research | It's a Writing Life

Paris in Spring: The Big Red Bus Tour

During the same trip to Europe that Bill, Tina and I took back in mid-March 2011, we also spent two days in Paris, in addition to our time in London.

Our first morning in Paris brought warm weather and sunny skies. Bill headed off early to meet up with business colleagues at a conference where he was scheduled to make a speech. Tina and I decided it was a great day to take the Big Red Bus Tour. It’s a hop-on, hop-off affair, featuring nine first rate tourist destination stops in Paris: the Tour Eiffel, Champs du Mars, Musee du Louvre, Notre Dame, Musee D’Orsay, Place de l’Opera, Champs-Elysees – Etoile, the Grand Palais and the Trocadero. There is no way anyone could cover all these sites in one day, so we cherry picked our targeted destinations.

Marianne and her sister Tina in the Jardin de Tuileries, Paris – Source: Family photos

We settled in on the top row of the bus. I was prepared to snap shots of important Paris destinations that were material to my research about Mom’s war years. Tina shared with me a picture practice advocated by her husband, Brian: have a person you know in the photo, even if the person is tiny in relation to the shot. It’s a lot more interesting. I actually agree, but this was going to be difficult when Tina and I started “suggesting” what we should do for the photo. The conversation could get out of hand.

“Stand there, no there!” Continue reading “Paris in Spring: The Big Red Bus Tour”

Shepherd Market, London

In 2011, Bill had a business trip to London and Paris and asked if I would like to come along. “Bien sur,” I replied, and quickly figured out how I would extricate myself from daily life at our house in Connecticut.

By sheer chance, I mentioned the trip to my sister, Tina. It turned out that she had a free ticket to fly anywhere in the world that was in danger of expiring, the result of a cancelled flight her husband Brian experienced the prior year. I asked if she’d like to join us on our upcoming trip and she replied, “Bien sur!” Kismet!

Sheperds House, Mayfair, London, where Mom lived in 1944-45 – Source: Family photos

A lot of great stuff happened on this trip. This was the real beginning of my book journey, and the research behind writing the story of my mother’s WW2 work for the Office of War Information (OWI). I’ll report on the other parts of the trip in additional posts.

On this day in London, March 16^th, 2011, we planned to visit Shepherd Market where our mother lived during her time in London from March 1944 – March 1945. Continue reading “Shepherd Market, London”

The Journey of Researching and Writing The French Desk

I’ve been mulling over writing this story for a long time. I had many letters from 1944-1945 my mother had written home, so I knew I could use those as the outline of the story. But some of the material was personal, like her love life, and did I want to splash all that over a book?

In the end, I decided I did because you can’t have a good novel about straight war work, even propaganda war work. There have to be a few problems and additional characters along the way. A few things, including all the names of the characters in the story, except for the people who worked at OWI, were changed.

I then asked myself if I thought my mother would want me to write this story. With her death in 2006, the opportunity to talk with her about the idea of a book was long gone. But, as we were going through their possessions after they had both passed away, we found my mother’s yearly date calendars. I looked through them casually, ready to discard them, until I caught an entry in the 1990 calendar. Continue reading “The Journey of Researching and Writing The French Desk”

Good Things Are Worth Waiting For

About ten years ago, I embarked on a journey to write the story of my mother’s wartime experience when she worked as a civilian in the Office of War Information (OWI). I had many letters – maybe 65 or so – she had written home in 1944 and 1945, saved by my grandparents for some reason.

My mother – Alberta Conway Jones (early 1950s) – Source: Family Photos

When my grandparents sold their brownstone in Brooklyn way back in the late 1960’s, my mother took all those saved WW2 letters to our house and promptly stored them in our attic for thirty-five years. When we sold our parent’s house thirty years later, I took those loosely tethered letters to my home and finally had a chance to look through them carefully.

As I went through them, I knew there was a story to tell. The challenge was where to start and how to approach these large moments in history: Continue reading “Good Things Are Worth Waiting For”

From My Mother’s OWI Garret

In the house I grew up in, our attic was stacked with boxes. A decade could be retraced in an hour’s time. Births, deaths, baptisms, confirmations and graduations and various ephemera littered the rafters. Frayed boxes bulged with old photographs and letters.

ACJ Letters home during WWI – Source: Family Photos

I was the youngest of my family and almost the youngest of my entire extended family. So much had transpired before I had attained an awareness of what was going on. In the attic, I was able to look back and recapture some sense of my family’s life before I came along. I found it captivating to think about where they had lived and to read about the details of their lives. And rich material there was. Continue reading “From My Mother’s OWI Garret”