A New Form of Biographical Screenplay?

John Fraim Jr. 1930 (20 years old)

Stardust / A top song of 1930

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I’ve been busy working with my brother on a revised biography of our father called The Distant Hero. I wrote the book right after his passing in 1993 and it has sat on my computer since that time. A recent call from my brother about looking at the family scrapbooks in the basement – two canvas grocery bags holding four scrapbooks. 

One of them was really the “mothership” of all the scrapbooks, I thought. It was grandmother’s huge old brown scrapbook started in 1910 when my father was born. In Tylertown, Mississippi. He was their only son and their pride and joy whose mission in life seemed directed towards making my father the best person possible. It chronicles many articles about my father going to military school then college at LSU and then – for 15 years – to have one of the most spectacular careers in the military that one could imagine. He was at the center of the spread of the interest in aviation and started the first flying school in the nation at LSU. After graduating, his career as a renowned pilot and then a commanding officer of the Army Air Corps Central Canada during WWII.

Towards the end of the war, he had risen to the rank of Colonel and was on assignment at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio. There, one evening, he met a beautiful young woman who had just graduated from Smith College. (A classmate of Betty Friedan). And, she had just gone through a short marriage and was now single. And, she was from a well-known family headed by one of the legendary businessmen of the times. 

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Rather than stay in Dayton, Ohio where he might make the transition from military life to private life and probably somewhere into the family business, they decided to move to California and rent a home on a cliff in Laguna Beach. He was still working at the base in Santa Ana at the time. His last military assignment.

Before his transition out of the military and into private life. The transition is far greater than most suspect and I certainly observed this in my father. His life had been the one of orders for so long. Ever since he wrote his father in 1925 that he wanted to go to military school. He wanted out of the Webb School of Bell Buckle and into something perhaps even more demanding than Sawnee Webb’s school he was at for a year. The school was recognized as one of the greatest in the south instilling a certain discipline and morality in its graduates.

My father couldn’t stand it though and begged his father to let him go to military school.

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Many don’t think of this very much it seems to me. But the dramatics of this transition is very real and I believe captured well in Chronological Distant Hero. With facts forced into their chronological alignment, pattern which were fuzzy when mixed around in time, now made so much more since when seen in this type of cause-and-effect layout of the pieces. 

More than anything else, an experiment in blending two forms of writing. Narrative non-fiction with a chronological outline based around years. All events of his life had to be placed in the current bins of years in the outlne. Then, within the years, events putt into order. We’ve added as notes to each decade, the leading events of the nation and world at the time so the reader can get a sense for where they are in my father’s life story. An example of one entry is shown below with my father’s age in parenthesis. It is an example of something my father would have known about but something that there was no evidence in research so far that he was at the event. No matter. It was in the news of the LSU campus at the time that he was at. The below is a good example.

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1934 (24)

Jack Fraim and John Fraim Sr. would often talk about the powerful Governor and then Senator of Louisiana Huey P. Long (Kingfish) to the children. Long has been described by contemporaries as a megalomaniac, demagogue, and skillful manipulator due to his immense drive for power and propensity for monument building. His involvement with the building campaign at the Louisiana State University, and in particular the sport and recreation venues housed on the campus (e.g., Tiger Stadium and the Huey P. Long Field House), serve as an exemplar of his willingness to construct large and ornate facilities that proudly support his name. 

The Kingfish is mentioned in a 1968 article from Sports Illustrated. Huey Long led parades, gave blistering locker-room talks and screamed signals to the team from the sidelines. He once threatened to raise taxes on railroad bridges 4,000% if the Illinois Central did not lower its fare for LSU students taking a football train to Nashville; the fare dropped from $19 to $6. Once when he heard that the date of a circus visit to Baton Rouge was hurting LSU game ticket sales, he called the circus manager and told him that he would force him to put every lion, tiger, elephant and gorilla through a sheep-dip to prevent who knows what foul diseases unless the show date was changed; it was. Oddly enough, Huey did not destroy football at LSU. He probably made it what it is.

One event that Jack Fraim surely knew about (since he had been manager of the football team) happened with Huey Long and the LSU Tigers football team in 1934. 

Throughout Lawrence “Biff” Jones’ head coaching career at LSU, U.S. Senator Huey had reportedly interfered with his decision-making and recruiting. At halftime of LSU’s 1934 final home game against Oregon, with the Tigers trailing 13–0, Long approached the team’s locker room and demanded to speak with the team. Tired of Long’s meddling with the team, Jones informed the Senator that he would quit after the game, “win, lose, or draw.” 

The Tigers would come back and defeat the Ducks 14–13, and Jones would make good on his promise, leaving the program to coach the Oklahoma Sooners and later the Nebraska Cornhuskers. Bernie Moore, LSU’s track and field coach, would take over the head football coach position. Moore had coached LSU to the NCAA track and field championship in 1933. Both Jones and Moore would wind up being elected to the College Football Hall of Fame.

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The merger between a biography and a yearly chronology outlne. A combination of a 150-page biography written right after his death in 1993. And now, thanks to my brother nudging me to read the scrapbooks, this new perspective has been added to the ongoing search for who he really was. A chronology. 

1927 Notebook of my Grandmother on trip with her son to the west for the first time.

A 1927 trip that my father saw the world hero Charles Lindbergh in person for the first time. Seeing his plane close up at the airport that they somehow maneuvers to be at as he took off for Portland that day in 1927. It is from the journal above and one can be reasonable sure that Lindbergh must have become some type of grand hero to him at the time.

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The Distant Hero biography is now merged with the Distant Hero Chronology. This merger has been sent to just my brother and sister and this is all who should see it for now.

Besides the dramatic nature of the story that stands out for me, there is so much more in the chronology about his life, when the pieces align in new ways as if magnetized suddenly. 

The resulting product seems very much like some new form of screenplay to me. In this sense, it attempts to give a bare minimum of information and then get out of the way as this is not to be a purpose-drive narrative of a life as a biography would be written. As media scholar Marshall McLuhan would call this new combination as a type of “cool media” in that it encouraged participation into its text by the reader. In effect, the read is a co-screen writer, given just the facts to create as he or she may. 

John Fraim, Jr. at 21 (1931)

All on hold now with the Chronology. It seems finished to me or as finished as I want to or can make it. To me, at this time, it simply seems finished, and I feel good about the product although I’ve yet to read or study it. There was more passion I for me in those years after his death and now that passion is chopped up into various years in the new Distant Hero Chronology I’ve just sent to my brother and sister. 

The Hero associated with define dates into the years of the Chronology being created. It was a technique in direct opposition to how most creatives created things: from an outline to the story. This reverses this standard process and goes from the story to being placed in an outline, full of items from the scrapbooks. And, with help of that new tool available now and not in 1993, the Internet. 

Almost as far to the sides of the spectrum as one could go. My grandfather on my mother’s side was a famous businessman and one of the great entrepreneurs in the 20^th century. Winning the Horatio Alger Award among other awards for building the empire he built. The contrasts were so great.

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My father’s grandfather was such an opposite of my mother’s father. My father family was from the South and my mother’ family from the North. And, perhaps importantly, my father’s first part of his life was filled with incredible string of awards in the military, in helping start the LSU Flying School, the first in the nation, flew Will Rogers on a mail route over the Sierras. 

He left this military life as a Hero in the first part of his life.

Private life has no use for Hero’s. In fact, culture and government work 24/7 to make sure that there are no Hero’s today. Like the Jack Fraim chronicles in the first part of our book. 

The story of a coming together of two very different people and perhaps the continuing effort of their children to understand that secret alchemy that seemed to be created from the marriage. But so many question are still posed at the end of the chronology. Questions I have right now. I’m sure that my brother and sister will add new ones. I’m sure I’ll have more, later.

One of the big questions I have is the total context change for my father of moving from a hero in the military to a private businessman working for a family operation. There were those years of operating car dealerships in LA and Idaho which were hard to determine. That is, whether they were a success or not. I still don’t know. Or know why the family left LA in 1957 and moved to Dayton, Ohio. I doubt my father wanted to move there but then, this is only speculation based on the fact he loved California more than anything and my mother Martha seemed so much at home.

John Fraim Jr. in High School (?) / 1925 (?)

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A decorated pilot, aviation educator, soldier marrying into a wealthy family and being helped in business by this family and then working for this family. He was used to giving commands and not following commands so much and there is reason to interpret the materials in the chronology in the 60s and 70s as expressing this. 

But again, the chronology lays out events and documents rather than a narrative of his life. And this is why I like the form so much. Why I think it offers a new context of viewing individual lives. To family members. To other families. The telling of family biographies told by all siblings of a parent? Perhaps this project need to move in this direction. We’ll see in few months after the three get together and talk about this. Isn’t this the real way this type of remembrance should proceed?