Whitey: From Farm Kid to Flying Tiger to Attorney; A Memoir by Wayne G. Johnson (2011: Langdon Street Press. ISBN 978-1-936183-93-7)
Spoiler alert. I had the privilege of reading the first one hundred or so pages of the unfinished manuscript that became this memoir about two years ago. Wayne Johnson, the author, is a friend, mentor, and attorney from “my neck of the woods”. He has been incredibly supportive of my writing. It was a great pleasure to be asked to take a gander at Wayne’s work-in-progress. Many of the suggestions that I gave the author were followed in the final draft of Whitey. Some were not. Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t pretend to be an editor. Nor a successful author. I’m just a guy who knocks words in some kind of order to tell a cogent story. But I think I know a good yarn when I read it. With the changes, this memoir is two-thirds there. Here’s why.
I found myself falling off my recliner with laughter at some of the anecdotes from Wayne’s childhood. He grew up on a succession of farms, part of a large Norwegian immigrant family, in southwestern Minnesota. Here’s a snippet from that section of the book that any country boy or girl can relate to:
Another incident I recall from this time frame involved the linoleum in our kitchen. New linoleum had just been laid and Mother was very proud of the imprint. When Mother and Dad went to town, my brother Clarence got the bright idea to bring one of our favorite horses into the house…it left hoof prints on the new linoleum. Mother didn’t notice the marks on the floor when she an Dad came home…
The next day she was mopping the floor….and she noticed the marks…She was really puzzled. She returned to town a few days later and complained to the owner of the hardware store who had sold her the linoleum about the strange indentations on the kitchen floor. The hardware man…was equally puzzled. Being a fair shopkeeper, he replaced the linoleum at no cost, although he did send a sample of the damaged linoleum to the manufacturer…(T)hey were unable to solve the riddle as to how the marks had occurred. They had never seen their product experience a similar deterioration, and I thought they probably would never see it again…Many years later, we revealed to Mother the cause of the strange marks.
The farm section has more pure fun in it than the other two sections of the book; more than likely due to the fact that childhood, despite the skinned knees and the teasing, is generally a blast. This is not to say that the middle section of the book, which deals with Wayne’s service as a fighter pilot in the Flying Tigers during WWII, doesn’t have its humorous moments. It’s too long to repeat here, but the story of Wayne stealing a general’s Jeep after a high-brow cocktail party in India, caused deep belly laughs from this reviewer. Again, the war years in the story hold a plethora of wonderful anecdotes, cultural observations, action, humor, and wisdom.
Though the last section of the book includes tales from Wayne’s nearly sixty years at the bar (including references to his work on the Reserve Mining case), unfortunately the legal “war stories” are not prevalent enough to save the last section of the book from a feeling of malaise. In addition, a minor flaw noted in the book’s earlier sections becomes manifest. Granted, this memoir is self-published. And because I have made similar errors in my own self-published books, I can forgive some repetition in a book as lengthy as this. But when passages or themes repeated in the book’s earlier chapters re-appear in the book’s final chapters, the mildly distracting turns annoying. Then too the long, winding passages relating to the Flying Tigers’ post-war conventions bog things down further. The tight, demonstrative writing of Wayne’s wartime journal (describing Casablanca, India, and other places far distant) was succinct. It’s as if, when pressed for time, the author was able to cut to the chase. His travelogues regarding trips to the Far East on behalf of the Flying Tigers after the war don’t have the same crispness.
In addition, while the author describes his recent health problems, I think he missed an opportunity to stretch himself as a writer. What goes through an eighty-even year old former fighter pilot’s mind when he wakes up after a routine heart operation and finds he is now a double-amputee? Rage? That’s the one emotion the author does describe. But surely there are other states of mind that Mr. Johnson has encountered post-surgery. Curiously, he spared no detail and took no prisoners when revealing past loves and forgotten transgressions: I wish he would have used the same level of abandon to craft the last third of the book.
All in all, this memoir is a solid read for two-thirds of its heft. Had the same fast-paced style been carried through the final section of text, there is every chance Whitey’s story would be coming to a big screen near you. Despite its flaws, Whitey is a book worth spending time over a succession of cold winter evenings (preferably in front of a roaring fire) while marveling at a life well-lived. 3 and 1/2 stars out of 5.
