Skip to Navigation
University of Pittsburgh
Print This Page Print this pages

November 23, 1994

Writer's roots in Bradford lead to book, UPB faculty appointment

Ernest Hemingway frequently spoke of the need to "get it right," to capture something of the fullness and basic truths of life, when writing a story. Perhaps the surest indication that David McKain got it right when he wrote "Spellbound: Growing Up in God's Country," a memoir of his childhood and youth in Bradford during the 1940s and 1950s, is the fact that it is often difficult to know whether to laugh or cry when reading it.

Of course, there are plenty of occasions in the book when the emotions are clear-cut. It is obviously a joyous occasion when McKain, who is a visiting professor of writing at Pitt's Bradford campus, scores 37 points to lead his city league basketball team to victory despite having a cast on his left foot. And it is just as obviously a painful day when he realizes he no longer can take care of his senile mother and must commit her to a nursing home.

Like life, however, "Spellbound" contains many more gray periods, bewildering mixes of happiness and sadness, love and hate, light and dark. Take, for instance, the McKain family's first Christmas in Bradford.

McKain's father was a Methodist minister who lost his church. Officially, he lost it because of ill health. He was an epileptic. McKain's mother, though, always maintained that it was because he had written too many letters to The Pittsburgh Press and The Buffalo Evening News lambasting President Franklin Roosevelt as "that Jew in the White House." The loss of his church coupled with the epilepsy sent McKain's father on a long downward journey that would include spousal abuse and business failure and eventually see him committed to the State Hospital for the Insane at Gowanda, N.Y.

During the course of one marital dispute in the midst of World War II, McKain and his mother went to live with his grandmother in Clarion so his mother could attend Clarion Normal School and study to be a teacher. After his parents reconciled, the family moved into a tiny house in Bradford that did not have a furnace. McKain's family was so poor that first year in Bradford, living on his mother's teaching salary of $25 a week and the irregular income from his father's tiny pet store, that they could not afford a Christmas tree. When Mayer Brauser, owner of the local furniture store, learned that the family was not going to have a tree, he appeared on Christmas Eve with a large Scotch pine. McKain's mother reacted with joy. She would later tell friends that "Christ's message of love came to us through a Jew." But his father saw it quite differently. He complained that Brauser "knows what he's doing. It's Christmas Eve, and he couldn't sell it. You'll be back…He's a Jew, isn't he." "I had never met a Jew before, and I liked Mr. Brauser," McKain writes. "I did not understand the intense dislike the Jews produced in my father, but I felt relieved when he picked fights with strangers rather than my mother or me." "Spellbound" was recently published by the University of Pittsburgh Press ($14.95 paperback). It was originally published by the University of Georgia Press after it won the Associated Writing Programs Award for nonfiction in 1987. In the Georgia Press edition the book was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, the PEN Award and the National Book Award.

It also drew raves from reviewers throughout the country. Kirkus Review called it "a moving, exquisitely written account of growing up poor in the Allegheny Mountains." The Los Angeles Times saw it as "the autobiography of a mid-20th century Tom Sawyer…a book of tremendous power and superb accomplishment," while The Village Voice found it "a beautifully quiet and troubling book…aside from its brilliant, damaged characters or the terrible precision of its simple poetry." McKain says he decided to write "Spellbound" after Lee Gutkind, a professor in Pitt's English department, sent him a letter in the mid 1980s asking if he might be interested in contributing to an anthology he was editing for the University Press. Gutkind and McKain, who also teaches writing at the University of Connecticut, previously had met at a seminar on the Bradford campus. The anthology would become "Our Roots Go Deeper Than We Know," a collection of writings about western Pennsylvania.

After completing a story about his father's pet store and the attacks of epilepsy that often felled his father at the most inopportune times, McKain began thinking about doing a book on growing up in Bradford. Then he landed a three-year stint as writer-in-residence at Phillips Exeter Academy in Andover, New Hampshire, and, for the first time in his life, he had the time to tackle a book.

"When I wrote the first piece I started thinking how different Andover and Connecticut and New England were from the way I grew up," says McKain. "And I thought there was an awful lot to celebrate in the way I grew up. I thought of the book as a kind of appreciation for the region and my family. Even though people thought I was harsh on my family in some ways, it was the truth.

"In a sense," he continues, "we live in a society where our stories are always being stolen from us. We're asked to buy into life styles. I've always resisted that and I had never told the story of my growing up to anybody, so it was a story waiting to be told. I didn't want it to slip by. Those were the main reasons I wrote the book." At the end of "Spellbound," McKain flees the hard life he knew in Bradford for a second chance at the University of Connecticut. He was such a poor student in high school that the only way he got into college was by taking a special examination arranged by his uncle, a professor of rural sociology at the school.

Eventually, McKain earned a master's degree and a Ph.D. at the University of Connecticut and began teaching writing at the school. He also would teach writing for short periods of time at George Mason University, American University, Marietta College, Virginia Commonwealth University and Juniata College.

But although he was free of Bradford, McKain never could forget the town and his life in it. Over the years, he returned frequently to visit his mother and friends. Then, after his mother died and he lost all family ties to the town, he suddenly found that he wanted to return and sought an appointment at Pitt's Bradford campus.

"As long as I had my mother's address here, I always felt a part of the place," he says. "But once that was gone, I almost had to come back in some way." Today, McKain spends about seven months of the year in Bradford and the other five in Connecticut, where he is a professor of English at the University of Connecticut.

"It's great," he says about being back. "I know the land. I know the contour of the hills. I really identify with the physical place. The woods and the hills. I am not a hunter and I am not a fisherman, but I am out in the woods a lot roaming around. I love to get lost in the woods. It drives my wife nuts, but it's one of my great adventures in life because I never feel lost. I just feel I am more in touch with reality here than anywhere else. There is just a gritty quality to the place that makes me feel more alive." Anybody who grew up in the 1940s and 1950s should be made to feel a little more alive, too, by the Bradford of "Spellbound," especially if they come from a rural background. The book is packed with images of small-town life during the period. There are old first-generation immigrants who still speak only Italian or Greek, hardware stores with warped wooden floors that decorate for Christmas with mounts of deer and other wildlife brought in from the surrounding mountains by local hunters, and shop owners who run their business out of their pockets.

"There was no cash register in the shop," McKain writes of his father's pet shop, "not even a cigar box, but he enjoyed it that way, I think. When he had to make change, he smiled and plunged his hand deep into one of his trouser pockets, scooped out a fistful. He spread the pile out across his open hand as though his palm were a countertop, sliding coins here and there with the tip of his index finger, the nickels, dimes, quarters and halves all new and shining." Reading about the balsa wood gliders that McKain and his friend Billy bought for a dime each is enough to make a person want to run out, buy one and fly it again. "We screamed as the gliders skimmed over the lilac bush and the clothesline," writes McKain, "landing in a mine field of rotten crabapples and yellow-jackets. Grandma had said the juice inside the apples had turned hard and that the yellow-jackets were 'foolishly drunk' and all the more dangerous. We bombed them with hard green apples and called them 'Japs.'" The feel of World War II in Bradford appears here and there throughout the beginning of the book in the form of newsreels in the local theaters and warnings about "Japs" hiding in trees. The war itself would come home to McKain with the arrival of Yankel, a displaced person, a young Jewish boy whose parents had perished in the Holocaust and who McKain and his mother befriended.

As the 1940s drift into the 1950s, the teenage McKain and his friends get caught up in fast cars, girls and breaking into the homes of the wealthy oil families during the winter while they were on vacation in Florida or the Caribbean. They never stole anything, McKain says. They just liked the idea of drinking rich people's Coke and urinating in their bathrooms.

Like many other small-town boys, McKain sought relief from the pressures of being a teenager and not fitting in by immersing himself in sports. In his case it was basketball. He lived, breathed and even slept the game, keeping a basketball next to his bed where he could reach out and touch it in the middle of the night.

Throughout it all, McKain's father continued to deteriorate both mentally and financially. He says neither he nor his mother ever fully knew what was going on with his father, but he feels a major part of the problem was caused by epilepsy. The fact that his grandfather was more successful than his father and continued to assist his father financially throughout his life, McKain believes, also stirred a certain resentment in his father. He feels his father often took out this resentment on his mother and other people, and that it finally led to his forced commitment to an asylum.

"There was some generosity in him, too, though," McKain adds. "I never had trouble loving him or feeling respect for him. I just knew he was all screwed up the way that kids know everything at an early age." About "Spellbound" as a whole, McKain says: "I really like the book. That's a funny thing to say and I don't mean it in any bragging way. I just felt good writing it. I felt good telling the story. I had never said any of the things in it to myself in any coherent way before I wrote the book, but I felt glad I had a story to write." Chances are that anybody with a background the least bit similar to McKain's probably will feel the same way when they read it.

(Editor's note: David McKain will be in Pittsburgh signing copies of "Spellbound: Growing Up in God's Country" on Nov. 28. He will appear at the Barnes & Noble Bookstore on Sixth Avenue, Downtown, from 11:30 a.m.-1 p.m. He also will give a reading that evening at Borders Book Shop, 1775 North Highland Road, Bethel Park, at 7:30 p.m.)

–Mike Sajna

Filed under: Feature,Volume 27 Issue 7

Leave a Reply