Jackson County IA Archives Biographies.....Scholl, John 1922 - 1988 ************************************************ Copyright. All rights reserved. http://www.usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm http://www.usgwarchives.net/ia/iafiles.htm ************************************************ File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by: Ken Wright wright@prestontel.com July 10, 2010, 11:17 am Source: Particles of Light Author: David L. Rosheim John Scholl (1922-1988) Particles of Light, Jackson County and Its Authors, David L. Rosheim, 1995 (Reprinted with permission of the author) Somehow the world John Scholl knew and particularly the world as it was in 1963, the year his novel, The Changing of the Guard, was published by Simon and Schuster in New York, seems to be, in a strange way, much remote to me than even the Victorian era. One reason may be that I knew his world in part. I was a college sophomore when his book appeared. My old college has changed in so many ways that the school I knew is gone. A vitality has passed. This primarily is what makes Mid-century America seem so utterly beyond our reach. One senses a farewell to the old world in his book. He writes of a town called Omega (a thinly disguised Maquoketa). He valiantly strikes a note of optimism but there are clear hints of fading of the old community. For instance, in the early 1950’s, Omega had been bypassed by the main railroad line. Guy Tallman, the book’s central character, who becomes a surgeon resident in Omega after having grown up there observes that “the town itself seemed so much smaller than it had been…there was no escaping the facts when, on his way to his uncle’s house, he came to the square. For there he counted an even dozen empty store buildings. The author, John Scholl, was a native Maquoketan, whose boyhood home was at 120 North Otto Street. He was the son of Albert School who owned a shoe store. Albert moved his family to Harlan, Iowa where John graduated from high school. When his parents moved back to Maquoketa, John stayed on in Harlan for a year, working for the local newspaper. When he rejoined his family in Maquoketa he worked first for the Dubuque Telegraph-Herald and then for the Maquoketa Sentinel. Then he moved on to newspaper work in other cities and was in Detroit when he went into the Army during World War II. After serving three and one-half years in an Army combat intelligence unit, Scholl returned to Detroit. But in 1959, the Detroit News went out of business and the temporarily retired journalist returned to Maquoketa to live in his parent’s trailer on the west edge of town. In his trailer, he wrote most of his novel, sending it chapter by chapter to Simon and Schuster after they had accepted the book’s outline. It took him four years to complete it. The book is very solid and well crafted. The time he spent on it is apparent in every chapter and it got excellent reviews. The New York Times reviewer wrote, “ An interesting cavalcade of small town life… depicts the decline of individualism in Grant Wood country…the whole cybernetic picture of American life today…a vast prospect, well worth while.” The San Francisco Call Bulletin: ‘…enough to take us through about 93 minutes of wide-screen movie, which this book is sure to become.” Austin American: “…a change which goes far deeper than the simple merging of one generation into the next…a something-for-everybody book.” But the novel was not to be a movie nor was it to go into a second edition nor was it a book “ for everybody” since it was not a book for many Maquoketans. The local library kept it on a reserve shelf for Adults Only. A gift shop and a drug store in town sold a little over 300 copies of the book and then the sales ended. There was a literary tea for Scholl but, as he remarked, “I don’t remember any parking problems because of it.” He added, in his newspaper interview, that the bookstore in Maquoketa had gone out of business in the same year that two bowling alleys had opened, “You wouldn’t consider Maquoketa a real literary stronghold.” One of the reasons Maquoketans reacted as they did, and do, is that there are no unlikely premises in this book. It is almost too real. There are numerous sexual relationships which are delineated fairly clearly but without the clinical detail of today’s novels. There is a startling description of a botched (and fatal) abortion. Some of these descriptions hit too close to home to Maquoketans who could, without too much difficulty, decipher who he was writing about.The story, basically, is that of the maturation and medical education of Guy Tallman and the changes that occur to Omega, a town which experienced its boom and bust cycles like so many other Midwestern towns of that era. The plot covers the period from 1920 to 1959. Scholl catches the mood of that period precisely. A big factory moved tpo Maquoketa and then went bust. The same thing happened to Maquoketa with Clinton Engines. No wonder so many townspeople still wince when they think of this book; for this event is too painful to be recalled with complacency. There are numerous subplots within the book, too many to recount here. Let the judgment stand as the newspaper reviewers had it. It was, and is, a good book to read. One wishes Iowans were still capable of such literature, not cloyingly romanticist, not heavily allegorical, but realistic, social realism in the best sense. Scholl and others of his era in Iowa, Richard Bissell, Thomas Duncan, Wallace Stegner, a whole galaxy now gone, showed how this could be done. Yet John Scholl. In his realism, realized that “in this televised age” the love of books would fade, that taste would inevitable erode. He alludes to these things in the articles he wrote for the Dubuque Telegraph- Herald in the 1960’s where he speaks of a new and degenerate species of Americans, Americus vulgaris, devoid of profundities, incapable of describing the old wonders of Dubuque. He alludes to it in his 1967 newspaper interview with Richard Bissell, on Bissell’s houseboat. Bissell had been the author of best sellers in the 1950’s and early 1960’s. The two authors concluded that “trying to write fiction for today’s markets was for the birds.” Scholl continued his career in journalism. His reputation in Maquoketa as a hearty drinker also continued. He would get so intoxicated that he would go to the intersection of Platt and Main and direct traffic (until the understanding local police intervened) People would drive him home from the old bar in the Decker Hotel when he was not in a condition to walk. He never did write a second novel though he did always have a work-in-progress. Eventually, Scholl moved west and died in San Diego, California on May 11, 1988. He was buried in Mt. Hope Cemetery in Maquoketa after a funeral service at the Sacred Heart Church. File at: http://files.usgwarchives.net/ia/jackson/bios/scholl381gbs.txt This file has been created by a form at http://www.genrecords.org/iafiles/ File size: 7.0 Kb