Out of the Past

No one spoke of my grandfather Kreamer, not ever. Even his given name was a mystery. All anyone seemed to know was that he had disappeared before my father's fourth birthday. And when my father died a few years ago, I assumed that any hope of knowing anything more about my grandfather—his father—had evaporated. So last year, as I intermittently corresponded with a distant relative I'd met through an on-line genealogy site, I was stunned by the following e-mail from her: "My cousin just wrote me and sent the following text from an article she found this afternoon. Hope this isn't a shock to you." The newspaper story, from the February 16, 1927, edition of the Glen Elder Sentinel, was headlined "J. H. Kraemer Still Missing." (The routine misspelling of our name is obviously a longstanding phenomenon.) The paper went on to report that "J. H. Kraemer, missing cashier" from the local bank, "has never yet returned and no news has been obtained of his whereabouts. A good many people over the county still think that he will come back and assist in straightening out the affairs of the bank."

"Straightening out the affairs of the bank"—could a phrase be more suggestively, intriguingly vague and expansive?

The Glen Elder bank was affiliated with the State Bank of Downs, Kansas. Dan Harrison, from a prominent family in the area, had cofounded the Downs bank and served several terms as mayor, and several as a state senator. My grandmother, Catherine "Toots" Harrison Kreamer, was his daughter. It made sense that my grandfather Kreamer worked in his father-in-law's business.

But no wonder no one spoke of him. He wasn't just any criminal—he'd stolen from his in-laws!

This isotope of information meant just one thing: I needed to go to Downs, a farming community of 1,100 in north-central Kansas that I had last visited, from my hometown of Kansas City, when I was nine—39 years before.

I persuaded my 14-year-old daughter, Lucy, to accompany me on this Nancy Drew-ish adventure. There are no scheduled planes, passenger trains, or even buses that stop near Downs. We flew from New York to Omaha (where my mother-in-law lived) and rented a car for the six-hour trip west into the middle of the middle of America. The route we mapped to Downs, which is 20 miles south of the geographic center of the 48 contiguous states, was along Route 77, the Homestead Expressway, into Kansas and "Pony Express country" as a posted road sign announced. Our family is always inclined to drive the back roads, and in Kansas, where the speed limit on two-lane highways is 65 and all roads run clean and straight, those byways are efficient—and their vistas are sublime. I had mouthwateringly imagined stopping for dinner at some great little mom-and-pop restaurant for the chicken-fried steak with cream (not brown) gravy that I remembered from childhood. But over hundreds of Blue Highway miles there was no such place to be found. On the other hand, there were virtually no fast-food restaurants—the thin and declining Great Plains population density cannot support the national chains.

After a pizza dinner, we drove due west on Route 24, through the Flint Hills, the little-known, classic-western-movie scenery of north-central Kansas, into the twilight. As a kid, I'd endured the drive to my grandmother's house: flat tedious mile followed flat tedious mile. So I was surprised to find how much the landscape itself—the dramatic simplicity of infinite cornfields against the distant horizon—moved me. On no conscious level had I been aware, during these last 30 years on the East Coast, that this vast emptiness was inextricably linked to my notion of myself. I hadn't imagined how beautiful it would seem to me—or to Lucy, who was seeing it for the first time. We were giddy with space, and stopped repeatedly to take pictures of isolated clapboard churches; miles of glowing sunflower fields; white gravel roads serpentining through endless green corn; hulking, centipede-like irrigation systems hurling water into the dry soil; and abandoned farmhouses surrounded by cottonwood windbreaks whose canopies were punctuated by ramshackle mills. Dust devils bobbed and danced in distant fields. And the streaming plumes of dust roiled up by farmers out tilling their land billowed on the horizon. The bulbous water tower of each (barely) inhabited place seemed to cry, "Look, here, we exist!" long before any other human presence was visible.

We passed exactly two cars, both of them going east, during the final 45-minute stretch of our all-day trip. As we drove through Cawker City (population 585), I was disappointed by the "largest ball of twine in the world." In my memory it was a grand, wonderfully absurd, amber-colored sphere as big as a house, on display beneath a strikingly modernistic circa-1960 geodesic dome. But today it seemed more like a minivan-sized pile of dirty rags under a carport.

Glen Elder (population 448) looked as if a neutron bomb had been dropped on it. No one was out sitting or walking or puttering. Bikes had been left splayed on their sides in yards. Apparently empty buildings stood silent. These stretches of the plains are lands that time forgot—but for my time-traveling purposes that was a good thing. When we finally arrived in Downs, around nine at night, the town looked hardly different from the sepia-toned, panoramic 1901 photograph of Downs that hangs on my living room wall in New York. Driving along the main street, I remembered exactly my grandmother's old address, 509 Division Street, and was able to find it—as my father always said to congratulate himself and my mother on successful navigations—"like a homing pigeon."

Lucy and I made our base camp at the Howell House, an impeccably restored Victorian bed-and-breakfast. Our first stop the next morning was my grandmother's place, just a few minutes' walk away. My strongest memory of it had been the wraparound sleeping porch where we'd escaped the stifling summer heat and watched fireflies glimmer in Mason jars with lids punched by a rusty ice pick—our only source of light. The porch was gone, and the house "modernized" in ways I disliked, but the bones of the place were still there and anchored me in my grandmother's presence.

I was able to track down her nephews, Bill Harrison, a 79-year-old retired gallery owner living in Taos, New Mexico, and Bogue Harrison, 74, and living in Panama City, Florida. I'd talked with Bill maybe once in my life, when I was about six years old, but he reacted to my call without missing a beat. "Well," he said, "now that you bring it up, when I was little, Jack Kreamer simply wasn't mentioned." My grandfather's name was Jack! Bill had worked at the family bank in Downs during college summer breaks in the 1940's, and remembered one incident very specifically: his father saying, "I want to show you something," taking him into the big bank vault, and digging out a three-inch-thick bundle of 20-year-old checks, wrapped with adding machine tape, that totaled over $45,000.

"These are the checks that Jack Kreamer bounced trying to cover his gambling debts," Bill's father told him, "and your grandfather covered them with his own cash." The tone of disgust used by Bill's dad left his son in no doubt about the in-laws' regard for Jack—$45,000 in 1927 was the equivalent of half a million dollars today.

The picture in my mind of my grandfather became both cloudier and more exciting. Was he an embezzler or just an extravagant bettor?Or both?Where in the middle of nowhere, in the pious, Protestant plains of Prohibition, could Jack have gambled on that scale?How far would he have had to go—Kansas City is 200 miles east and Denver 400 miles west—to lose such a sum?Was it possible that my grandfather was still alive somewhere, a very old man living high off his bank spoils?Had he started a new family?I was imagining Newman and Redford in The Sting. And I knew that my father, who had loved mystery novels, would have delighted in my speculations.

I decided that one of the best ways to follow Jack's trail was through the bank. Jerry Berkeley, who bought the State Bank of Downs from my relatives in the 1970's, had known nothing about my grandfather's criminal history, but I turned him into a fellow detective. He uncovered a lawsuit, filed in 1930, alleging that J. H. Kreamer had left the county in 1927 to avoid being served with a summons relating to large debts he owed the Central Kansas Cattle Loan Co. Jim Vandergiesen, a contemporary of my grandparents, suggested that the "gambling" Jack had indulged in might have been something that in the 1920's they'd called "bucking the board." Folks would go to the "elevator," the local grain storage depot and market, and place a bid speculating on crop futures. Jim also whispered that a local woman, another contemporary, said that she'd "heard Jack Kreamer had done time." The very language was a little thrilling: I pushed on with my quest.

I learned that my grandfather had grown up in Jewell, Kansas, another small town (population 483), about 30 miles from Downs. Lucy and I drove to Jewell knowing absolutely no one there. We stopped at the town library and looked through local burial records. There I found my Kreamer relatives. Jack Kreamer's parents—my great-grandparents—and his sister Edith are buried in the Jewell cemetery. The librarian suggested we might pick up more information if we went to the Scoop, a local ice cream shop where a group of older women gathered every afternoon to drink coffee and chat.

We went. Betty James, a 72-year-old widow, stunned Lucy and me—accustomed as we were to the New York mind-your-own-business M.O.—by opening her house to us, two unknown travelers, in the old and pure way of Midwestern hospitality. At the city office next door to the Scoop, Lucy plowed through a book listing every graduate of Jewell High School for the past century, and hit upon the real key to our family history: Charlotte Kreamer, class of 1941. By phone that night I tracked down Charlotte, now 79 years old and living 90 miles away in Council Grove, Kansas, and her 87-year-old sister, Katherine, who lives in Holton, yet another little Kansas town, about 100 miles away. They are nieces of my grandfather Jack. Katherine was a flower girl at Jack and Catherine's wedding in 1921; both women had known my grandfather and spoke freely about him. They were the first people I'd ever known who did. "I don't know why he turned out to be the black sheep," Katherine said.

Their half sister, Margaret Ann, told me more: "Jack had a charming personality. My father"—Jack's brother Fred—"said he could sell a refrigerator to an Eskimo, and that he'd give you the shirt off his back." Margaret Ann had inherited her Aunt Edith Kreamer's belongings,including a photograph of my grandfather in his twenties, an up-and-coming young member of the Commerce Club of Jewell. I had never seen a picture of him before. I found myself staring at the face, both strange and familiar, seeing in his features my father's and my own. From some old letters of Edith's, I learned that she had been the one to send my grandfather, her little brother, away from Kansas in 1927. "When the trouble was slowly killing Grandfather Kreamer, I begged him [Jack] to go away as far as he could." In other words, the shock expressed in that original small-town newspaper story was, perhaps, somewhat disingenuous.

And I also discovered, in my great-aunt's papers, that in 1943 my grandfather Jack Kreamer died, at age 48, penniless and alone, working in a lumber camp in northern California. His sister Edith paid $3.50 for his headstone in Shasta County.

As my grandfather's story came into focus, I found that it had been no romantic caper after all, but something more complicated, even tragic—more like Theodore Dreiser or John Steinbeck than The Sting—and compelling in ways I hadn't anticipated and that will take time for me to digest.

I intend to stay in touch with this family I never knew about. And I'll continue to dig into my grandfather's financial shadow life and exile, and track his path west a few years ahead of the great Grapes of Wrath emigration. For Lucy and me, the outlines of a trip to northern California are already taking shape.

Are You Self-Medicating for the Anxieties du Jour?

It's easy to dismiss reality TV as junk, but if you look a little deeper, you'll see why it's so popular. It's the same reason why books on Buddhism are selling: We all need some relief from the angst of the moment.

Are You Self-Medicating for the Anxieties du Jour? Anne Kreamer leisure, leisbooks It's easy to dismiss reality TV as junk, but if you look a little deeper, you'll see why it's so popular. It's the same reason why books on Buddhism are selling: We all need some relief from the angst of the moment.

Contrary to conventional cultural criticism, reality television does not represent the end of civilization as we know it. As inspirationally bereft as ABC's Are You Hot, Fox's The Glutton Bowl food show, NBC's Playboy Fear Factor, and the E network's Anna Nicole Smith series are, the frenzied popularity of this programming isn't difficult to understand: It's a way Americans can self-medicate. Obsessing over Michael Jackson's gothic lunacy or zooming in on the sweet pathetic nobodies on American Idol helps distract us from thinking and fretting about terrorism and the messiness of post-Iraqi-liberation all the time.

That's my take on the business-culture intersection. I checked it out with Joni Evans, consummate keeper of the business-culture flame. In her role as agent for Dr. Brian Weiss (author of Many Lives, Many Masters) and as a senior vice president at the William Morris Agency, the outfit responsible for bringing Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and The Weakest Link to the United States, Evans has a different view of the market's reaction to these reality offerings. "Reality TV isn't an escape from Iraq," Evans says. "What it illustrates is that people realize that nonfiction is more interesting than fiction." Nonfiction, in Evans's book, spans media offerings as diverse as the surface-only Survivor to below-the-surface chronicles like Bob Woodward's Bush at War. The cocktail-party circuit, Evans says, where real business also gets done, does consist of tough talk about substantive issues. "People are trying to make their own sense of reality," Evans says. "Is what's going on with the world good, or bad?"

My response to Evans: I don't think regular Americans are hearing what she's hearing. People who read Bush at War are also watching I'm A Celebrity -- Get Me Out of Here? I doubt it. I think real reality is so complicated and nervous-making right now that TV is giving us spectacularly inconsequential human comedy and calling it "reality." In some postmodern torque of irony, reality TV lets us keep our minds off of reality.

There's a second antianxiety medication that Americans are turning to: behavioral therapy, using techniques like meditation or relaxation. Here our cultural institutions are way ahead of the market. According to Publisher's Weekly, about 560 new spiritual and religious guides will be published this summer. Last December, a Gallup poll found that nearly 25% of all Americans are likely to choose a book about spirituality when selecting a book to read.

According to Evans, the current explosion in spirituality books has been building for a long time -- and predates the threat of war, the downward slide of the economy, and the other anxieties du jour. "The rise in spiritual publishing is a direct expression of our contemporary state of existential flux," Evans says. "How do we make sense of it all?"

What I found really interesting about those 560-odd pop-metaphysics summer books is the kinds of titles being released. I expected sanctimonious evangelical tracts. Instead, I was encouraged by many of the titles.

First, more than 60 of the titles were Zen- or Buddhist-related -- more than 10% of the books, even though only about 1% of Americans label themselves as Buddhist. As our leaders have hurtled us, for better or for worse, into quasi-permanent war, we are, if the book publishers have got it right, searching for meaning as well as calm. The best-seller status of Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones proves that Americans will embrace tough content if it reveals glimmers of heartfelt hopefulness.

Kids have been onto this kind of literary self-therapy way ahead of grown-ups: This month's first printing of 6.8 million hardcover copies of the latest Harry Potter installment, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, demonstrates how smart kids are. Harry gets to beat Voldemort, the Osama bin Laden of fiction, repeatedly. That feels really good.

So the crazes for reality TV and pop spiritual books are different currents in the same cultural stream -- possibly because Americans intuitively understand what Franklin Roosevelt said about Depression-era national panic back in 1933: "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself -- nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror. . . ." And what showed up in the years immediately after FDR's famous exhortation? Fabulous pop-culture confections: all the classic screwball comedies, The Wizard of Oz, and Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

On the other hand, what followed those fanciful offerings was World War II.

What's the News About the Nightly News?

This month, Anne exchanges email with Tom Brokaw, anchor and managing editor, NBC Nightly News With Tom Brokaw.

Anne Americans have never been all that interested in foreign news. But in light of September 11, the current confrontations in Israel, Iraq, and North Korea, and Americans' intellectual unpreparedness to cope, do you regret that over the past 20 years, big media reduced foreign coverage because editors, executives, and producers had decided that their audiences just weren't interested?

Tom Actually, the two subjects that were not ignored were the Middle East and terrorism. All of the networks did a substantial amount of reporting on the Taliban in Afghanistan, the rise of Osama bin Laden, and the failure of peace efforts between the Palestinians and the Israelis. What we no longer do is use the incidental or episodic foreign development as a filler in a broadcast. Having said that, I agree that given a choice between a routine domestic story and a foreign story, we're much more likely to go domestic. Foreign-news coverage tends to be crisis driven. Moreover, foreign policy has been only a faint image on the campaign radar screens in the last three election cycles, and that has added to the public malaise on global developments. One of the many changes in the American culture following September 11 was an increased appetite for foreign news. I suspect that will remain for as long as the terror threat seems viable -- which could be a long time.

Anne On the one hand, with 24-7 news channels and Internet news sites, consumers can completely customize their personal input of news. On the other hand, while we've all read about the imminent demise of the nightly network news as a format, you're coming off an all-time ratings high, and during crises, Americans do seem to crave a trusted source -- someone like you. Is this a contradiction?

Tom A well-organized summary of the day's most important developments still has a place in this crowded news and information universe. My guess is that most viewers are also dedicated consumers of other sources of news. The evening broadcasts simply complement their other news resources. For the foreseeable future, I believe that there will be a place for the nightly network broadcast, but its chances of survival would be greatly enhanced if it were expanded to one hour. That said, I'm not confident that will happen in my professional life.

Anne When it comes to the civic discourse, isn't it a bad thing that TV news lost the semiexemption from conventional profit margins that it had in the 1960s and 1970s?

Tom During the 1960s and 1970s, the network news was essentially a duopoly: NBC and CBS, with ABC still being a relatively minor player. The broadcast networks were so rich that they were willing to indulge their news divisions with fat budgets to shore up their "public service" image with Washington overseers. In fact, a staggering amount of money was spent, not on the essence of editorial coverage but rather on the trappings of it: chartered planes, layers of unnecessary personnel, redundancies in the assignment organization. The greater financial test, I believe, is whether the networks will continue to find room for news broadcasts that are in the public interest, if not high on the popular-issues list. For example, the future of energy consumption is not a subject that's likely to generate huge audiences, but it is an indisputably important subject. Even a low-rated network-news broadcast attracts several million people, especially when it is recycled across cable platforms. Will networks be willing to underwrite those broadcasts? It is increasingly a difficult proposition.

Anne Do you think that the "right here, right now" urgency in our culture is more bad than good? Worse than it was 10 or 20 years ago? And do you think that anti-American sentiment around the world is just a price of empire?

Tom I'm not sure that the American culture has ever been anything but right here, right now. It's part of our national character, but it is accelerated by the tools of modern technology, which are designed for speed and dispersal. The second part of your question, about anti-American sentiment, is much more complex. I do think that it is partly the price of empire, partly envy, and partly the result of a kind of American myopia in which we're determined to see the rest of the world only through our prism.

What Does It Take to Make a Great Movie?

Anne Kreamer meets Harvey Weinstein, cochairman of Miramax Films.

Anne Harvey, you could argue that Miramax's films have been leading indicators for what's happening at the upper end of the mass-media cultural landscape. What are the quirks of your sensibility that led you to make or distribute such disparate films as The Crying Game, Pulp Fiction, The English Patient, Sling Blade, Good Will Hunting, Life Is Beautiful, Princess Mononoke, and In the Bedroom?

Harvey I don't think that there is a specific quirk or sensibility that guides our selection of projects. My brother, Bob, and I have a deep passion for movies. We have definitely learned to appreciate innovative writing and to recognize that two of the most important ingredients for success are well-written scripts and the passion of the filmmakers. You were able to cite the above films because they did work, because audiences did respond to them. But for every Shakespeare in Love there is The Shipping News, Get Over It, or All the Pretty Horses -- films I loved that audiences just did not respond to.

Anne What do you think really made the difference between the hits and the, um, not hits? Were the big, commercially unsuccessful films ones where you gave too much rein to the filmmakers?

Harvey Each film presents a unique set of circumstances, but typically, the quality of the writing is the most consistent indicator of whether a film will "succeed." There have been projects where we may have overlooked flaws in the script, thinking that a great director or a great cast would solve the problem. We can work with the filmmaker by offering all sorts of suggestions to resolve issues, but sometimes you just can't overcome them. Cultural differences across borders factor into how American audiences will respond to those films. After we acquired In the Bedroom, which received an Academy Award nomination for best picture last year, we reviewed the film with its director, Todd Field, and discussed some minimal editing. But we ultimately decided that the film would work with no changes at all. And it did.

Anne On a different note, for quite a few years, you've tried and not really succeeded at TV. How come?

Harvey Whenever you move into a new arena, there are growing pains and lessons learned. While we are very proud to have received our first Emmy nomination for Project Greenlight [for HBO] this year, we recognize that this is a slow process and that success will not come right away. We're excited about Project Greenlight 2 [also for HBO], our current animated TV series, Tokyo Pig [for ABC Family], our upcoming miniseries, A Wrinkle in Time [for ABC], and a TV film based on Miramax Books's best-selling Icebound, the Jerri Nielsen story [for CBS].

Anne Speaking of TV programs such as Tokyo Pig and A Wrinkle in Time, you have kids under 10 years old. Do you think that entertainment companies are doing right by them? Would you let your kids see Jackass or let them play Grand Theft Auto: Vice City?

Harvey Trust me: Watch-ing my girls grow up has definitely provided me with perspective. I am even working on my own adaptation of a children's book for a future project. But freedom of expression is certainly something that I treasure, so I'm not going to sit here and pontificate about how people shouldn't be making violent films or video games. I do think that the recent focus on not marketing R-rated films to kids has been constructive. And I will say that over the years, the story lines of those types of films have definitely suffered. I like a great action movie as much as anyone -- but there has to be a real plot.

Anne About that adaptation of a kids' book: What kind of a project is it? Animation? Live action? And you're the one writing the script?

Harvey I'm writing the script. As for the medium, I'm at the mercy of my production executives.

Anne That should be an interesting process: Your executives giving "notes" on your script. Over the past 20 years, you've moved from Sex, Lies, and Videotape to your own adaptation of a children's book. There's a natural progression!

Want to Know How She Does It?

This month, Anne exchanges email with Allison Pearson, author of the best-selling novel I Don't Know How She Does It.

Anne One day, a few years after I had left my executive job at Viacom to start my own company, I was on the subway. It was midday, and I was sitting on a train with a funky grab bag of ordinary middle-class people. According to the norms by which I previously had some standing in the world, I no longer existed. I had to construct and, more important, believe in a new definition of success. When I read I Don't Know How She Does It, I was delighted by how exquisitely you captured the crux of that struggle. How would you define success for a (Western, professional) woman of the 21st century?

Allison Success for a Western woman is still bound up with a traditional male idea of achievement. Basically, women entering corporations are obliged to say, "Unsex me here!" like doomed Lady Macbeths. The price of competing equally with men is to remain childless - but men don't have to pay that price. Gender plays a big part: Women bring new life into the world, and I suspect that they have a surer grasp of what's really important. Sucking up to superiors, playing office politics, and sitting through time-wasting meetings that are really male arenas of grooming and display - women lose patience with all of that big-ape rubbish once they've had kids and need to get home to read them a bedtime story.

Anne I think you're onto something with how intolerant women become of time wasting at work after they have children. If we feel as though the work that we do may make a substantive difference in the quality of someone's life, then time away from our kids feels like a reasonable trade-off. But if the job feels socially useless, or worse, then time away from the family feels wasteful and stupid. Do you get the sense that women want something more than just personal "lifestyle" balance?

Allison From talking to women, I got the impression that making large amounts of money is less important than a sense of being appreciated and of working in a personally rewarding environment. Every woman I interviewed wanted greater flexibility in her working life - and was willing to trade pay to get it. Why are companies so damned slow to respond to this need? The passionate response to my novel suggests that both men and women have a profound sense of something being not quite right about the way we live now. There's a feeling that if things don't change, then we could be storing up trouble for ourselves and for future generations.

Anne What about the man's role? In your novel, it felt like Kate didn't seem to respect her husband, Richard, even though he did a pretty good job of holding down the fort while she chugged away at work. He didn't seem as sexy as her almost lover, Jack Abelhammer, the titan of industry, did he?

Allison I don't really believe in the househusband. Here's the problem: Woman wants man to become more domestic, more like a woman, so man familiarizes himself with the laundry basket and becomes more like a woman - and woman no longer wants to have sex with him because he's not enough of a man! It's not fair, but then biology has little to do with justice.

Anne When all is said and done, how do you define success for yourself?

Allison I find the definition changing. A year ago, having I Don't Know become a best-seller would have been near the top of the list. Now I just want my two kids to know that they have their mum back after her long absences spent writing and promoting the novel. You can't imagine how much they hate my computer!

Anne So will you unplug and stay home now?

Allison I did suggest to Anthony, my husband, that I might stay home full-time with the kids, and he got this look on his face - sort of a sphinx with a migraine - and said that he would pay me to go to work. He reckoned that I would be unbearable to live with if I didn't do some kind of job. People have said that Kate Reddy gives up work at the end of the novel, but that isn't so. We leave her knowing that she's going to climb back onto the machine: She can't help herself.

Anne The trick is that the machine that Kate is climbing back onto is one of her own making. By the way, "She Can't Help Herself" would be a great title for your next novel.