Hello, and welcome to the bookma I'm Christine Brown, your host.

Today my guest is Phil Oakley, author of runner's.

Welcome back.

Thank you.

Thank you much for being so nice of you to have So this is the second novel in your trilogy, and I just want to catch people In case they don't remember the first episode of the first b can you kind of set the scene ab a little summary what that was a Before we jump in?

Absolutely.

These are novels, but the charac are based on real members of my and we are now deeply into the t generation in this book.

The time frame at the beginning was right after the Civil War.

Family settling in New Mexico, had some dealings with the Mesca Apaches and some less pleasant d with some Comanches and.

The grandfather, the father.

In this sequence, Walter, was my actual grandfathe And in the book, he is largely completing the last work on the Southern Pa Railroad from New Orleans to Los Angeles, and he has become involved in his local politics, and they've settled along the So Llano River.

Both Walter and Edda, my grandmo have attained a lot of prosperit and respect within their communi But along comes the beginning of and we see the Great Depression, the Jazz Age claim one of the ugly sons lives We see incarceration of another youngster in the family.

And we have also seen Brooks and Ray, who are featured prominently in have a high school football care and some tragedy ensues with Bro who had counted on being, on all everything running back and woun getting injured.

And so he's in the University of Texas at th waiting to go to medical school.

Ray is 14 years old, and for reasons that no one will ever understand he decided that the best thing h would be to get on a freight tra in the middle of the Great Depre and go to California.

And while some people look at th and say, well, that's, that's a great Huck Finn story.

Well, if you were his parents, i And he nearly lost his life seve He also did something that turne to be a good favor.

It wound up in this book.

He wrote about 100 pages of his And I was able to use that in here.

And, you know, it was everything in his b True.

I don't know.

But it made a great story and I I didn't realize that I want to I want to dig into that a little because the book opens with him catching a freight train for the first time and, his lack of skill at knowing wha And then later in the story, he kind of revisits that life.

And and it's a fascinating look at what is kind of a very pivotal moment in American You know, he is thinking of of what he's heard about Califor and what life is out there is li and then is a little disillusion once he gets there and sees the Now, today, we we've seen The Grapes of Wrat The Grapes of Wrath, so we understand the hardship.

But it was really interesting to be in the mindset of a young who wasn't disillusioned yet abo That Paradise or what?

That.

Yeah, yeah, I think imagine two high school on a little bitty crystal radio that they had gotten through the and put together themselves, listening to far away radio stations down in the Texas Hill Country and hearing about the Great Depr and going to their school librar and reading the magazines of the and the newspaper accounts of this cataclysmic worldwide ev And I am sure that Ray was fascinated to see this history for himself, and also know that he was very r You get that that impression right at the first of the book.

But why you didn't learn anythin from the failed first trip and why he kept doing That's the part I just can't explain.

So he said he wrote his story do and this was your father right.

This was based on your father.

What was his writing.

Was it a just about the.

Is that where you got all the ti and tricks about how to do this Well, not the mechanics of getting on and off of freight It was his siblings who told me what what terrible shape he woul And by the time he had reached another family member, he never took coke on these trip he would start out.

He didn't know California got cold at night.

You know anything about it?

And he hadn't seen the movie.

He hadn't been made sure.

But it was.

There's a whole lot of stuff in about farming marijuana and all of that he actually expe or so he wrote in his book.

And it is a fascinating story.

And it, you know, we we look at this is a very muc our time issue.

And it's not clearly it's not ne It's not new.

It's not a new pro So this isn't just Ray's story t This is kind of the next generat If the first book was Walter and the story with a little bit of their children, this is really the children's bo So you're telling about their ch some of them get a little more focused than others.

How did how did you choose which narrati to to bring forward in this book Well, we number one, we we had a long sequence about smuggling alcohol, and one of the brothers lost his in that during the course of tha And another was almost, put in the federal penitentiary.

He served time in a lockup, but he eventually got out of it.

And so we have to complete his s The middle brother, Brooks, he was going to be a great football player, but that was a that intervened, that stopped th And then it was going to be a me a doctor, a surgeon.

And he went he went to medical s at the University of Texas Medic in Galveston for the summer, in of beginning his formal studies.

And he was he was in Austin agai before he went to his first medi He he, he just found out that he probably didn' want to do surgery for a living.

So and then World War two happen And the first place that he gets sent against his wi was the officer candidate, schoo He didn't want to be an officer.

He joined the Texas National Gua in advance of the war so he could stay in Austin and run his business, but that didn't work out.

He didn't want to be an officer.

That didn't work out.

And the first assignment, they s to Mississippi to round up draft And that that was a humbling exp And, you know, that's those are based on true stories.

You also feature a couple of the Absolutely.

Can you tell us abou Tragedy was not confined to the so-called sensible ones in the family.

Two sisters, both had very early marriages, very tragic early marriages.

Both of them had severe problems with alcoholism.

And, it, you know, it was a trai that ran through the family, and they were not immune to it.

It was it was great fun at first And being part of the Roaring 20 and being rich and riding around and open car and smoking cigarets for the fir but it didn't it didn't all stay far, didn't g So we talked about in the last episode of the last about how you had kind of fictio Walter Nadeau, who were your gra But can you talk about the proce of fictionalizing these because these are your aunts and and your father, potentially people you maybe know a little bit more well or more fully so was it eas or was it harder to turn them?

It was harder, yeah.

It was harder because.

I got to make up a lot of things in the first part of the first b To show the character the iron will of these two people that settled in a wild frontier.

And it was it was basically, complete fiction based on the history of the time So I didn't have to worry about being very accurate with them, but it was hard to get away with being too accurate.

About the second the third generation's problems.

My father's generation, and and to just let the story do the good things that it wound You know, so how did you have to, like, get permission?

Did you talk to.

Are any of them around okay, wha or do you have cousins that long As a matter of fact.

So, no, I didn't need to ask any permission.

It's, We'll use their real names simpl it just seemed.

More genuine to me than making up a bunch of for people.

You know, I use fictional names some other characters in the sto when let's let's just skip forwa a little bit when we talk about Franklin Roosevelt, everybody knew who was president the Great Depression and World W There's no point in giving the g different name.

So that's that's kind of my mind we've we've covered a little bit but there are some pretty extrao and and, and action filled stories in this book.

How much of this is true and how did you embellish a little bit?

Embellished a lot, but based on real events, about 85, 90%.

It's they really did a lot of these crazy things.

And why all but one of them lived to have additional life.

It's kind of hard to imagine, well, it's a as we've discussed a little bit, it's a very turbul This is the Roaring 20s, the Great Depression, World War So much change happening in such a very short a Yeah, definitely in Texas.

Yes.

Because, you know, most of those who went to Europe and the Pacif had had never been to a big city This, you know, Texas was a farm state when that war started.

And we have so many kind of char There's eight was eight children seven children of, of Walter and So naturally they're all going to have differ varying experiences in their tim and based on their gender, their age, they're going to have these wealth of different experi So it tracks I guess, you know, they're all they're all extremel They're physically very attracti and they're all just stubborn as, you dangerous combination of characteristics.

So on the last book, you talked about how you did a lot of resea on on how the railroads got buil to kind of fill in that story.

This I was going to ask about re how to ride the rails, but it so you had a great firsthand accoun Yeah.

Did you have to do any other res Yeah, I wanted to make sure I got the the German submarine warfare in the Gulf of Mexico.

Right?

During the Navy in the War Depar denied virtually all of these th that happened out there.

Well, there there are about half German submarines close in to the U.S. coast coastline.

They were really sinking ships in the Gulf of Mexico.

But the Army, in its infinite wisdom, did not want people to p And when, Matagorda Island got shelled by a German submarine they said never happened.

And the same thing happened a number of other they transported crude oil from to big refineries, mostly around Philadelphia, and became aviation gasoline and wen to the Battle of Britain to supp airplanes flown by Britain's and Canadians, and then later on, the United States Air Force.

So Texas was absolutely vital.

You know, if Hitler had had an asset like he wouldn't have been nearly as as it turned out.

And a lack of raw material for the German army was a was a huge issue.

We had also talked before about setting in the last book.

There's not a lot of settings.

I mean there's kind of New Mexic and then Texas and the rails bet but this one's a little bit broa We we go all over the place.

Yea We wound up in the north woods of Michigan.

We're we're actually out on a tanker in the Gulf of Mexico.

We're still running liquor.

Illegal liquor.

And at one part of the book in the Gulf of Mexico and along the Texas and Louisian both, we've got one sister who winds up in Pennsylvania.

We've, and we've we've got a cluster of various entities living in other parts of the state of Texa Since we're, we're in this kind of next generation of oakleys here, there's a lot m I guess, main characters.

This isn't any maybe one charact So there's a lot of narratives you're having to kind of balance in and out of.

Was that difficult and how did you manage to?

It really is.

Well, this is effortless.

As a reader, I jump in and I know where I'm at, like it and I'm not getting confused by by the jumping around.

So I'm just curious how you how that out, how you, how you make I'm on it.

You know, I started writing books in 1963, 64 spring 1964, and with each new effort, I pick something up.

And when somebody offers a chall and that's when things like what you're des from this book happen.

Because to meet the challenge, I've got to keep track of everyt in my head so people, you know, write these things down on chart so they'll know where who is, at what time.

I can't do it that way.

I've got to let the story go.

And then I make sure that that t is enough background in each part of the book to find, in case you fell asleep 30 minut and kind of had foggy parts of the, particular chapter or something like that.

And I do that myself.

I get so enthralled in reading somebody else's book that, you know, then I start bac the next evening.

Listen, yeah, I gotta remember t Yeah.

There's some there's some kind o the book plays with time a littl We flash back and flash forward, which I imagine is challenging as a writer, but But the reason it happens in thi is because, on about the 15th time around, I figured out Ray was the most i part of the story.

But because he was my father, I it was harder for me to come to When when I was dealing with his siblings.

That wasn't is is difficult because I didn't have as much invested in them as I do in Brooklyn.

Right.

Sure.

That makes sense.

It's much more close to you.

More personal than.

Than some of the other ones.

Yea In the in the first book, we see kind of a push pull between Walt and his father on him wanting to and strike it out on his own.

And as it often happens, history repeats itself here with Walter and their children are wanting t to kind of get break away.

Can you talk about that theme in about how there's that discord between parents and what the parents expecting with the children?

I think if you've ever had a chi you you have a great perspective on how this happens because they don't want to keep They don't want to be told when go to bed or what they can wear In the case of my family, it was more severe th They didn't have enough sense, not to put their lives in consta It's one thing to tell someone that, you know, if you pay too much attention to it's going to have a negative im because that's not something that's not a lesson that you can just teach and have Most children, young people acce They've got to find out for them We had talked last time about even though the circumstan were so different, the relate ab of those characters, and I find thinking the same thing in this the situations are maybe more ex but it's relatable, the relatabi of that push pull, the wanting t go out on your own and not under why somebody would make some som But you have to just like, live with it and love them regardless of whatever bad choic they're making.

These are all the things we still experience in our own t just hopefully not as dramatical And and I think that that goes b to oral history forever.

It's human nature.

If you've got to get out of the and why so many of us have to do it so much of the hard way, it's the most difficult part of I also wanted to talk about the title runners, because kind of almost another theme in when we have the literal like ru But then all of, all of these pe all of our characters are kind of running from somethi or someone or themselves or some Yeah.

Yes.

All of them are running from the In one sense.

And of course, Ralph, the oldest brother, is still in business.

Illegal liquor business.

He's he's a smuggler, a gangster and the middle son, Brooks.

Is a real high school football p And he's literally running a foo but he's also running away from his own decisions several times in a very dramatic He's running away from the army.

Except he never gets away.

And Ray is just running.

He just can't be still.

There's a there's a story about Huey Long.

It's his brother said he was ner He was so nervous he jumping.

Well if you didn't watch it when he was a little kid apparently my father was the sam And the girls are running for hi Oh yeah.

Marriages or reputation Like they the one is in the shadow of the Or she's running from them.

I mean, it's again, relatable, but they're they're all they all this need to run to get out.

They do to try something else.

Another another theme I've noticed in this book, too, not understanding your parents, I guess, as people, because ther there's a couple moments where where Ray and and Brooks and to a lesser extent, Ralph.

They they don't know their dad as they know their dad as their but not as his own independent m But they'll see him in situation where he has all this power within the railroad and all he knows, all these people and connections And it's like it's that stark mo when you realize your parents ar They're not just your parents.

Oh, yeah.

And, you know, their father is a big You know, he has done a lot of history on his own And he has friends all over the Southern Pacific Railroad system.

He's got political friends all o And Ray, who is all the next to child, doesn't really realize he's just kind of a doddering ol by this point in his eyes.

He can't he can't figure this ou But every time he turns around, is somebody talking about his fa He didn't know any of those thin And and because the character Wa is such a kind of a stoic and qu not a, not a brass and showy, he he wields his power carefully.

And he's a consummate Texas.

Yes, man.

Yes.

And to these young upstart boys, not how powerful men are suppose Something else in their mind.

So So watching that, especially if you read the first and you understand Walter's char so well, it's almost tragic that his children misunderstand But, you know, by going back to look at Walter in the first b he's 16 at the most when he tells his dad he doesn't want to be an enginee his father had dreamed of becomi and that he's going to go out and have his own adventure building the same railroad.

His son winds up nearly dying.

Which is it's I find these stori fascinating is they're so human.

It's it's so it's so us the these follies that we repeat gen after generation.

I when we had talked about your book, it was still kind of new.

So I want to know what are the r you're getting from these storie Oh, just this one has been fanta The pre-sale on this book was just enormous.

And and, I think a lot of that is, is owing to Lauren Steffy, who runs Stoney Creek Pu And.

The most interesting part of the success is that people preordered this b and figured out that they hadn't read the other So it sent sales of Little Hatch through the roof.

We actually got in the top ten in Amazon for, for a few hours, a few but still I mean that's a long way.

A lot of books on Amazon.

Absolutely.

Yes.

Yes.

Well that's exciting.

So we've got the third one to look forward to.

And yes, I'm sure you'll come back and talk a Is this going to pick up with more of their stories?

Are we going?

Absolutely.

Okay.

Absolutely.

Okay.

And I'll give you a hint.

Right.

Kind of takes that one ov Thank you Lord.

Well, I, I would imagine you've got the most research and and ideas maybe for for Ray's fu Not really.

No no no on I, I was hard to see it.

It was hard for me to see it in And it became hard again in the next book.

But once I just let him go.

I'm kind of like him and his fat Well that's wonderful.

I look forward to that because this is, as we've said, a really fascinating story a human story of.

And with the time period we've been in kind of fun and ex So, we're running short on time but in our final, maybe two minu can you tell us what you hope people take away from this story I hope they they learn that all of these horrible that they may be called upon to It's not just their experience.

We virtually all have to go thro a great deal of tragedy in life, and I hope they understand that.

History has a way of.

Keeping us in our dreams.

You know, it's so easy to get lost in the day by day.

This is the worst that ever happ Oh I, I, I can't handle any more bad news Well just wait.

A you can and you will, you can and you will.

And there's this mystery to all For me, it's easy to understand There's a religious experience behind virtually everything in l The tragedies and the joys.

But even if even if you don't vi that way.

You believe in things and you lo and you want what's best for the Well, that's I can't think of a to to end it.

So let's let's stop there.

Thank you so much for coming bac for sharing this story with us.

And I'm we're going to look forw to that next one.

I can't wait X can't wait.

Thank you so much for joining us The book is Runners by Phil Oakl That's all the time we've got fo and I will see you again soon.