Ray E. Boomhower

"Nobody reads a mystery to get to the middle; they read it to get to the end. If it's a letdown, they won't buy any more. The first page sells that book. The last page sells your next book."
Mickey Spillane

The Reporter and the Mine Disaster The bodies began coming up from deep within the bowels of the earth days after the first  explosion at the Centralia coal mine  on March 2...

This month in 1947, a coal mine near Centralia, Illinois, exploded, killing 111 men. Freelance writer John Bartlow Martin set out to find what happened and why for @harpers.bsky.social.
rayboomhower.blogspot.com/2018/03/the-...

YouTube video by blackwind99 Matchbox Twenty- Long Day (Live at Philip's Arena)

"I'm sorry 'bout the attitude
I need to give when I'm with you
But no one else would take this shit from me
And I'm so
Terrified of no one else but me
I'm here all the time
I won't go away"
youtu.be/yd-7Ebqk1sI

YouTube video by Jesse Fitzgerald Robin Trower Live Too Rolling Stoned

Happy birthday to Robin Trower, born on this day in 1945. Not a bad guitarist for an old guy.
youtu.be/Wzcteihsckw

“It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment?”
Vita Sackville-West, born on this day in 1892

“I’m not an author, I’m a writer, that’s all I am. Authors want their names down in history; I want to keep the smoke coming out of the chimney.”
Mickey Spillane, born on this day in 1918

"Writing is a sustaining thing. I decided when I was young that I wanted to write, so that’s what I do. If I didn’t do it, I wouldn’t know what to do. Without it I’d probably croak."
John McPhee

"Never market-research your writing. Write on subjects in which you have enough interest on your own to see you through all the stops, starts, hesitations, and other impediments along the way."
John McPhee

I should be able to share some good news next week about my new book project. It involves this writer ✍🏼 and his book.

"Advanced Ideas": The Early Fight for Equal Suffrage in Indiana During the spring of 1878 Indianapolis society crackled with “mysterious whisperings” concerning a proposed meeting involving women in the ...

“Had we convened consciously to plot the ruin of our domestic life, which opponents predict as the result of woman’s enfranchisement, we could not have looked more guilty or have moved about with more unnatural stealth.”
#WomensHistoryMonth
rayboomhower.blogspot.com/2017/03/adva...

"With nonfiction, you’ve got your material, and what you’re trying to do is tell it as a story in a way that doesn’t violate fact, but at the same time is structured and presented in a way that makes it interesting to read."
John McPhee, born on this day in 1931

"Don't write so that you can be understood, write so that you can't be misunderstood."
William Howard Taft, who died on this day in 1930

Once, for a Sacco and Vanzetti demonstration at Boston Common, a man came up to her, identified himself as a policeman, and said he wanted to be where the trouble was. "Stick with me brother," Donovan told him, "and you'll be where the trouble is."

She was heavily involved in trying to save the lives of anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, winning, from Upton Sinclair, the designation of being the "Irish ex-Catholic Joan of Arc of the labor movement."

“We were always poor," she recalled of her childhood. "I didn't have to 'get interested' in the underdog--I was one myself."

In honor of #InternationalWomensDay, here's to Mary Donovan Hapgood, the first woman to run for governor in Massachusetts (1928) and Indiana (1940), both times as the candidate of the Socialist Party.

"You spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time."
Jim Bouton, author of one of the best books on baseball, "Ball Four," born on this day in 1939

Ernie Pyle, Robert Sherrod, and the Battle of Okinawa On April 9, 1945, while covering the American invasion of Okinawa, located only 330 miles from Japan, two war correspondents, one a veteran ...

Think Okinawa.
rayboomhower.blogspot.com/2018/04/robe...

Writing in Wartime: Robert L. Sherrod and Tarawa Late in the afternoon of March 7, 1944, Robert L. Sherrod , a reporter who had been covering the war in the Pacific for Time and Life magaz...

“It’s O. K., pretty bloody but that’s the way it is out there.”
OTD in 1944, war correspondent Robert Sherrod met a young officer who offered the first positive notice about Sherrod’s new book about a bloody battle in the Pacific. His name? John F. Kennedy.
rayboomhower.blogspot.com/2017/10/writ...

Malcolm W. Browne and the Fall of Saigon Commissioned by the U.S. Navy on September 20, 1969, the USS Mobile , a Charleston-class amphibious cargo ship, had over its lifetime been d...

“Nothing came easy in that country.”
This month in 1975, better war correspondent Malcolm Browne returned to South Vietnam to report on what became the death throes of America’s former ally.
rayboomhower.blogspot.com/2024/04/malc...

YouTube video by an on Townes Van Zandt - Nothin' - Live @ Amsterdam 1991

"Sorrow and solitude, these are the precious things
And the only words that are worth remembering."
Townes Van Zandt, born on this day in 1944
youtu.be/ie5c3a87W0Y

Benjamin Harrison: The Death of a President The illness that took the life of former President Benjam Harrison came as a surprise to him and his family. Harrison had seemed "perfectly...

“I am having a dreadful chill.”
The illness that led to the death of former President Benjamin Harrison struck him on this day in 1901
rayboomhower.blogspot.com/2024/03/benj...

Check out the book and preorder here: www.unmpress.com/978082637015... #booksky #historysky #biography

According to Terry, he noticed that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his lieutenant, Ralph Abernathy, are wearing dress shoes and socks. "So I provide them with combat shoes and sweat socks I charge to my 'Time Magazine' expense account. (I don't tell Time.)"

A tidbit from my Wallace Terry biography, to be released on October 6 by the @unmpress.bsky.social: In his unpublished memoir, Terry, who covered the civil rights movement for both the "Washington Post" and "Time" magazine, was in Selma, Alabama, on March 21, 1965, for the march to Montgomery.

Ring Lardner, South Bend, and Baseball In the spring of 1901 the University of Notre Dame varsity baseball team was busy preparing for a game on the South Bend, Indiana, campus....

“I had no newspaper experience, but a two years’ course in a gas-office teaches you practically all there is to know about human nature. Besides, I had been class poet at the high school, and I knew I could write.”
Ring Lardner, born on this day in 1885
rayboomhower.blogspot.com/2020/10/ring...

The Bygone Era of Supreme Court Support for Voting Rights Sixty years after upholding the Voting Rights Act, the Court has dismantled most of it.

Tomorrow marks the 61st anniversary of Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama. It also marks the 60th anniversary of the Supreme Court first upholding the Voting Rights Act.

We have gotten so, so far away from a Court that cares about democracy.

New from me at @brennancenter.org:

YouTube video by PJHarveyVEVO PJ Harvey - This Is Love

Even in the summer, even in the spring
You can never get too much of a wonderful thing
youtu.be/STxXS5lLunE?...

The Country Contributor: How Juliet Strauss Worked to Save Turkey Run State Park Historical profile of journalist and environmentalist Juliet Strauss from Rockville, Indiana, who was a leader in saving the lands that would become Turkey Run State Park in Parke County.

For #WomensHistoryMonth, here's a Hoosier writing legend and a person responsible for helping save Turkey Run so it could become one of Indiana's first state parks.
www.ipm.org/show/journey...