I Was Here: The Young Manhood and Education of Rick Stevens

When you and I beyond this veil have passed,

Oh, what a long, long time this world will last.

And of our coming and departure heed

As the seven seas heed a pebble cast.

{Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam—Translated by Edward Fitzgerald}

What has been my motivation for writing this long novel?  Let me answer this question by asking more questions: Have you ever wondered whether the world will remember you after you have ceased to exist on this fascinating planet?  Wouldn’t we all like to leave a mark, a sign, of our having been here?  Perhaps we can count on our family members and close acquaintances to remember us, but what happens after they have passed away? Of the coming and going of so many billions of people throughout endless time, am I nothing but a fleeting speck? Is my lifetime nothing more than the blink of an eye in geological time? I should like to register the fact that I was here, if only for my own reassurance.  I am reminded of the hand-drawn signs I used to see on walls and fences when I first enlisted in the United States Army in 1946:

I believe that KILROY WAS HERE became a kind of symbol of the average GI’s desire to be remembered.  The ordinary soldier, sailor, or marine thought of himself as Kilroy.  In a sense, it was a quest for immortality.

This long novel is my KILROY WAS HERE.

It is my hope that someday my sons, their wives, children and descendents have the opportunity or the desire to read this novel.  They may not read it until after they have retired or reached old age; there are too many daily distractions that prevent one from reading a novel of this length.

This novel attempts to present a complete, unvarnished, and rounded portrait of the young manhood and education of a white American male in a mid-western state.  It depicts his good qualities as well as his bad ones—his “warts.”  The span of his life covered is from his infancy to twenty-nine years of age.  The years are from 1928 until 1957.

Parts of his life included are:  his early childhood and boyhood growing up on a farm and in a small town in northeastern Ohio; persecution by his stepfather; constant moral support by his mother; his sexual education; his enlisting and serving in the United States Army (the peacetime Army from 1946 – 1949); his Army buddies; his long automobile trip with friends through the Western states; his college education at the University of Virginia and Ohio State University; his college friendships; his failures and his successes; his college summer jobs on Great Lakes iron ore freighters; his education courses and preparation for a science teaching career (Glasgow College, Pa.); his love life and his sex life; his European trip with his best friend—a fellow sailor and college chum; his determination to overcome his shyness, to break out of his shell, to become more of an actor than just a spectator, to eliminate his laid-back  passive behavior, and to become a much more aggressive man—active, outgoing, generous, caring and fun-loving; his meditations and discussions with Army and college friends concerning the subject of what philosophers call free will versus determinism; his eventual decision to believe in free will; his self discoveries.

You, the reader, may wonder just how much of what you are reading is true.  This book can be described as an autobiographical novel or even as a coming-of-age novel.    The protagonist Rick Stevens and I have had similar experiences; however, not all of our experiences have been the same.  The characters are based upon real people.  I have used both real and fictitious names.  For the most part I used real names for deceased people and fictitious names for people still living.  However, this has not been a hard and fast rule; when the character appears briefly and the part he plays is beyond reproach, I have used his or her real name.  (In my Diary I plan to have a list of the names of the characters; opposite each, I plan to give the name of the real person upon whom the character is based. Family members are probably the only ones who will be interested in reading this list.)

The reader may be dismayed when he reads Part 1 during which time the protagonist Rick Stevens is a mere infant and a toddler.  Most of Part 1 is told from his mother Ida’s point of view or her frame of reference.  Since her decisions and moral support profoundly affected the course of her son Rick’s life and that of her daughter Janet, the author felt it was very important to describe fully Ida’s situation while she was living at