#1574 John Steinbeck and the Western Flyer

Listening to America

History, Politics, Unitedstates, Society & Culture, American

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 21 November 2023

⏱️ 57 minutes

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Summary

This week, Clay Jenkinson’s conversation with fellow Steinbeck scholar Russ Eagle of North Carolina about the relaunch of the Western Flyer, the boat that took Steinbeck, Ed Ricketts, Steinbeck’s wife Carol, and four others to the Sea of Cortez in the spring of 1940. After eighty years the Western Flyer has been completely refurbished and now takes its place as one of the principal attractions at Monterey, California. Ricketts was a marine biologist and one of Steinbeck’s best friends in life. Partly to help Ricketts (who was a mediocre businessman), partly to get away from his sudden celebrity after The Grapes of Wrath went viral, Steinbeck commissioned the boat, gathered the crew, and made his way with his fellow adventures to Baja California to collect specimens for Rickett’s lab in Monterey. Steinbeck’s marriage to his first wife Carol was coming apart at the time. He was completely exhausted after the flurry of concentration that led to the greatness of Grapes of Wrath. It was part science, part escape, part vacation, but it led to two books, The Sea of Cortez in 1941, and The Log of the Sea of Cortez ten years later.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, everyone. This is Clay Jenkinson with this podcast introduction to this edition of
0:04.9	Listening to America, a conversation with one of my closest friends in the world,
0:09.2	Russ Eagle of Salisbury, North Carolina. We've known each other for a long time. We met
0:15.4	under the auspices of Lewis and Clark. He came on one of my Lewis and Clark adventures and has
0:21.6	since become a regular first as a client and now as a member of our management field director
0:32.6	of many of these tours. He and I have then discovered that we both had a great interest in Steinbeck
0:38.5	and at his suggestion I've done a couple of Steinbeck retreats out in California. We'll be doing more
0:44.6	and Russ is deeper into Steinbeck than I am although I'm pretty deep myself in it.
0:50.4	I'm writing a book now about Steinbeck and the Arthurian Saga the Mortar Thurr,
0:56.4	which was a project that never was completed but is fascinating and reveals a great deal
1:01.9	about all sorts of important things relating to John Steinbeck and so I'm working on that.
1:07.4	At the moment I'm working on a chapter on JFK and Camelot. Mrs. Kennedy said that
1:13.5	he used to love to listen to that LP of the soundtrack to the Broadway musical Camelot
1:21.1	and really she created the Camelot myth not alone but she created the Camelot myth
1:27.2	a week after the death of her husband and Dallas. So I'm writing about that because Steinbeck
1:32.0	was asked by her to write a biography of her husband JFK. He considered it. We pondered it in
1:40.6	his usual way. Eventually decided he couldn't do it which is very fortunate because it turns out
1:47.6	that she was almost impossible to deal with such was her grief perhaps. One William Manchester was
1:55.5	not commissioned but but recruited to write the definitive account of the actual assassination. It
2:01.8	produced a classic death of a president. She Jacqueline Kennedy and her brother-in-law Robert Kennedy
2:10.6	attacked Manchester, filed lawsuits against him, tried to prevent publication, tried to prevent him
2:16.8	from in any way profiting from the work that they had encouraged him to do. They were absolutely
	...

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