Once again my ADD has caught up with me. I was eager to finish another project, having finished a book in September; after all, I have about four almost finished. I set to work on the one closest to being done, but it didn't take; I got partway into it, and just couldn't do any more. I stalled a while hoping it would come to me and I could just finish. The timing was fortuitous; it would be good to finish it before Christmas. But the words wouldn't come. I was unhappy with the changes I'd made to what I had.

Suddenly, inexplicably, I got drawn back into the worlds of my great grandfathers. They lived in Council Bluffs, Iowa, at the turn of the century (~1900). One worked in a bank, and had run a magazine called the Trans-Mississippian designed to promote the Trans-Mississippian Exhibition in Omaha in 1897. He gave up that magazine soon after the exhibition. He was actually better suited to various other pursuits that made more money, like selling insurance and real estate, but with the exhibition over and the world going back to Omaha as we already knew it, he had no reason to keep promoting it, I guess. What I'm saying is I'm not really sure why he gave up writing when he seemed to be enjoying it.

The other one had taken the proceeds of his farm inheritance - he had sold out to his brother - and set up a hardware store in downtown Council Bluffs. They sold everything from big stoves to get you through the winter to foot balls, the newest rage in the physical education craze. Their ads were all over the Non-Pareil. His partner, Charles Swaine, joined the national association of hardware-store-managers and they had a pretty good run, from the end of the 1890s well into about 1920.

Somewhere in there maybe the monotony of standing at the cash register ringing people up got to him. He had grown up on the farm and as far as I know chose to come to town and set up this store, but maybe he was doing it just because his older brother wanted him out of the farm and had first dibs on the farm which didn't have enough room for the both of their families. In any case he had this idea of setting up a self-checkout grocery store. Today we have Aldis and a few others like it but in 1920 this was a new idea and people weren't sure it would work. Look, he said, you can save all that money that you have to pay to keep the cashiers here, to keep them paid and happy, if you just do the work of checking out, bagging, etc., yourself. You'll save tons. I'll pass all the savings to you.

It was a failure. By the late 1920s he was a traveling salesman, or traveling something, and died on the road in Watertown South Dakota, at a young age. So I see him as a kind of Death of a Salesman character.

The story is rich and has texture. That's why I'm drawn into it. The Roaring Twenties was a wild time, money flying around, people drinking in speakeasies, etc. Downtown Council Bluffs was a lively place. The other great grandfather was ousted from the bank where he worked, but did ok selling insurance, which was a new thing, and managing real estate. He was a historian and gathered information particularly about the area and about the different tribes that had occupied it. His son would marry the hardware-store man's daughter.

In the end the story has to do with cultural assimilation. The hardware store man was from a German family; like most of the farmers out in Minden (outside of Council Bluffs) they had emigrated from Ostfresia or the part of north Germany closest to Netherlands. The German Americans, at that time, had to hide their identities because of World War (, and this would get worse in World War II. One had to hide any evidence of one's past and work on one's accent so that one didn't even sound German. This was not easy.

One reason I'm drawn to this story is that it's fairly clear in my mind, just not yet written. The people in it are all very interesting characters yet distinct, and they totally lived in their time. There's a kind of gap that I don't know a whole bunch about, the first decade of the century, but after that, the Roaring Twenties, the Depression, etc., I've pretty much got that down. I know where the story is going. It will end up that the culture gap just rips apart the family. And that makes for a huge tragedy, but it's only one of many that presumably were common in those times.

I'll see if I can get a good wide outline of it down, and then work on the details. If I'm inspired to write, I have to write, quick while the writing is good. That other stuff will have to wait.