Stanley Gallon

A Gallon of History The year I started writing:

The History:
In 1980 Mt. St Helens erupted, when an earthquake measuring 5.1 on the richter scale collapsed the north face of the mountain, killing 57 people including a young USGS scientist who had just enough time to warn his colleagues that the eruption had begun. One month earlier the United States, gripped by a hostage crisis in Iran, attempted to rescue the 52 hostages held by the extremist followers of a growing theocratic movement gaining strength; eight US service men were killed even though the mission was cancelled due to a sandstorm. In 1980 the Shah of Iran died in Egypt and from that day forward Iran struck out on a path, the repercussions of which still resound today.
1980 was the year John Lennon died, a voice for peace in music and in general. Ronald Reagan won the presidential election and for better or for worse the United States embarked on a new path of its own.
The eight year Iran Iraq war began in 1980, the United States pulling the strings of Iraqi leadership, while the Soviet Union pulled the strings of Iran’s. This was a cold war battle fought by pawns, millions died, and nothing was achieved in the end.
Ted Turner started the first all news Network in 1980, calling it the Cable News Network (CNN). The Supreme Court ruled in Diamond v. Shakrabarty that genetically engineered organisms can be patented. It was the year Alfred Hitchcock, Jesse Owens, Jean Piaget, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Mea West all died. The Chrysler Corporation almost died, but a $1.5 billion federal government bailout saved it. The Soviet Union attended the Winter Olympics in Lake Placid New York , but the United States boycotted the Summer Olympics in Moscow.
In Tampa Bay, Florida the Summit Venture a Liberian Freighter slammed into the Skyway Bridge dislodging and collapsing a 1400 foot span killing thirty-five people, most of whom were on a bus. Hurricane Allan reaches category three and slams into southern Texas on August 9, 1980 causing $2.6 billion in damage.
Poland’s Lech Walesa led the first of many strikes at the Gdansk Shipyards at great risk to his life. This began a chain of events and the creation of the Solidarity movement that ultimately resulted in Poland becoming the first Eastern European nation to break its Soviet communist shackles.
A woman in Australia claimed to have lost her baby to a wild animal, giving rise to the mantra: “A dingo stole my baby.” A trial in China begins wherein the nation prosecutes the Gang of Four. Arguably the seeds of China’s economic and political reform began with this pivotal event. Counted among the Gang of four was Jiang Qing, the widow of Mao Zedong.

The Writing:
In 1980 I became aware of world events in a meaningful way for the first time. Sure I recall images and bits of information from previous years, but 1980 was when I began to question what I was seeing. Images of burned bodies broadcast on television following the failed hostage rescue were among the first demonstrating the morbid consequences of failure. Then there was the wrath of nature ( Mt. St. Helens), the carnage of accidents (Skyway Bridge collapse), all of these terrifying events captivated me and made me realize the world was bigger, more spectacular and/or terrifying than I’d ever imagined.
Realizing that great stories hid in the realities, I wanted to know more about the world. I read books differently after that, finding in them secret messages, symbolic references, codes of information buried between the lines. Literary allusion it was called. I realized that writing was more than just words scribbled on paper and I got excited. Pretty nerdy, I know; but a new desire gripped me, an obsession one could say.
It was sometime around ten o’clock one night. Everyone in the house had fallen asleep and that familiar silence of night, interrupted only by crickets and other insects chirping outside, kept me awake, I mean wide awake. I was thinking, not about what I did that day or what I was going to do, but about other things. The universe, things I wanted to do, adventures I dreamed of living. After all, I was just a kid languishing in the dreadful monotony of suburbia where not much happened.
So there I lay in my twin size bed, orange carpet, red wool blanket, one orange wall and three white (hey, it was just after the seventies) dreaming and getting antsy. Just as a precursor, I have to tell you that my dad gave me a gift I doubt he had any idea would change my life to the degree that it did. He was at sea when he sent it to me. It was a fountain pen. I’d never had anything but ball points and markers before that. That pen felt very different when I used it, almost like it painted words. The ink really flowed so I had to make sure not to leave the tip touching the paper any longer than a microsecond.
I started writing that night. I still have the story, handwritten front and back some fifty eight pages of text, my first so called “book.” I was nine years old. Looking back, it was a most amateurish nonsensical prattling, demonstrating not only my age but how little I knew about anything. The story dealt with war, interplanetary conflict in a time of vanishing resources, obsession, ruthlessness, and heroism in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.
Over the years my writing improved, in part because I read everything I could get my hands on, but mostly because of life itself. From listening to the stories of my father who barely survived Nazi oppression – only to be fettered down by Soviet despotism – to having traveled to over twenty-five countries by the age of 16 – where I not only met people from all over the world, but witnessed first hand the vicious poverty of the third world.
Experiencing first hand a poverty from which there is no hope of escape, triggers something in you that for your entire life you struggle to understand. To believe that the poor choose their poverty is a philosophical luxury that those of us in the lower middle class, upper middle class, wealthy, and everything in between convince ourselves is true, so that we can turn away and not feel ashamed; or worse, that we embrace because it empowers us.
After law school, the intricacies of government, politics, law, and even the functioning of our society suddenly made a very different kind of sense. Having practiced law, I saw how the ideals breakdown, how power, money, and greed conspire each and every day to reshape our lives in the name of a profit maximization principal that disregards ethical responsibility. Having worked both sides of the political fence, I watched politicians pervert truth for political gain (but that’s not news, right? Who hasn’t seen that, even from a distance?). It is indeed a very different world that we live in than the one we see.
Over time experiences pile up in your mind and without either the gift or the curse of forgetting the past, there is nothing you can do but let the world in on what you’ve seen. For me, writing was a way to communicate the full extent of what deeply moved, shocked, repulsed, or elated me. In fiction there are truths for those who challenge themselves to find them. For those who are not into that, there is at the very heart of what is written a tale that takes us far beyond the confines of our lives and lets us in on secrets we would perhaps not have considered.
So with that, take a look inside my books, then take a look at the world around you. We are all coffers of secrets, things that make us imperfect. If we are judging, we are not understanding.
- Stanley Gallon