 10 years vacation time. The research was a combination of historical research and oral history. Oral history, mostly interviewing my family, and then traveling to Iowa and interviewing people there. The hardest part was doing the geneological work in the L.A. family history center and at Ellis Island.

It was just oral history that my great grandfather from Italy had arrived and suffered a fatal altercation on a train. The only evidence we had was a note written in pencil by a deceased aunt with the town and date of his death. When I went to Ellis Island two years ago, I found they had digitized records which made all the difference in the world. I got to [Ellis Island], I could see he came with a family companion who, four years later, came again to America with the son of my great grandfather so he could come looking for the grave of the father, so that closed the circle.

Patch: Was there anything you found that surprised you about your family past?

Godges: Yes. The most surprising thing was the fact that my dad, at the age of 11, had literally run away from home, and that's how he immigrated to America. He got caught in between his father and his mother, and his father returned to Poland, and my father was abducted and never saw his mother again. And this was something that my dad had never shared with anyone in our family, not even his own wife. And it was something that had been so painful that he had kept it inside. Because someone had finally asked him questions that went into detail about how he arrived in this country, he just honestly answered. I was trembling when he told me. It explained so much of his behavior throughout my family's life.

That experience taught me that so many stories are never shared simply because the questions are never asked. No one's thought to ask these questions, so they assume that no one cares. They could assume their stories are not important to anyone else. But younger people, they don't want to stir the pot, so out of 'respect' for their elders, they don't want to cause emotional pain by bringing up these distressing aspects of the past. But so much is lost because of these assumptions that go in both directions.

Patch: What was the American experience and the Californian experience at the time you were growing up in the South Bay?

Godges: My upbringing was very much characterized and influenced by the 1960s. I'm a Kennedy baby. I was reared with boundless optimism of the early '60s, and then, pretty quickly, witnessed the effects of the Vietnam War and Watergate. For me, the experience of America as a child was a place that had immense and endless opportunity for creating good in the world but also one that had become so divided internally because of mistakes, and the clash of ideas and definitions of what America should be, and because of the grieving that was going on in that period. It wasn't just the boys coming home in body bags, it was the national heroes of a generation being blasted away. John F. Kennedy to Martin Luther King Jr. to Robert Kennedy.

Patch: How does this play into your book?

Godges: All the immense and tremendous hopes of Camelot were being dramatically squashed, stamped out, and very quickly a lot of lingering questions we all struggled with, what it means to be American. The tension between individual freedom and connecting with a larger community. That tension is the theme of the book. I try to portray the family as a metaphor for that tension. I think that echoes in a big family like mine that is kind of wacky and diverse.

My sister developed a mental illness in 1968, right in the midst of all of this national turmoil, and it made for a very riotous situation at home. The way we have come together over the ensuing decades to grapple with her mental illness is the heart and soul of the book. Having that common, formative experience of learning to love someone, who at certain times you understand the least, has made us all better people.

And there is something very powerful in that story that helps to explain how families, societies and countries that champion the freedom of the individual can nonetheless rally together to support one another. In this case, we all learned so much from my sister Gerrie, that all of us would agree she is the most important person in the family. Yet the irony is that people with mental illness are deemed by society to be the least important. In our case, she is the one who has kept our society intact as a family.

Patch: If, 100 years from today, someone were to sit down and write this story, how do you think it would take shape? What do you think are the formative societal roles and dilemmas we are facing today?

Godges: Actually, I think they would be very similar. I think the one thing that struck me while writing the book was how the stories I was writing about seemed to reflect current events. Stories of immigrant laborers risking everything to enter this country. People crawling their way out of poverty. Parents scrambling for healthcare for their kids. Communities quarreling over issues of ethnicity and religion. Military involvement that brings out the best and worst in people. Domestic battles erupting over matters of money and morality. And individuals fighting for their inalienable rights.

A lot of that is starting all over again... or maybe continuing. Our core American experience, I would expect it to be playing out on the stage a century from now.

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