Tales of the Tinkertoy

Book excerpt: When 15-year-old Gus Mazur leaves his Oklahoma birthplace to live with his aunt and uncle in New York City, he narrowly escapes the blame for getting a girl "in trouble." In the Big Apple, a whole new life opens for Gus—from boarding school to university to Marine Corps duty in Paris to a career at the WBN television network. It's the dawn of civil rights struggles; WBN needs reporters with insider access to events off limits to their white counterparts, which enables Gus, as the network's only non-white producer, to be promoted executive producer by the age of 30. Yet, he chafes when he's forced to run civil rights and Vietnam stories that hide the truth from the American people. But the money is good and there aren’t that many opportunities for “someone like him.” It is also a time of liberation when women in all walks of life assert themselves. No more so than in television. It’s against this backdrop—civil rights, women’s liberation, and television that Gus’s encounters with three exceptional ladies lead to a greater self-awareness. • Joanna/Vicki: Gus’s first love whose dedication to her career as an economist dictates a relationship based on yearning and remembrance as they pass through each other’s lives in a sort of on-again, off-again sexual revitalization. • Miriam/Skipper: A dedicated third-grade teacher and exceptional athlete—Gus’s bi-sexual lover, who by exposure to Gus’s work, imagines herself an anchorwoman, a dream come true when she becomes one of the first women in television to shatter the glass ceiling. • Lil: A gentle Chinese-American who keeps Gus real in the face of the compromises he’s forced to make and the commercialism that pervades the television industry. After Gus is waylaid in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic Convention, she’s instrumental in helping piece his life back together as Gus begins to appreciate her sacrifices. Simone de Beauvoir once called Stendhal and Joseph Conrad feminist writers. Add to that list Tolstoy (Anna Karenina), Henry James (Portrait of a Lady), and Theodore Dreiser (Carrie). Tales of the Tinkertoy carries on the tradition of these great minds.