Whole Truths

About the Book

Imagine this book as an improbable cocktail party. All the people who populate this collection of journalistic works by Jerry Miller, living and dead, are there, holding martinis or grape Nehis (a lot of them are from Middle America after all), telling their stories, showing their human sides, keeping their lives in motion for the writer of descriptive narrative journalism to depict in his work and, thereby, evoke deeper and more unexpected responses than the more expository, facts-only approach of traditional reportage.
Quite the party, this one. People you know because they are celebrities or because they live just down the street, because they made headlines or because they tried and didn’t get their allotted fifteen minutes of fame. So, walk into the party, mingle, see the characters up close and personal, again thanks to a brand of literary journalism that believes its subjects are far more human and complex than just the bare facts that appear on their driver’s licenses, which probably aren’t accurate, anyway.
Look, over there in one corner is the country music contingent. Loretta Lynn holding court with Skeeter Davis and Tom T. Hall, who is quite a storyteller in his own right. And all three came through Indiana to perform at one time or another. So did many others, like Crystal Gayle, Carl Perkins, Ray Price, and Ernest Tubb, but they couldn’t make the party (or the book).
Tiny Tim is trying to break into that claque, or any other for that matter, but they won’t let him in.
Over by the window are the songwriters, living and dead. The Indiana boy who made “Stardust” a word in all our vocabularies, and the sickly humorous author of such classics as “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park” and “The Old Dope Peddler.”
Nearby, too, are the Hollywood types. Quite a range of them, from Spanky McFarland to Wolfman Jack, the Lone Ranger to Martin Sheen. They won’t let Tiny Tim into their conversations, either.
The biggest group of all probably is the one over by the beer cooler. The auto racing crowd – Jeff Gordon, A. J. Foyt, Jan Opperman, Andy Granatelli, and a young stock car driver hoping to make the same kind of headlines the others have. There are the Indy 500’s most legendary losers, too, from Ralph DePalma to Andy Granatelli (before he finally won the big race). The author has spent a lot of time at race tracks in his lifetime, so these are the people he invited first. After all, he did once write a whole book about those guys (and a girl or two) with grease on their uniforms and blinding speed in their blood. Other sparkles of fame are scattered around the room. Jesse Jackson is here. So is Dick the Bruiser. And Dave Barry and The Great Imposter. All of them, except maybe the Imposter, will talk your leg off. The Bruiser will also rip it off if you give him reason (like suggesting that pro wrestling is fake).
Oh, hey, there’s the pope, John Paul II, sipping a small class of communion wine, imagine that. Tiny Tim keeps asking him to forgive him for calling Satan a beautiful angel. The Holy Father just keeps sipping. And there’s ex-senator Birch Bayh, proudly talking up his son, the senator and perennial Mr. Congeniality of the vice presidential nominating contest. Vernon Jordan is here, as well, fully recovered from his assassination attempt in Indiana (not the state’s proudest moment). And Bobby Garwood, whoever he was once upon a time. The entire population of Economy, Indiana, is here, too, all bemoaning how the American economy for which it was named continues to pass it by over on a highway in eastern Indiana. Another small town has squeezed in, too, the one that beat some of the biggest schools in the state to get to the state high school basketball tournament’s finals down in the big city (Indianapolis).
It just gets more and more diverse, this odd menagerie of imaginary cocktail partiers. Hobart Freeman, the faith-healing pastor of the old Faith Assembly, hanging a

About the Author

Born in eastern Indiana, Jerry Miller has been a newspaper and magazine journalist for more than forty years, as well as teaching journalism at Ball State University and Franklin College in Indiana for twenty of those years. His previous books were Fast Company: The Men and Machines of American Auto Racing (1972) and little stars: Wishing Upon the Rock ‘n’ Roll Dream (2001). He retired as professor emeritus from the Pulliam School of Journalism, Franklin College, in 2004. He continues to write articles for newspapers and magazines and has begun work on a fourth non-fiction book.