Robertson, Don. The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread. New York: Harper
Paperbacks, 2008. (Originally published in hardback in 1965.)
Nine-year-old Morris Bird III is a timid sort of boy with a precocious sense of right and wrong. After hearing his teacher describe the brave deeds of James A. Garfield, Morris makes up his mind to atone for all the lily-livered mistakes he’s made and earn himself some “selfresepect.” The best course of action, he decides, is to embark on an epic pedestrian journey to see his best friend, who just moved a whopping two miles away to the St. Clair-Superior neighborhood of Cleveland. As fate would have it, the day he chooses is October 20, 1944 — the day of the infamous East Ohio Gas Explosion. (Also see the Cleveland Memory Project photos of the explosion and aftermath.)
(Because I like looking at city maps, I’ve recreated approximately the walking route that Morris Bird III used. Point B is the epicenter of the Gas Explosion disaster.)
View Larger Map
What interested me most about The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread was the portrait of two Cleveland neighborhoods — Hough and St. Clair-Superior — that took a huge beating in the postwar suburban flight epidemic (and which have never entirely recovered). This was a pre-Rust Belt era. Cleveland was a more densely populated place where people lived smaller, more localized lives, where they walked to the store and rode streetcars to work, a place where East 63 and St. Clair and East 91 and Hough were thought of as worlds apart, and not just to a child’s mind.
It’s tempting to dismiss The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread as a mere nostalgia piece. There are, in American literature, a lot of literary reminiscences about being a child during the 1940s. But such a distinction misses the point: the book is a tragic coming-of-age tale set against the backdrop of one of the worst industrial accidents in American history, made doubly tragic by the fact that nine is awfully young to come of age. (After all, a grown man would not normally feel nostalgic about seeing his best pal incinerated right before his eyes.)
It’s also important to note that the book was first published shortly before a conflagration of a different kind — the Hough Riots, which took place in the neighborhood where Morris Bird III lived. As Mark Winegardner illustrates in Crooked River Burning, the Hough Riots were as good a symbol as any of Cleveland’s own loss of innocence.
Don Robertson earned the Cleveland Arts Prize in 1966 for The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread. He wrote two additional books featuring Morris Bird III, The Sum and Total of Now and The Greatest Thing that Almost Happened. The Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature presented Robertson with the Mark Twain Award in 1991.
How odd that this review was published 14 minutes agao, as I was doing a Google search for this title. I suppose the search was prompted by the news regarding the death of Catcher in the Rye author JD Salinger. I have wanted my daughters to read this book, but believed it was out of print. Well, Audrey is now 26, but Julie is 13, the age when I read the book. I ordered a copy. Maybe I can get the girls to read it.
My recollection of the book is a bit fuzzy after 45 years, but I have always remembered Morris Bird III, and his sister and wagon and Stanley being incinerated. My memory is that this is a wonderful book.
As cborne says, the journey was a whopping two miles, but there is still that mentality in NYC, where the entire world is four blocks square. I love the google map cborne posted.
Pat
New Jersey
Comment by Pat — January 31, 2010 @ 12:15 am |
How serendipitous! And I’m glad you liked the map. The story struck a chord with me because when I worked in University Circle, the bus I rode downtown took almost the exact same route. I always used to look out the window and daydream about what the place must have looked like as a thriving middle-class neighborhood.
I’m really interested in your perspective as someone who read the book when it was first published, especially because I kept forgetting that the book was 45 years old — it seemed so vibrant and immediate, and you’re right, it has some incredibly powerful and hard-to-forget images. Are you from Cleveland originally? (By the way, I used to live on the Jersey Shore – Ocean/Monmouth County to be exact.)
Comment by cborne — January 31, 2010 @ 12:47 am |
Well, I’ve been to Cleveland once in my life, mostly because I wanted to see the lake. I have traveled America, lived out west for years and returned here 20 years ago. I suspect some bits of courage to wander the country alone comes from reading this book. I am from what is now a suburb of NYC; was the farms when I was a kid, and I grew up in a very small Hudson River city. I read this book in the 10th grade for English class if I recall. I never did read Catcher in the Rye. I read very little anymore, in the book sense, although I read a lot of stuff on the internet.
I realy don’t recall much abiut the book, it was such a long time ago. I tend to file things away in my memory as either abstracts or synopses; I recall the impression or the overview. For example, I don’t recall all of the stuff I learned in engineering school in detail, but I remember what the highlight is. A circle is a degenerate ellipse; don’t ask for a formal proof.
What I recall of the book was that the kid was quite adventurous…didn’t he skip school that day to visit his friend across town? We once cut out on a class trip to the Museum of Natural History in 5th grade to hang out in the neighborhood…that didn’t go over well. Anyway, I remember that the kid saw his friend basically get incinerated, and he remained somewhat non-plussed by the fact. Didn’t he do heroic things in the story, and got his sister home intact? I just remember the story being about a kid who was in way over his head, but remained extremely cool in the face of all danger. Please correct me if Im wrong. And, wasn’t the book set in the 40′s, during the later stages of the war? Morris would have been 16 when I was born. One day, the A&E garage blew up on my way home from school. I was nine. It was a huge fireball 20 yards away. Old Hank, the proprietor, came running out of there, he was lucky to escape death. I can only imagine the explosion in Cleveland, and the level of comprehension a nine year old has for something like that.
I will read the book again and we can disuss it merits further
Pat
Comment by Pat — January 31, 2010 @ 1:50 am |