Edmund G. Love (–1990)

Edmund G. Love's second memoir, HANGING ON, is every bit as delightful as was his first, THE SITUATION IN FLUSHING, which I read several years ago. That first book gave us his childhood in the 1920s. He was a much doted-on child and was fascinated by trains, and there were plenty of them around his home turf of Flushing and Durand, a rail hub in Michigan in the Twenties.

HANGING ON continues Love's story from his high school graduation from Flint Northern in 1929 just a few months before the market crashed and America was plunged into an economic Depression that would last for a decade. Love tells of his one year at a Military Academy in the South, then his intermittent higher education years at the University of Michigan. Due to the hard times, it took Love over seven years to earn his BA, and then a teaching certificate and an MA during summers in the late Thirties. In between he worked at his father's failing lumber and coal yard, as well as at the Fisher Body and AC Sparkplug plants in Flint. And yet, despite the financial pinch, Love finds much to laugh about during those dark days of the Great Depression and Prohibition. His stories from his college days in Ann Arbor made me remember another book from a Michigan author, Allan Seager's A FRIEZE OF GIRLS. Seager was from Adrian and grew up in the same era. Both write about bootleggers and a series of jobs. Love was forced to drop out of school more than once for lack of money and go back to Flint and find work.

He might easily have called this memoir, "Love in Love," because Love takes us along on several tumultuous love affairs, from his very first crush at the end of high school, through a few college romances, and even a dangerous fling with one of his senior high students when he was back teaching at his Flint alma mater.

He also deals with the infamous sit-down strike at the Buick plant by the still-new UAW and the mixed feelings it invoked in him, since he had worked in the plant and gotten to know both management and the union men.

But the book never deviates too far from its central theme, the hard times that were part of life during the Great Depression. I suspect that Love had it much better than many of his contemporaries, since his father managed to hold onto his business, if only by the skin of his teeth. Like everyone else in those days, Love and his family and friends somehow kept "hanging on," waiting for better times. Which finally arrived, in the form of World War II, unfortunately. Although we know that Love served in the Army during the war, his story ends with his being drafted, at the age of 29. As a teacher, he could have been exempt, but he chose to serve.

Edmund Love was an extremely talented writer with a wonderful sense of humor, which was probably one of his most important tools in surviving the hard times of the 1930s. Perhaps one of his most famous books (he wrote twenty) is SUBWAYS ARE FOR SLEEPING (1957), which was adapted into a successful stage musical. Wish I could've met the guy, but he died in 1990 at the age of 78, a heart attack. Nevertheless, I feel like I know the guy, just from reading his two memoirs. Maybe I'll try that SUBWAYS book soon. This one? I LOVED it. Very highly recommended.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER… (más)

I read this book several years ago and enjoyed it immensely, so much so that I went to visit the town of Flushing, over near Flint. Walked around downtown for a half hour or so, but so much has changed from the days of Love's childhood that it was a rather disappointing pilgrimage. The few people I talked to downtown didn't seem to know who Ed Love was, nor did they seem much interested when I told them about the book. I had a similar experience when I visited Shillington, PA, years ago - John Updike's boyhood home. It seems you're never famous in your own hometown. But nevertheless, this is a wonderfully entertaining look at a long-ago Flushing, when it was a thriving railroad town. I would put it right up there with another wonderful Michigan memoir, Bruce Catton's Waiting for the Morning Train: An American Boyhood (Great Lakes Books Series). Highly recommended.… (más)