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Speaker 1: You are now listening to True Murder, The most Shocking
Speaker 1: Killers in True crime History and the authors that have
Speaker 1: written about them, Gasey Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker DTK. Every
Speaker 1: week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and
Speaker 1: infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host,
Speaker 1: journalist and author Dan Zupansky.
Speaker 2: Good Evening. This is your host Dan Zuvansky for the
Speaker 2: program True Murder, The most shocking killers in true crime
Speaker 2: history and the authors that have written about them. Over
Speaker 2: the years, Ron Francell's books have earned high praise from
Speaker 2: best authors such as Anne Rule and Vincent Bulagosi. He
Speaker 2: is the best selling author of The Darkest Night, and
Speaker 2: his writing has been often compared to Truman Capodi. Ron
Speaker 2: grew up in Wyoming. A lifelong journalist, he worked for
Speaker 2: newspapers in Wyoming, New Mexico, and California's Bay Area before
Speaker 2: hitting the road in one of America American Journalism's best beats,
Speaker 2: covering the evolution of the American West as a senior
Speaker 2: writer for the Denver Post. Shortly after nine to eleven,
Speaker 2: he was dispatched by the Post to cover the Middle
Speaker 2: East during the first few months of the Afghan War.
Speaker 2: In two thousand and four, became the managing editor for
Speaker 2: the Beaumount, TX Enterprise, where he covered the devastation of
Speaker 2: Hurricane Rita. After Ron's divorce, he feared he was the
Speaker 2: link in a long chain of his strange fathers. But
Speaker 2: when the author and his teenage son embark on a
Speaker 2: road trip to the Yukon to seek out a macabre
Speaker 2: cocktail containing an amputated human tow, they unwittingly begin a
Speaker 2: journey into their own present and future. The Sour Cocktail
Speaker 2: Club is a true life love story about fathers and sons,
Speaker 2: set against epic backdrops and overlooked places. It is also
Speaker 2: a roadbook that attempts to answer, for one father and
Speaker 2: son a pivotal life question, where does the road go?
Speaker 2: Our book that we're featuring this evening is The Sourtoll
Speaker 2: Cocktail Club with my special guest journalist and author Ron Fransell.
Speaker 2: Thank you for agreeing to this program and welcome back
Speaker 2: to True Murder. Ron Francell, p Pell Dan.
Speaker 7: Thank you for having me back. I'm just delighted that
Speaker 7: I didn't screw up so bad the last time that
Speaker 7: you wouldn't have me at all.
Speaker 2: You got to get a little bit more confidence in yourself.
Speaker 7: Ron I have a great time doing your show. But tonight,
Speaker 7: despite the build up, we're not going to be talking
Speaker 7: about killers or murder or anything like that. Although I
Speaker 7: have to admit I don't know exactly where this toe
Speaker 7: came from. But you know, we're not gonna well, maybe
Speaker 7: we'll talk about killers before it's all over. But this book,
Speaker 7: you know, is a little a little brighter than my
Speaker 7: usual fare.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And the thing is though that I think that
Speaker 2: it's very interesting for people who already are aware of
Speaker 2: your work, love your work, to now hear to get
Speaker 2: a chance which is a rare opportunity to hear about
Speaker 2: something that life changing in your life. And we will
Speaker 2: ask some questions about Obviously, you know, the book answers
Speaker 2: it to a certain degree, but we're going to ask
Speaker 2: some questions for the audience that because of course they're
Speaker 2: just hearing about this program, but we want to know.
Speaker 2: We're going to know, we're going to learn quite a
Speaker 2: bit about your son, and we're gonna learn quite a
Speaker 2: bit about yourself and your history. And so being a
Speaker 2: prolific writer, a true crime writer, has written a couple
Speaker 2: things that are very that have affected a lot of people.
Speaker 2: I think our audience will be very interested in how
Speaker 2: you came to all of this and how this has
Speaker 2: informed your personality and this great book that we have
Speaker 2: here now again, like I say, a life changing experience
Speaker 2: for those that don't know otherwise a true crime writer.
Speaker 2: So let's get to the Sour Tool cocktail club now. Now, first,
Speaker 2: I think we should talk about your job at the
Speaker 2: Denver Post. You say you drove more than eight thousand
Speaker 2: miles per week writing about the West, eighty thousand miles
Speaker 2: in your first year and root sixty six. Tell us
Speaker 2: what your first tell us about your marriage, and then
Speaker 2: tell us about your job at Denver Post. And where
Speaker 2: are you at that point in your marriage when you
Speaker 2: have this job at Denver Post.
Speaker 7: Take us back, Well, let me take you back a
Speaker 7: little bit farther than that. My then wife and I
Speaker 7: were the co publishers of a small daily newspaper in Wyoming,
Speaker 7: where we had both grown up. Now we had worked
Speaker 7: for newspapers elsewhere, but come back to Wyoming to raise
Speaker 7: our children in a small town and to run a newspaper.
Speaker 7: Things just ended up going badly, and not for the newspaper.
Speaker 7: The newspaper was doing terrifically, but the relationship is sort
Speaker 7: of very slowly. Gave is sagged under its own weight,
Speaker 7: and we ultimately divorced when my son was thirteen and
Speaker 7: my daughter was seventeen. Being a small town and being
Speaker 7: the publisher of the newspaper up to that point, it
Speaker 7: wasn't possible for me to just go get another job
Speaker 7: there in town. You know, there was no other newspaper,
Speaker 7: There was no other media outlet that I could just
Speaker 7: casually show up and start a new job. In the
Speaker 7: American West, the next biggest place for me to go,
Speaker 7: or the next best place for me to look for
Speaker 7: a job, was Denver, Colorado. And as it happened, they
Speaker 7: had been dreaming for some time about some new kind
Speaker 7: of reportage that for them anyway, where the typical ordinary
Speaker 7: journalism was told with a little bit more narrative flare.
Speaker 7: And because I at that point I had written some
Speaker 7: novels as well as had long experience as a journalist,
Speaker 7: they thought I was perfect for that, and so they
Speaker 7: assigned me to the job as a senior writer and
Speaker 7: a columnist to write about the evolution of the American West,
Speaker 7: and and my job was to wade out into this vast,
Speaker 7: vast region and find stories where the past, the present,
Speaker 7: and the future all intersected, where where by looking backward,
Speaker 7: we might see where we are and where we're going.
Speaker 7: And it was a beautiful job for me. I got
Speaker 7: to blend, you know, real journalism, real stories, truth, with
Speaker 7: all those tools that I developed as a novelist, to
Speaker 7: to bring drama to a story, to bring to give
Speaker 7: it a pace, to give it, to give it a meaning,
Speaker 7: and and I just loved that. And it was doing
Speaker 7: that that caused then my bosses to send me to
Speaker 7: the Middle East right after nine to eleven in hopes
Speaker 7: that we could begin to answer some of the questions
Speaker 7: that we were all asking ourselves in North America at
Speaker 7: that time for an American audience. And they saw no
Speaker 7: better way than to send someone who could tell that
Speaker 7: story on the short runway that I had become accustomed
Speaker 7: to working. So that's where I was, And in that
Speaker 7: process I didn't travel eight thousand miles a week, but
Speaker 7: my first year on the road was eighty thousand miles.
Speaker 7: What was happening was I was using the road as therapy.
Speaker 7: It was my sanctuary. I would spend five or six
Speaker 7: weeks generally out reporting and driving all over the American
Speaker 7: West looking for these stories and writing them and living
Speaker 7: that road life kept my mind off all the pain
Speaker 7: that was that that that that had uh just gripped
Speaker 7: me in in the in the backwash of this divorce.
Speaker 7: And during that time I was able also then to
Speaker 7: spend a lot of time with my son where he
Speaker 7: lived in Wyoming, because I was on the road and
Speaker 7: I could visit fairly often, but it wasn't every day.
Speaker 7: And it was in the first month or I'm sorry,
Speaker 7: in the first summer of of after that divorce, that
Speaker 7: he came to me in my my little house in
Speaker 7: the Colorado Rockies and we spent that glorious summer together
Speaker 7: and we we tried to do too much. We we
Speaker 7: wanted to fit every mist day into the days we had.
Speaker 7: So it was during that time that I ran across
Speaker 7: a mansion and I think on the internet one night
Speaker 7: about this bar in Dawson City and the Yukon, And
Speaker 7: what I learned was that you could go there and
Speaker 7: you could order a drink, and they would show you
Speaker 7: to a little room in the back, and there you
Speaker 7: would be sworn to an oath and having taken the oath,
Speaker 7: a funny little guy would drop into your drink, a
Speaker 7: mummified human tow. And when I told my son this,
Speaker 7: now he's thirteen years.
Speaker 2: Old, he.
Speaker 7: Was immediately intrigued by the idea. Now, I think because
Speaker 7: he was thirteen, anything that involved liquor and anything that
Speaker 7: involved disembodied body parts was fascinating to him, and so
Speaker 7: it became a kind of code to us after that.
Speaker 7: For many years, we would talk about the toe as
Speaker 7: this thing that we shared, this kind of fantasy that
Speaker 7: we shared, and we had always sworn, you know, to ourselves,
Speaker 7: that we would do it someday. When he became a
Speaker 7: college student eighteen years old, he was driving to college
Speaker 7: and I was checking in with him throughout the day
Speaker 7: because it was a long trip and it was his
Speaker 7: first time doing that sort of thing. And toward the
Speaker 7: end of that day, I noticed he was getting tired,
Speaker 7: and so we just would we just spend a lot
Speaker 7: of time on the phone talking, not doing not really
Speaker 7: talking about much of anything, just keeping him talking. And
Speaker 7: he mentioned that during that day he had thought about
Speaker 7: the toe, and it was at that moment that I
Speaker 7: decided we were going to do this. And so it's
Speaker 7: the road you know lies literally under this story obviously,
Speaker 7: you know, a nearly five thousand mile journey to the
Speaker 7: Yukon and to the Arctic beyond. But it lies in
Speaker 7: the sort of metaphoric sense under this story too.
Speaker 2: Now, let's for our audience. I think this is a
Speaker 2: very very important part of the story. Is your own
Speaker 2: childhood and your own relationship with your father, biological father
Speaker 2: and your stepfather. Tell us about that. Take us back
Speaker 2: to your life and tell us about that.
Speaker 7: When my mother was pregnant with me, her first child,
Speaker 7: the young woman and married less than two years before
Speaker 7: my biological father left and never came back and never
Speaker 7: turned around. It was many years I was a young
Speaker 7: boy before she told me that my biological father had
Speaker 7: abandoned us, and that the man that I knew was
Speaker 7: my father and who continues today to be my father,
Speaker 7: was not, you know, my biological father. And that's kind
Speaker 7: of confusing when you're eight or nine years old, and
Speaker 7: it was confusing to me. Nevertheless, I grew up with
Speaker 7: my stepfather. I continue, you know now to have a
Speaker 7: wonderful relationship with my stepfather. But for many years I
Speaker 7: didn't know anything more than what my mother had told me,
Speaker 7: which wasn't much about my biological father. I found him
Speaker 7: when I was thirty years old. I was a journalist,
Speaker 7: and I used a lot of the skills that I'd
Speaker 7: learned as a researcher and as a journalist to find him,
Speaker 7: and he at that time was living in Panama, so
Speaker 7: it was another couple of years before we actually met,
Speaker 7: and it was it was a very strange meeting, as
Speaker 7: you might imagine. I told him in our very first
Speaker 7: face to face meeting, that I wasn't looking for a father.
Speaker 7: I had curiosity about where I came from, as you
Speaker 7: might imagine, but that I had a wonderful father and
Speaker 7: I didn't need a father, and that the best he
Speaker 7: could hope for was that we might be friends. In time,
Speaker 7: I learned his story, and I learned that he too
Speaker 7: had been abandoned in his life by his own father,
Speaker 7: And as fate would have it, I learned even later
Speaker 7: that my grandfather had also been abandoned by his father.
Speaker 7: So we're looking at essentially four generations of what I
Speaker 7: call accidental bastards, people who ended up not having a
Speaker 7: close relationship with their biological fathers. And here I was
Speaker 7: newly divorced and contemplating that I had just in my way,
Speaker 7: abandoned my own son. Suddenly it became very important to
Speaker 7: me to try to rectify that. I couldn't go back,
Speaker 7: I couldn't change time. But I began to think about
Speaker 7: how I might disrupt this rhythm, how what I could
Speaker 7: do that might cause my son not to be in
Speaker 7: the same position I, my father, my grandfather, and my
Speaker 7: great grandfather had been in. So that that all plays
Speaker 7: into this this very very interesting, very poignant, very funny
Speaker 7: at some point story into the wilderness of Canada.
Speaker 2: Now you asked him some profound questions as well. What
Speaker 2: I found very again this is you've You've bared yourself
Speaker 2: to the to the bone here and left nothing. He's
Speaker 2: left nothing out. But you talk about posing the question
Speaker 2: to this Tom Lane, your biological father, about whether he's
Speaker 2: actually loved, if he's actually explained what exactly you ask
Speaker 2: him and what he asked of you, and why you
Speaker 2: asked that question.
Speaker 7: I you know the wording. I'd have to look at
Speaker 7: the book to get the exact wording. But I was
Speaker 7: trying to get at his capacity for love, because of
Speaker 7: course I had never felt loved by him. But having
Speaker 7: gone through that divorce. As I did, I began to
Speaker 7: wonder about my own capacity for love. You know, when
Speaker 7: you don't have a model for that, when you don't
Speaker 7: when you can't look around at your own experience and
Speaker 7: find a model for what love looks like.
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Speaker 7: You don't know if you're doing it right. Yeah, you
Speaker 7: might think at times that this is you know that
Speaker 7: you've gotten it, and then it feels like love, But
Speaker 7: when it comes right down to it, you don't really know,
Speaker 7: do you. I mean, if you if you don't know
Speaker 7: what it looks like, how can you know? How can
Speaker 7: you know if you're doing it right? So that that's
Speaker 7: what was kind of going through my mind that that, Uh,
Speaker 7: I questioned his obviously I questioned his capacity for love,
Speaker 7: but I wondered if I had inherited that in some way,
Speaker 7: And so I was really kind of exploring. I was
Speaker 7: really kind of exploring the nature of love and and
Speaker 7: the love, the kind of love we talk about between
Speaker 7: fathers and sons, and and do do I answer that?
Speaker 7: I don't know. I think people take away from this
Speaker 7: kind of a story what they will. There's it's very
Speaker 7: difficult sometimes to to to predict or even to expect
Speaker 7: that your message is what they will they will get.
Speaker 7: But in that particular, in that particular exchange that we
Speaker 7: talk about, we go into that and in a way
Speaker 7: that is kind of poignant. I think.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you also asked a question, because you did the quote,
Speaker 2: you said, do you think do you wonder if you're
Speaker 2: capable of truly loving someone? And then later in the
Speaker 2: conversation or that day, you asked, do you ever feel
Speaker 2: that something is broken inside you? And what did he
Speaker 2: say to that question?
Speaker 7: I think he refreshed my memory. You know, my father
Speaker 7: is is a vagabond, am I And I don't even
Speaker 7: call him my father. I do for radio, I guess,
Speaker 7: But but he's not my father per se. And I
Speaker 7: refer to him in the book by a different name.
Speaker 7: But he's evasive that way. He he he will, he's
Speaker 7: as I say in the book, he's all he's the
Speaker 7: hero of his own stories and and all of his
Speaker 7: own stories. And and so in any answer he gives you,
Speaker 7: you have to you kind of kind of have to
Speaker 7: hold it up against that and and and that becomes
Speaker 7: the test. So I you know, he you know, he
Speaker 7: he talks about what passes for love, and and he
Speaker 7: talks that's kind of an illusory kind of term to me,
Speaker 7: that that he he he thinks he's been in love
Speaker 7: or at least what passes for love. And I begin
Speaker 7: to use that same sort of phraseology as I go
Speaker 7: through this book. Uh, and it pops up here and
Speaker 7: there in unexpected places, you know what passes for love
Speaker 7: or what passes for drunk, or you know what for adventure.
Speaker 7: And he gave me some of the really you know,
Speaker 7: I think interesting parts of this story.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, the other before we get to more
Speaker 2: of the the actual trip itself and more of the planning.
Speaker 2: What I found very interesting as well, and it mustn't
Speaker 2: have a profound effect on you in a negative way,
Speaker 2: was that that your parents didn't show. It seemed to
Speaker 2: be your mother was disappointed that you didn't have a
Speaker 2: different career and that you had picked journalism, and that
Speaker 2: when you got married, they didn't even show up at
Speaker 2: the attend the wedding, which was a month after you
Speaker 2: graduated journalism school. And it seemed that you didn't find out,
Speaker 2: and you explained in this book Final two years later,
Speaker 2: that you didn't realize that that's what it was. It
Speaker 2: seemed to be a disappointment in your choice of career
Speaker 2: and profession. And and you don't sum up how important
Speaker 2: that was or how profound that was an effect on you.
Speaker 2: But how of what what did that do to you
Speaker 2: when you your choice of profession. Instead of the parents
Speaker 2: being real proud, they seem to not, you know, not
Speaker 2: be in contact for a while. Please explain that.
Speaker 7: Right, Well, my parents were, you know, children of the
Speaker 7: of the Second World War, really, and they were both
Speaker 7: born right at the tail end of the depression. To them,
Speaker 7: college they couldn't get college. First of all, they didn't
Speaker 7: understand college. They couldn't see how this was a value
Speaker 7: to them. It was you're paying somebody to tell you
Speaker 7: how to go get a job when you could just
Speaker 7: go get a job. And and and so it didn't
Speaker 7: make sense to them. And and and we were you know,
Speaker 7: I would say, lower middle class family. And and they
Speaker 7: didn't have the wherewithal to send me to college. So
Speaker 7: it became the easiest thing in the world for them
Speaker 7: to say, well, you know, you're not going to go
Speaker 7: to college unless you can pay for it yourself. Ultimately
Speaker 7: I did. I didn't do that exactly. And and I
Speaker 7: am to this day, the only the only one in
Speaker 7: my family of five kids and and their kids except
Speaker 7: for my own children who went to college. Now my
Speaker 7: both of my children have gone to college too, but
Speaker 7: you know, that's a reality that a lot of people
Speaker 7: live with. My mother in particular, saw saw me at
Speaker 7: as too dreamy. When I remember her asking me one time,
Speaker 7: you know, what is it you want to do with
Speaker 7: your life? And she sort of put it in that
Speaker 7: kind of in that kind of cant, you know, she's
Speaker 7: what is it you want to do with your life?
Speaker 7: And when I said, you know, I'd like to become
Speaker 7: a reporter. Someday, I'd like to run my own newspaper,
Speaker 7: she was dismissive of that because she saw not because
Speaker 7: she thought I was an idiot, but because she thought
Speaker 7: I was kidding myself right, and that I wasn't being realistic,
Speaker 7: and that I was only setting myself up for disappointment,
Speaker 7: probably a lot like the disappointments that she had felt
Speaker 7: in her own young life, and she knew the pain
Speaker 7: of that. So I think that that's where it comes from.
Speaker 7: And she she I have no greater supporter now that
Speaker 7: I'm a you know, an accomplished journalist, that I'm a
Speaker 7: best selling author and that I'm telling stories like this one.
Speaker 7: I have no greater fan than my mother, But in
Speaker 7: those early days, I think her hyper sense of reality
Speaker 7: and my dreamy qualities, my fantasies about becoming a writer,
Speaker 7: really bothered her and it did work on me, but
Speaker 7: it probably made me all the more interested in succeeding
Speaker 7: as a writer and a journalist.
Speaker 2: Now, before we go a little bit further, I want
Speaker 2: to know, in the context of this story here, you
Speaker 2: were in the in Afghanistan in two thousand and or
Speaker 2: just in two thousand and one, and let me see,
Speaker 2: in two thousand and four you were managing editor for
Speaker 2: the Beaumont Enterprise. When did you write The Darkest Night?
Speaker 2: And tell us what your personal connection is to the
Speaker 2: people in the Darkest Night? The book The Darkest.
Speaker 7: Night, I had been working for the Denver Post, and
Speaker 7: it was after I came back from the Middle East
Speaker 7: that I began to feel very strongly about telling that story,
Speaker 7: partly because for me and for my community in nineteen
Speaker 7: seventy three, this was like a little nine to eleven.
Speaker 7: On September twenty fourth, nineteen seventy three, we all went
Speaker 7: to bed and everything was fine. This was a wonderful world,
Speaker 7: and we lived in an idyllic existence. We wake up
Speaker 7: on the twenty fifth and everything has changed. That suddenly
Speaker 7: doors are locked and night falls and you're in the
Speaker 7: house and porch lights are on, and there's a fear
Speaker 7: that has absorbed the community. So in some senses, it
Speaker 7: was on a very very microcosmic scale, a kind of
Speaker 7: nine to eleven for me and for other kids who
Speaker 7: knew these two girls who were abducted and terrorized through
Speaker 7: the night and monstrously thrown off of a very high bridge.
Speaker 7: They lived next door to us. They were neighborhood kids,
Speaker 7: and in a neighborhood where there were many kids, and
Speaker 7: where we saw each other more as brothers and sisters
Speaker 7: of different mothers than just neighbors. We played together, we
Speaker 7: experimented in forts and digging and army men together. You know.
Speaker 7: It was that kind of a relationship with everybody in
Speaker 7: the neighborhood again, brothers and sisters, and it was no
Speaker 7: different for these two girls. So the effect on the
Speaker 7: kids of our neighborhood and in in in the larger
Speaker 7: town was profound. And I wanted not only to explore
Speaker 7: this crime, but I wanted to explore how nearly at
Speaker 7: that time, thirty years later, this this remained a fresh wound,
Speaker 7: that the memory was still vivid and absorbing. So it
Speaker 7: was it was not I didn't set out to write
Speaker 7: a true crime. I wanted to tell a true story
Speaker 7: about how, you know, one moment of unrestrained barbarity could
Speaker 7: poison a whole community's memory and could you know, cast
Speaker 7: this dark, dark shadow across generations. So it was a
Speaker 7: true story. It was about a crime, but to me,
Speaker 7: it was bigger than true crime, right, and so what
Speaker 7: came of that was of course the Darkest Night, and
Speaker 7: it was embraced as that kind of a story. Now
Speaker 7: you even mentioned that it has been compared to in
Speaker 7: Cold Blood. I think the reason it was is that
Speaker 7: it happened. It's a it's a monstrous crime that happens
Speaker 7: in a small town, much like Capodi explains in in
Speaker 7: in the book with the Clutter. You know, the Clutter
Speaker 7: family being massacred in Holcombe, Kansas. And it was an
Speaker 7: attempt at doing it in a literary way, which is
Speaker 7: what Capodi did and which is different than the typical
Speaker 7: true crime that you see on today's supermarket shelves, you know,
Speaker 7: which tends to be more reported, more a leaning work
Speaker 7: towards the lurid and the grotesque, and a lot of
Speaker 7: blood and that sort of thing. I wanted this to
Speaker 7: be something bigger, something that went deeper, and it was
Speaker 7: much more complex. So that's the book that came out
Speaker 7: of that.
Speaker 2: Now, obviously your life was changed. You became a best
Speaker 2: selling author by virtue of this book especially, and then
Speaker 2: it referred to you as a true crime writer, which
Speaker 2: you say, Jesus, I'm not really a true crime writer.
Speaker 2: So but I wanted to know what was the response.
Speaker 2: I know your son must have Matt must have been young,
Speaker 2: but when did he actually read that book, or if
Speaker 2: did he did he read the book, and if he
Speaker 2: did or didn't, why or what was his response if
Speaker 2: he did?
Speaker 7: You know, I don't recall. I The Darkest Night, of course,
Speaker 7: came out around two thousand at the first edition of
Speaker 7: it came out in two thousand and seven, so by
Speaker 7: that time he was in college, and I don't know,
Speaker 7: you know, I certainly he's aware of it and he
Speaker 7: knows the story, but I don't we did. We never
Speaker 7: have had a specific sort of literary deconstruction about the book.
Speaker 7: We've talked about that with many other books, but not
Speaker 7: that particular one. Very early, I remember him picking up
Speaker 7: my very first novel. He was a young boy. He
Speaker 7: was eleven or twelve, I think, And actually when my
Speaker 7: first novel came out, he was, I guess twelve or thirteen,
Speaker 7: and I remember him reading that.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 7: It was a little uncomfortable with that because it wasn't
Speaker 7: written for a twelve or thirteen year old. But it
Speaker 7: was difficult for me to say, you can't read your
Speaker 7: father's novel, you know. And I remember him. We've talked
Speaker 7: about that, but The Darkest Night not so much, not
Speaker 7: so much with him interesting, but he's he's a he's
Speaker 7: a voracious reader. And as as we do in sour Toow,
Speaker 7: we we're often stuck in these sort of literary conversations, Yes,
Speaker 7: where I think you get to see very starkly two
Speaker 7: different minds at work.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think he really does covet his own
Speaker 2: reading and would like to keep it well. It seems
Speaker 2: like he's trying to keep it his own thoughts and
Speaker 2: interpretations about the books that he's reading. And he and
Speaker 2: he's passionate about maybe to himself, because it seems like
Speaker 2: he almost he thought you were dragging it out of
Speaker 2: him or making fun of him when you did discuss
Speaker 2: the fight club and Chuck vaholmik and anyway, uh now,
Speaker 2: tell us just before we start this the journey with
Speaker 2: Matt and we when you first spoke about this, when
Speaker 2: you first the idea was hatched in your mind, or
Speaker 2: at least the germ of the idea was when he
Speaker 2: was thirteen, he's now finally nineteen, when you actually decide
Speaker 2: to embark on this trip to the Yukon, what is
Speaker 2: Matt like? Tell us about the character of Matt, your son,
Speaker 2: and over that six year period you said you had
Speaker 2: a fair amount of time because you were on the road,
Speaker 2: that you would go and watch his baseball games and
Speaker 2: be involved in his life, even though you have to
Speaker 2: travel into your former town that you lived in. But
Speaker 2: tell us what was the relationship, like, how strong was
Speaker 2: the relationship during that six year period and at that
Speaker 2: age when you're just about to embark on this trip,
Speaker 2: what is your relationship like?
Speaker 7: It's a big question mark to me, to be honest,
Speaker 7: it might have been as good as anyone has and
Speaker 7: he father has with his son, But I still had
Speaker 7: this question mark because it wasn't around him every single day.
Speaker 7: We spent a lot of time together, but it wasn't
Speaker 7: every single day. And because I knew that he was
Speaker 7: angry about about the divorce and about how he was
Speaker 7: kind of left abandoned, I think in his mind abandoned
Speaker 7: because not long after the divorce, my daughter went off
Speaker 7: to college. So all of a sudden, he's home all
Speaker 7: the time with his mother and she's living the life
Speaker 7: of a single mother, and he's got a lot of
Speaker 7: anger about that. And I definitely saw some changes in
Speaker 7: his personality. I think this sunny, bright, always laughing, always
Speaker 7: joking little kid became a little darker and a little
Speaker 7: more nicol and uh uh. To me, he would have
Speaker 7: been justified and and probably did hold some against me
Speaker 7: as well as his mother, for for putting him in
Speaker 7: this position. Uh And and I think any parent that's
Speaker 7: that's a horrible feeling to have, that that you're being
Speaker 7: blamed for your child's pain. And so I I I
Speaker 7: wanted to do anything I could, uh to not make
Speaker 7: him feel that way. I wanted to do everything I
Speaker 7: could to to have the reassurance that I was relevant uh,
Speaker 7: and that I was loved. But most of all, I
Speaker 7: wanted him to make sure. I wanted to make sure
Speaker 7: that he knew he was loved and and in and
Speaker 7: all of that kind of goes into the concept behind this.
Speaker 7: But as I say in the book, once I decided
Speaker 7: we were going to take this trip, the first thing
Speaker 7: I did was go to Panama to see my own
Speaker 7: biological father and to begin to sort through some of
Speaker 7: the issues that might shed light on my relationship with
Speaker 7: my son, and in so far as I could, to
Speaker 7: maybe begin to nudge the future a little bit more
Speaker 7: in a direction that I could live with.
Speaker 2: There was one more character I'd like to talk about,
Speaker 2: because it seems to be quite important to the story
Speaker 2: as well. And if I mispronounced this, you can correct me.
Speaker 7: And Julia sig. There we go, Julius Age who it
Speaker 7: was during this sort of dark period after my divorce,
Speaker 7: And I was on the road and one day, one
Speaker 7: evening really is the end of a very very hot
Speaker 7: day in the Arizona desert, and I drove off into
Speaker 7: the desert because I wanted to see what was a beautiful, beautiful,
Speaker 7: brilliant sunset, but I wanted to see it as far
Speaker 7: from humanity as I could possibly get. And I drove
Speaker 7: out into the desert in my four wheel drive pickup
Speaker 7: and went off roading a little bit. And while I
Speaker 7: was out there, came across a small monument. There was
Speaker 7: a chair, there was a little table. Somebody had put
Speaker 7: rocks around some of the greasewood shrub, you know, the
Speaker 7: scrub that was out there in the desert, and a
Speaker 7: little a sort of own fireplace, and and somebody had
Speaker 7: obviously lived in this area. But there was there was
Speaker 7: a sign that was posted there and it it it
Speaker 7: it it basically described that the man who had lived
Speaker 7: there had just died about a month before. Uh, and
Speaker 7: he had no one and and uh, I thought, you know,
Speaker 7: some who lives out in the desert and and under
Speaker 7: these circumstances, and who puts rocks around you know, these
Speaker 7: scrub plants in the desert like it's a home. And
Speaker 7: I became fascinated with this, and I wanted to know more.
Speaker 7: And when I investigated a little bit further, I found
Speaker 7: out that that Julius ag The had been a Czechoslovakian
Speaker 7: immigrant and and had himself had had died of a
Speaker 7: heart attack out in out there in the desert. He
Speaker 7: was a prospector and a desert rat, and he had
Speaker 7: no money, so he was buried in a pauper's grave
Speaker 7: in Courtzite, Arizona. During my research, I found that simultaneously
Speaker 7: that there was a son that he had abandoned decades
Speaker 7: before who was looking for him. And suddenly I felt
Speaker 7: that I was the only person in the world, and
Speaker 7: I think it's true. I was the only person in
Speaker 7: the world who knew that Julius Age was dead and
Speaker 7: that his son was looking for him. And it became
Speaker 7: a kind of obsession of mine to let this son
Speaker 7: know that his father that he was seeking had died.
Speaker 7: But none of the old message board posts by the
Speaker 7: son had good had good email addresses anymore. So the
Speaker 7: son was lost too now, and I began to put
Speaker 7: all those research skills to work, but unfortunately came up empty.
Speaker 7: And the one thing I did do, though, was leave
Speaker 7: a message with the county coroner in Quartzite, Arizona, and said,
Speaker 7: if this man ever contacts you, please tell him that
Speaker 7: I was trying to find him. It's maybe a year
Speaker 7: later when I get a call from the son and
Speaker 7: he had found his father's he had found out what
Speaker 7: happened to his father, and this coroner had told him
Speaker 7: that I had been trying to find him. So he
Speaker 7: called me and we talked, and I suddenly felt better
Speaker 7: that here was another son who had been seeking a father,
Speaker 7: and I didn't want that father to go unfound. What
Speaker 7: I find, well, what the son's reaction is is in
Speaker 7: the book.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a sort of anti climatic. It's surprising, yes,
Speaker 2: that is. But you did you know, it was interesting
Speaker 2: how hard you tried to do this, how much of
Speaker 2: a mission it was, and you accomplished what you set
Speaker 2: out to do. So I think I gave you so
Speaker 2: much need of confidence at that time, I would think,
Speaker 2: I think so.
Speaker 7: I think it made me feel I knew, as well
Speaker 7: as anybody can know, what it felt like to want
Speaker 7: to know what happened to your father, and I couldn't
Speaker 7: casually let that go. Maybe I should have, but I couldn't.
Speaker 7: And because it happened in that period after my divorce,
Speaker 7: I was especially attuned to family relationships and fathers who
Speaker 7: had disappeared, and it was you know, it all becomes
Speaker 7: part of this story.
Speaker 2: Now you embark on this trip to the Yukon and
Speaker 2: you have to go pick up your son Matt in Wyoming,
Speaker 2: fifteen hundred miles away, so it takes you a little
Speaker 2: while to get there. What did you really I know
Speaker 2: that you wanted to make sure that you had a
Speaker 2: bond your son, and you want to make sure you
Speaker 2: understood what that bond was. I'm oversimplifying this, but what
Speaker 2: else did What did you specifically feel and believe that
Speaker 2: you would actually get or garner from going on an
Speaker 2: actual road trip. What did you actually think would be
Speaker 2: had would be gotten from going on a road trip
Speaker 2: with your son? What would you what would he get
Speaker 2: out of it? What would you get out of it?
Speaker 7: At that point, it was hope. It wasn't believe. I mean,
Speaker 7: I was hoping that this would turn out, that this
Speaker 7: wouldn't collapse under its own weight, that it wouldn't be
Speaker 7: a bad idea. It was. It was really an effort
Speaker 7: to bridge a gap by creating memories. I wanted to
Speaker 7: show my son in a very concrete way that I
Speaker 7: loved him more than I could ever explain to him.
Speaker 7: And I wanted, you know, before I came to the
Speaker 7: end of my own life, I wanted to be able
Speaker 7: to give him the most precious thing I've got, and
Speaker 7: that's my own time, because it was the thing that
Speaker 7: I missed the most in that period when after my
Speaker 7: between the divorce and this trip, it was the one
Speaker 7: thing that was missing.
Speaker 2: And so.
Speaker 7: That's what I was hoping was going to come from that.
Speaker 7: And I would say, in that fifteen hundred miles between
Speaker 7: my home in Texas and his home in Wyoming where
Speaker 7: we would finally really start the journey together, I had
Speaker 7: a lot of trepidation about it. I had a lot
Speaker 7: of fear that this was not going to be what
Speaker 7: I had hoped.
Speaker 2: Did you have some from your own experience reading classic
Speaker 2: books about road trips and the profound effect that a
Speaker 2: couple people could have on this road trip rip, on
Speaker 2: this journey. Did you have sort of a fanciful sort
Speaker 2: of visions of that that there would be some profound
Speaker 2: effect by virtue of the experience for Matt of being
Speaker 2: on the road and experiencing all these incredible sights and
Speaker 2: sounds and the experience itself. Did you, in your mind,
Speaker 2: in your in your in your literary imaginary mind, did
Speaker 2: you envision that Formatt?
Speaker 7: I again, I think I hoped for that. I mean,
Speaker 7: I already knew the character that he had, and that
Speaker 7: it would be a tough sell to make this romantic,
Speaker 7: because he's not a romantic. He's he's sort of a
Speaker 7: very pragmatic, very independent and still in many ways at
Speaker 7: the time angry, and so any vision I had this
Speaker 7: was going to be something romantic and and a fantasy
Speaker 7: come true. I didn't really entertain that it would have
Speaker 7: been unwise, but I did hope that along the way
Speaker 7: that that whether it was just an alignment of stars
Speaker 7: or something that I would say, or something that would
Speaker 7: be said to him, or maybe something that he just
Speaker 7: saw a fleeting past past as we were driving, would stick,
Speaker 7: and that it would that it would make sense to him,
Speaker 7: and that that maybe in some way he'd say, hey, Dad,
Speaker 7: I get it now, and it's okay now. That never happened, really,
Speaker 7: not at least in so many words.
Speaker 2: But.
Speaker 7: Nevertheless that was my hope. And and then the further
Speaker 7: the further we plunged into Canada, and the longer we
Speaker 7: were on the road, and the more we talked, and
Speaker 7: the more I began to see this thing unfolding out
Speaker 7: in front of me, there became another goal, and that
Speaker 7: was too and I didn't know what we were going
Speaker 7: to do, but it was this idea of that we
Speaker 7: talked about earlier, the disrupting that awful rhythm of accidental bastards,
Speaker 7: And I really became obsessed with the idea, what can
Speaker 7: I do that might break that rhythm, that might break
Speaker 7: that cycle while I have him? What can I say?
Speaker 7: What can I do? What can happen that we maximize
Speaker 7: the chances that someday he won't leave his own son
Speaker 7: or daughter, and that we will have we will have
Speaker 7: stomped that that terrible cycle out. And so those two
Speaker 7: things began to boil around together for me. Meanwhile, he's
Speaker 7: watching Scrubs re runs on his you know, portable DVD
Speaker 7: and listening to heavy metal and flirting with the girls,
Speaker 7: or at least having the girls flirt with him, and
Speaker 7: giving me these occasional glimpses into him that were surprising,
Speaker 7: uh and challenging and again, and of course that's all
Speaker 7: described there, but I would say it would be safe
Speaker 7: to say I think that what I had hoped for
Speaker 7: and what I had expected probably didn't happen. But what
Speaker 7: did happen was even more surprising. And so I think
Speaker 7: that it's a good example of, you know, being focused
Speaker 7: on one thing while something else wonderful is happening.
Speaker 2: Sure, that's a great way of putting it. Now you're
Speaker 2: talking about your son, Matt. He's got his Mega Death
Speaker 2: and his Pana T shirt on, and he's got his
Speaker 2: long hair, and he's listening, like you say, he's watching
Speaker 2: Scrubs reruns. And he's nineteen years old. And so you're
Speaker 2: in Canada and within a few days, I believe or shortly,
Speaker 2: and you go through Calgary, Alberta. So you're going through
Speaker 2: part of the Rockies that you're familiar with, but not
Speaker 2: immediately obviously.
Speaker 7: No, no, yea.
Speaker 2: But so tell us at what some of the checkpoints
Speaker 2: and some just just a couple of the little the
Speaker 2: snippets of those profound little moments where along the way
Speaker 2: as you're heading towards the Yukon, you do have these moments.
Speaker 2: I know. The one moment I thought was quite humorous
Speaker 2: is that in the as you mentioned, the Zen and
Speaker 2: the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Maintenance, there is a moment
Speaker 2: where they see a red winged blackbird and along the way,
Speaker 2: lo and behold there's a red winged blackbird and much
Speaker 2: to your dismay, Matt could care less, probably or it
Speaker 2: does not get and so you explain it. Please tell
Speaker 2: us a little bit about that interaction there, and then
Speaker 2: tell us about one where you were surprised, where you
Speaker 2: did something profound did happen again to your surprise, maybe
Speaker 2: was uninspected.
Speaker 7: Yeah, of course. Robert Percy wrote the books in in
Speaker 7: the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance back in the maybe late sixties,
Speaker 7: early seventies, and it became one of the great rogue books.
Speaker 7: I mean, is a very deep book. It goes into
Speaker 7: philosophy in these sort of complex turn but but it
Speaker 7: revolves around he and around him and his son making
Speaker 7: a run from I think the Dakota's across Montana to
Speaker 7: California on motorcycle, and the sun is much younger, I
Speaker 7: think about ten or eleven years old at the time
Speaker 7: of the trip, and Perzig, who had and it's a
Speaker 7: true story, persick had had a nervous breakdown in his life,
Speaker 7: and he he was he was concerned that that his
Speaker 7: insanity would be passed on to his child, and he
Speaker 7: didn't want his child to go through that insanity. So
Speaker 7: there's a kind of a parallel there. Well, we're traveling
Speaker 7: across Montana on you know, sort of the beginning leg
Speaker 7: of this trip, and we do we see in in
Speaker 7: in you know, the middle of nowhere, here's a winged blackbird,
Speaker 7: a red wing blackbird, much like Persig had contemplated on
Speaker 7: his own trip and talked about his son, and it
Speaker 7: became one of the symbols of the story. So I
Speaker 7: mentioned it to my son. He never heard of the book,
Speaker 7: didn't much care, if you know, if such a book existed,
Speaker 7: you know, And suddenly his writer father it becomes father
Speaker 7: again and wants to to tell the story and and
Speaker 7: for him to understand and to see the parallels, but
Speaker 7: he's kind of uninterested in that. And it's it. I
Speaker 7: think it's a nice little vignette of that every father
Speaker 7: feels at some point where he's trying to get something
Speaker 7: important to cross to a teenage a teenager and it's
Speaker 7: just not going to happen.
Speaker 8: Yeah, and uh.
Speaker 7: And then so in this book, you know, it's a uh,
Speaker 7: it becomes one of those those illuminating moments where you
Speaker 7: begin to see that these two characters that are together
Speaker 7: for the next three plus weeks on the road are
Speaker 7: are not always going to see things the same way.
Speaker 7: Sure as far as later, I mean, I remember.
Speaker 2: You.
Speaker 7: I guess it was. We were well into Canada at
Speaker 7: the time, and I we had been talking about mythology
Speaker 7: and religion, and again finding that we we didn't always
Speaker 7: agree on things, but I was impress with his with
Speaker 7: his thoughts. While I didn't agree, I loved, I fell
Speaker 7: in love with listening to him tell me why he
Speaker 7: felt something. And there I remember in particular that one
Speaker 7: night he was he had a duffel bag and and
Speaker 7: I was moving it or something, and when something fell
Speaker 7: out of it, and I think, I say in the
Speaker 7: book that I would have been less surprised if it
Speaker 7: had been a bag of marijuana. Instead, it was a
Speaker 7: copy of a book by a guy, a writer named
Speaker 7: Brian Green, called The Elegant Universe, super Strings, Hidden Dimensions,
Speaker 7: and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory.
Speaker 8: Well, huh, I.
Speaker 7: Mean, I thought, I mean it was talking about things
Speaker 7: like rips in the fabric of space, vibrating strings, quarks,
Speaker 7: you know, things that I wasn't going to grasp. And
Speaker 7: yet my nineteen year old son appeared to be well
Speaker 7: into reading about and so here I was frustrated by
Speaker 7: my inability to get him to be interested in Persik's
Speaker 7: red Winged Blackbird and this personal this personal exploration that
Speaker 7: he made when I discovered that my son is really
Speaker 7: pondering issues that are beyond his father. So again it's
Speaker 7: a little illumination of the difference between these two characters.
Speaker 7: And I think that ultimately the book kind of explores
Speaker 7: how men, even you know, fathers and sons, can be
Speaker 7: both comrades and competitors in the wilderness. Now maybe that's
Speaker 7: a physical wilderness, geographic wilderness. Maybe it's an emotional wilderness,
Speaker 7: so you get you, you know, just because we're father
Speaker 7: and son, it doesn't mean necessarily that we're always comrades. Yeah, uh,
Speaker 7: sometimes we're competing. And I think those two those two
Speaker 7: moments show.
Speaker 2: That, yeah, certainly. Now, the original idea was to go
Speaker 2: to this what ends up being the Sour Dough Saloon
Speaker 2: where the there is the Sour Toe Cocktail. So please
Speaker 2: briefly explain what is the legend of or the story
Speaker 2: behind the Sour Toe Cocktail whatever.
Speaker 7: The bar owner, a guy named Dick Stevens, who owned
Speaker 7: the Sourdough Saloon at one point there in Dawson City,
Speaker 7: bought an old rum runner's cabin out and out in
Speaker 7: the sticks and one of the rum runners who had
Speaker 7: owned it. Were two brothers and one night during the depression,
Speaker 7: they were running liquor into Alaska and they got the
Speaker 7: Mounties got on their tail. They had to take some
Speaker 7: evasive maneuvers, and one of the brothers stepped in a
Speaker 7: sort of semi frozen area and on the journey his
Speaker 7: toes became frostbitten. They get home, his brother chops off
Speaker 7: the frostbitten toe, puts it in a jar of whiskey
Speaker 7: or rum, and they put it because it's winter, they
Speaker 7: put it under the floorboards of the cabin, where it
Speaker 7: stays for decades. This Dick Stevens is it buys that
Speaker 7: cabin from the elderly surviving brother who tells him the story,
Speaker 7: and indeed, as he's refurbishing the cabin, he finds that
Speaker 7: tow in the jar. He takes it back to his
Speaker 7: bar and it's it's it's just a conversation piece everybody's
Speaker 7: talking about. They're joking around, and then and then somebody
Speaker 7: puts it in somebody's drink as a joke, and it
Speaker 7: dawns on him that this is a little bit like
Speaker 7: Robert serves his poem the ice Worm Cocktail, where they
Speaker 7: put a piece of spaghetti and a you know, tenderfoots
Speaker 7: drink and it makes him sick because he thinks it's
Speaker 7: an ice worm. And it became a thing, you know,
Speaker 7: that you could test your metal by by raising a
Speaker 7: glass I had this mummified human toe in it and
Speaker 7: drinking the drink. Well, now they've made it into a
Speaker 7: tourist thing, although not every tourist who goes there is
Speaker 7: going to do it. So uh, it has become famous,
Speaker 7: or at least at least in the right circles. If
Speaker 7: you travel in the perverse grotesque circles that crime writers
Speaker 7: like I do, yeh, then then you know you hear
Speaker 7: about it. But so that I don't really even recall
Speaker 7: how I've found out about it originally. And just like
Speaker 7: I say, it became a shared fantasy that we had
Speaker 7: that we were going to do this, and indeed we did.
Speaker 2: Now, how are you traveling to Dawson Dawson Creek and
Speaker 2: how are you you rented? Tell us what you rent
Speaker 2: or how you how you actually go there, and what
Speaker 2: your accommodations are along the way.
Speaker 7: Well we we drove in my Subaru to Calgary, and
Speaker 7: in Calgary we rented a camper van, which we then
Speaker 7: drove not just to Dawson City, but then beyond that
Speaker 7: up the dempse Her Highway into the Arctic, where we
Speaker 7: intended again to do another another poetic thing on on
Speaker 7: the father's part, uh to camp out on the longest
Speaker 7: day of the year when the sun doesn't set. So
Speaker 7: we have this story that starts in this intense darkness
Speaker 7: after a divorce and ends on a day when there
Speaker 7: is no darkness. And you know, it's a it is
Speaker 7: just a beautiful poetic thing, but it's it's absolutely true.
Speaker 7: And that's what we did. We we were in a
Speaker 7: camper van, uh, which we then did a little damage
Speaker 7: to because the Dempster Highway is is a bitch of a.
Speaker 2: Road and you were warned, and.
Speaker 7: We were warned many times, and we dismissed it. We thought, oh,
Speaker 7: you know, these pussies we could you know they're there,
Speaker 7: what do they know? You know we're from Wyoming. Yeah,
Speaker 7: well we were wrong.
Speaker 2: They were right.
Speaker 7: Now I've said it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Canadians were right.
Speaker 7: The Canadians, the Scottish people, the Germans, everybody along the
Speaker 7: way told us. In fact, I think even one Texan uh,
Speaker 7: everybody knew the reputation of the Dempster Highway. We knew
Speaker 7: it was a bad road, but we didn't think it
Speaker 7: could be as bad as they were saying. And again
Speaker 7: we were wrong. It is as bad, but it's also
Speaker 7: as beautiful as it is bad.
Speaker 2: Now, by the time you get to the sourdough saloon
Speaker 2: that you talk about the evening before, and you're you're
Speaker 2: eating some local food, some arctic char which I've had myself. Fantastic, fantastic.
Speaker 2: Now you are going to go to this sourdough saloon
Speaker 2: to the sour they have to sample this sour toil cocktail.
Speaker 2: See what all the fuss is tell us about what
Speaker 2: happens when you go to the saloon itself and you
Speaker 2: refer to someone at the back of the room.
Speaker 7: Refer to somebody at the oh, you're talking about the
Speaker 7: fellow that did our the toe. What do you what
Speaker 7: are you talking about?
Speaker 8: They say, well, you have to talk to that person,
Speaker 8: and he was all right, okay, well yeah, they call
Speaker 8: him the captain, and he the toe captain is somebody
Speaker 8: who really whose main function is to administer the oath
Speaker 8: and then to drop the toe into the drink, and
Speaker 8: then to ascertain that it touched your lips.
Speaker 7: In our case, we wanted to take pictures, and it's
Speaker 7: kind of hard to take a picture through a cocktail
Speaker 7: glass and see if this toe touched your lips. So
Speaker 7: in both my son and Maya case, we we actually
Speaker 7: took the toe in our mouth between our lips so
Speaker 7: that you could see that it clearly touched our lips.
Speaker 7: And but the the Toe Captain is sort of the MC,
Speaker 7: and he's the guy that keeps everything running and and
Speaker 7: takes your money and and gives you issues your certificate
Speaker 7: that that represents your your membership in the Sour Toe
Speaker 7: Cocktail Club. Uh and uh, I'm proud to say my
Speaker 7: son and I are both members, which I think only
Speaker 7: means that we can we can always go back to
Speaker 7: the Sour Dough Saloon and drink the Sour Toe cocktail
Speaker 7: without paying the extra five dollars or something that it
Speaker 7: costs to have the toe put in your glass there.
Speaker 7: So it's a great money saver.
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely, now we will. We're a little bit over
Speaker 2: the hour, but we'll just spend a few more minutes here.
Speaker 2: This whole trip was a little over three weeks. You said, Yeah,
Speaker 2: what is the most profound thing that you learned? I
Speaker 2: know we've talked about a little bit, but at the
Speaker 2: end of this entire thing, to wrap up in terms
Speaker 2: of the journey itself, basically it was a success. But
Speaker 2: tell us what you learned the most. What was the
Speaker 2: most profound thing that you learned in that in this
Speaker 2: journey with your son.
Speaker 7: I think that here I was this this a vagabond,
Speaker 7: maybe much like my biological father, that I had relished
Speaker 7: in my life and in my career, these risks of
Speaker 7: being a war correspondent or writing out a hurricane and
Speaker 7: doing some of the things that I did and would
Speaker 7: do again. Yet there were risks in my life life
Speaker 7: that I refused to take that thousands of people take
Speaker 7: every day, and that is, you know, just surrendering to
Speaker 7: love and recognizing when it comes along and risking the
Speaker 7: hurt that goes with it. Of course, at that point,
Speaker 7: I knew the hurt that went with it, and I
Speaker 7: was reluctant to take that risk again. So, you know,
Speaker 7: I think that the biggest thing was this epiphany that
Speaker 7: I had about the nature of risk and how I
Speaker 7: was perfectly willing to do some of the most risky
Speaker 7: things that humans do, and then perfectly frightened of risking
Speaker 7: things that ordinary people do every day. So there was
Speaker 7: that I think that you know, uh, the book talks
Speaker 7: about in it in its way that reassures us that
Speaker 7: we don't need to repeat the sins of our fathers
Speaker 7: and then we can we can navigate our own paths
Speaker 7: quite well. And and that that, uh, there there are
Speaker 7: ways we we we're not we're not hostage to our history.
Speaker 7: So I think those are the two the two things.
Speaker 7: You know, it's sometimes it just takes extraordinary courage to
Speaker 7: come out on the other side of a great sadness
Speaker 7: and to accept your flaws and to find love. And really,
Speaker 7: once you do that, putting a corpse toe in your
Speaker 7: mouth is pretty damny.
Speaker 2: Incredible. One last question here, Uh, how has your son
Speaker 2: Matt respond to the idea of the book and is
Speaker 2: he planning to read it or has read it? What
Speaker 2: is what is the plan with Matt regarding this book
Speaker 2: that certainly he is a big, huge part.
Speaker 7: Of well, he of course knows everything about the book.
Speaker 2: We do.
Speaker 7: There was a lot of collaboration during the writing on
Speaker 7: where I was asking questions and trying to get at
Speaker 7: some of his interior. But during during the time it
Speaker 7: was in manuscript form, he didn't want to read it.
Speaker 7: Not because he was afraid of it or anything. It
Speaker 7: was just he wanted to read the book.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 7: Well, the book just arrived literally last Thursday, So as
Speaker 7: far as he and I are concerned, it wasn't a
Speaker 7: book until last Thursday, and he immediately got a copy.
Speaker 7: I think it was sent to him Friday. So honestly,
Speaker 7: I don't know yet. I think he's going to be
Speaker 7: okay with I haven't heard bad, but I don't think
Speaker 7: he's actually had a chance to read the book, or
Speaker 7: if he has, he hasn't had a chance to digest
Speaker 7: it and respond. I'm pretty sure though that he's still
Speaker 7: going to be mad because I don't get Pantera. Gon
Speaker 7: to be mad, be it.
Speaker 2: I just don't get it, don't appreciate it.
Speaker 7: Yeah, that's right, I just can't.
Speaker 2: Well, there's still time, n.
Speaker 7: I've got plenty of time to get into heavy metal.
Speaker 8: Yeah, it'll have.
Speaker 2: Me, it'll maybe not. Man. Oh well, you know, Ron,
Speaker 2: this was really a lot of fun. Again. Once again,
Speaker 2: you're a great interview and I love speaking with you
Speaker 2: and letting you explain your incredible books. And this book,
Speaker 2: like you say, it's quite different from this program, almost entirely.
Speaker 2: We do something has to do with murder, and there's
Speaker 2: no murder in this entire book. And yet I think
Speaker 2: the audience will very much enjoy this interview with uh
Speaker 2: you run and talking about your personal life. I think
Speaker 2: it's personal, poignant, humorous and profound, and I think it
Speaker 2: was a very enjoyable read and of course the follow
Speaker 2: up I get to enjoy having an interview with you,
Speaker 2: So thank you very much. Ron.
Speaker 7: You're so nice and you're you're just so generous having
Speaker 7: me on your program. I appreciate it.
Speaker 2: Well, it's a lot of fun and I'm sure the
Speaker 2: audience had a great time. So I want to thank
Speaker 2: you very much once again, and have yourself a great evening. Run.
Speaker 7: Thank you Dan very much.
Speaker 2: Well, thank you and talk to you soon. Ron, Thank
Speaker 2: you you, bet ayebye. You've been listening to the program
Speaker 2: True Murder, the Most Shocking Killers and through crime history
Speaker 2: and the authors that have written about them with my
Speaker 2: special guest, Ron Francell with his new book, The Sourtoe
Speaker 2: Cocktail Club. That's Ron friend, Sell, good night,