the weiss issue: Jack Torry Interview

Tell me, if you would, about your creative process. Do you have a particular routine or approach to your writing?
That’s an interesting question: Do I have a creative process?

First and foremost, I regard myself as a reporter. I mean, I’ve been a newspaper reporter for longer than I want to admit. At
least thirty-five years. I always think great reporting makes great writing. For example, people who would’ve influenced me
would be William Manchester, John Toland, Barbara Tuchman. If you read their books—specifically, Manchester’s
biography of Winston Churchill, Toland’s But Not in Shame in 1961, Tuchman’s The Proud Tower, it’s the detail that
always impressed me. Every sentence conveys a fact—a description of something. That’s the way I’ve always tried to
approach writing: that you have enough detail from your reporting that it carries the piece.

A great example, if you ever get a chance to do it, read the introduction to Tuchman’s Guns of August, where she’s
describing the funeral of King Edward of England in 1912. You’d swear she was there. That’s how good the detail was.

One of the things in Henderson’s Light is that I want people to think that I was there watching this whole thing when, in
fact, I was thirteen years old. This is all a product of reporting. Throughout the last four-year period, I interviewed about
125 people—many of them repeatedly over and over and over again. Each time, looking for a detail. I asked people for
anything they could provide me: diaries, written letters, legal documents, medical records. All of which allowed me to
reconstruct the lives of five young teenagers who, quite frankly, were very typical teenagers.

They’re not anything out of the ordinary; they’re just good, solid kids.

I wanted to be able to describe who these five kids were in this car, how they ended up getting hit by a drunk driver, and
the impact of the crash over the next forty years on the two survivors and the family members of those dead kids.
[Henderson’s Light ] was to be a way to describe what happens in every drunk-driving crash in the United States. Rather
than looking at thousands of crashes, I focused on one. And then I really delved into it.

Speaking to that, as a reporter, is there a different approach that you take to writing a political story?
There’s a difference in the sense that a lot of times, the political story is where you’re describing an issue. You’re writing a
story on health care reform. Today, I was doing a short story on the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, and the goal of a political
story is that to make certain that your facts are right and explain in a very clear, simple way so that the average reader can say, “Oh, I understand this issue now.”

By contrast, with a book, you’re really delving into the backgrounds of people. You want to know everything they did. I
asked people things like what they ate for breakfast, what time had dinner at night, and who were they romantically
involved with. It was a whole litany of things. It’s very different because it’s descriptive writing in the sense that … I’ll give
an example. In the chapter of the accident, on pages 87 and 88, there are five teenagers in this car. There were probably
twenty interviews to just write that paragraph. And I had to go back to the Detroit Free Press , where they would print the
weather just to see what the temperature was at each time. People I talked to remembered these huge mountains of snow
on either side of the road and that it was windy, but you could see these little specks of snow being blown across the
street.

That’s what I’m talking about with descriptive writing. In a political piece about healthcare reform or something like that,
there are some political pieces where you do that. In the 2004 campaign, I was down in Florida for one of the Bush-Kerry
debates. I went down a few days early – I wanted to do a story on how Florida changes so often. So many people move
into Florida every year. And in many ways, it’s become a different state over twenty years.

I went to South Beach, which years earlier had been kind of this sleepy place where you went to die, and it’d be
transformed into this trendy place. All I did was describe South Beach – the restaurants and I think I used something to
the effect of “where men and women walk around in alleged bathing suits” because, quite frankly, I don’t even know why
they bothered wearing them. <Laughs> In that sense, I was doing descriptive writing.

I read an interview that you did with NPR. What was it about this story that motivated you to write Henderson’s Light?
I was thirteen at the time. I was living in Birmingham, MI, which is a suburb of Detroit. This crash was a huge local story. It
was not only front page on the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News, but it was a massive story on Page 1 of the
Birmingham Eccentric the local paper.

I did not know these kids at the time. But they towed the two cars to a gas station. And you had to pass that gas station,
literally, every day of your life. And there were the two cars: the Buick Skylark, which had five teenagers in it. It looked like
half the size of a car. And the other car, who had been driving by the guy who’d been drinking, it was a Ford Galaxie
convertible. It sort of looked like a V. The front and back ends were pointing skyward.

That stuck with me.

And throughout the intervening years, whenever I’d read a story about kids being involved in a crash involving drinking, this
would be the first thing that’d pop in my brain. Finally, after the ’04 election, I thought: “Jack, if you have this strong a
feeling about this crash and you didn’t even know these people, these people must have had a powerful story.” And so I
started, you know, going back, looking at the newspaper clips, and calling the people involved and much to my surprise,
not only did they talk about it, but they wanted to talk about it.

It was clear – there was one woman, Nancy Henderson (the younger sister of Rod Henderson),. It’d almost like she’d
waited forty years to ask her about this stuff. Of course, what makes this compelling is that this happens thousands of
times every year. You, yourself, you have somewhere between 30 to 40 percent chance of being involved in an
alcohol-related crash at some point in your life. I don’t mean you drinking, but you have that chance. So we’re not talking
about something that is a rare occurrence. 11,000 people were killed in alcohol-related crashes last year. If 11,000 people
were getting killed in Afghanistan every year, there’d be a national riot over it. So, I wanted to use one crash as a symbol.
The book describes in vivid details all the difficulty of the two survivors and the families who never quite got over it. And in
fact when I was interviewing them, the thing that struck me was that it was as if I asked them about something last week.
The recall and the detail was overwhelming. I was just stunned.

Did you ever come across anyone who didn’t want to speak about the incident?
Um, just to set this up: There were five kids in the Buick Skylark. The kids had been having pizzas and Coca-Cola. They
were driving the speed limit and they got hit by a 22-year-old guy going about 75 miles an hour. Of the five kids in the car,
one of them was a girl named Sandy Christman. Her family did not want to talk about this. Unlike in politics where I push
and push and push to get people to talk, you’re dealing here with people who are not public figures, so I made the decision
early on that if someone didn’t want to talk, I wasn’t going to push them. I wrote her sister, I telephoned her sister, and she
did not reply either time. But I talked to friends of her sister and they all said it was too painful, which of course told me
something. Because, if after forty-five years, if you’re still finding this too painful, there’s a story there.

The two survivors and the families of the other kids talked at length about this. I had very little problem getting them to talk.
What surprised me was the younger brother of the guy who had been drinking. I interviewed him at great length. He was
willing to talk about it. These were hard phone calls to make – you don’t know what you’re going to get. I remember I
called Jim Henderson and he called me back and I said I’m doing either a magazine piece or a book on this topic, and he
said: “Forty years ago last week.” And his sister Nancy turned over forty years of diary entries for me, and it provided a rich texture of detail that I think makes Henderson's Light very readable and the type of book that people can relate.

It’s not a dated thing. You’ll recognize these kids as people typical of people you went to school with.

While I was reading the book, I was struck by the descriptions of the kids and there are a lot of references to pop culture of the time and historical events. Was there a significance to the inclusion of these?
Yeah. This is a technique I stole from David Halberstam who, in his book The Summer of ’49, he describes Toots Shor's, which was the hangout for all the New York sports figures of the 40s and he framed the whole concept for you. I what I wanted to do was something similar. I wanted people to know, Roddy liked the Beach Boys and he looked like one of the Beach Boys. Nancy was the very quiet introvert who is very interested in poetry and immediately gravitated to Marianne Faithfull.

First of all, any reader today knows who the Beach Boys and the Beatles are. Any baby boomer remembers The Ed
Sullivan Show. All of these are points of reference. We’re trying to show a character without making them a caricature. It
helps frame their personalities and I worked very hard at that. I actually ended up dropping a lot of stuff. Originally, I had
something about Teri Garr dancing on Hullabaloo.

I don’t remember reading that.
Yeah…Teri Garr was one of the dancers on Hullabaloo or Shindig, I don’t remember which. And originally, I had a lot more
about that. I suddenly said, “You’re getting too carried away here.”

I read an interview where you were unable to separate Mike and Bruce from the families of the tragedy. Was your original approach just about Mike and Bruce, and everything else came after?
Yeah. My memory tricked me. I thought when I first started this, there was only one survivor. And I got a copy of the
Birmingham Eccentric and there were two survivors. I said, “All right, I’m going to focus on these two guys.” Then it
dawned on me as I did the interviews—the more I talk to other people, the more I realized that there is a story here. These
people, they haven’t moved beyond this accident. It’s still haunting them. I remember it like it was yesterday, Nancy
Henderson, in particular, kept telling me on her couch: “This accident had an impact on all of us.” You know what? You
can’t separate Mike and Bruce from the families of the dead kids. So, the way I finally decided to approach it was to focus
on four people. While there are a lot of people involved, it was just Krisa Barnum, Mike Adair, Bruce Berridge, and Nancy Henderson. You’re able to follow these four people and see how this crash never quite went away. I couldn’t just do a neat little separation that I’d originally planned to do.

Were there moments during your research where you were stunned by what you found or heard?
It was sort of a constant surprise. I really kind of thought that these people would say: “We all have personal tragedies in
our life and we move on.” Constantly, they couldn’t quite get beyond it. I reached one person by phone and she called me
back and said, “I can’t talk about this.” I said okay. Let’s just talk off the record.” We talked for a half-hour. She just didn’t
want to talk about the crash for a book. She said: “I was supposed to be in the car with them that night.” It was clear that
she never recovered from this thing.

The other thing I noticed was the lack of therapy or school counseling. There was none of that. They basically just said:
“Well, it’s a bad crash. Let’s go back to school.” Today, that wouldn’t happen. There are still people who drink, there are
still people who drink too much and drive. But there are also things we’ve done better. We’re better at getting more people
off the road and getting people to deal with grief counseling.

Speaking to that, why do you think these sorts of stories tend to fade from society’s consciousness, then renewed again?
I can tell you from a newspaper standpoint, when we would write about these [incidents], you stop writing at the funeral,
then moved on to something else. Nobody really ever thought of doing something like this: the long-term impact [of an
accident].

These people are no longer in the public eye, but they’re still having to cope with this. I just thought that I wanted to show
people even four decades after this, it was still a major impact. And yet, I was constantly surprised by how much it was.

I fully expected to fail. I thought people wouldn’t talk to me, they’d moved on. It was constant surprise at what I was being
told. I tried to tell this in a way that wasn’t preachy. There’s no lecture in there that says “Hey, don’t drink and drive.” It’s
the story itself. I think if you get done with this, if you’re a parent, it scares the living daylights out of you. And if you’re a
young adult, you go “Oh my God.” This is why I thought this would appeal to younger people. Normally, when you do
stories like this, it’s basically that young drivers are a bunch of lousy drivers which is true. They are a bunch of lousy
drivers. <laughs>

But, in this case, the kids didn’t do anything wrong. If it had been another lecture about kids are lousy drivers, teens would
go “Aw, screw this. I’m not reading that stuff.” Instead, they go: “Those kids were like me and didn’t do anything wrong.’ At
the same time when you go, “If he hadn’t been drinking that night, those kids would’ve lived.” This is a very simple thing to
solve.

The book itself does not preach like that. For crying out loud, I’ve driven when I was drunk. Particularly when I was in my
teens and twenties, I thought nothing of having a few beers and driving myself home. It was incredibly stupid. But you know what? That’s what I think makes this such a compelling book. It’s something everyone can relate to. Unless you’re a
teetotaler, you’ve been behind the wheel with a drink or two in you. You know what this is about.

What was your personal experience after writing the book? How did the interviews and the writing of the book affect you personally?
It was tremendously satisfying for me. This is the second book I’ve done and both of them were just tremendously
satisfying. It’s almost like when they’re done, you go: “I don’t care if it fails.” At the same time, I’ve also wrestled with the
fact that part of me says: “You may be intruding on these people. You’re bringing up something that they might be trying
to put behind them.” The first book I did was a baseball business book. Well, baseball is not a tragedy. You win, you lose,
nobody gets killed. In this case, there were times when I thought: “I can’t write this part anymore. This is too tough.” And
then you get into: “I wish I could make this guy not drive this way that night.” I would’ve liked to see Roddy when he grew
up; I would’ve liked to know these people.

It was satisfying, but not fun. Does that make sense?

Absolutely. I think the book serves as a nice lasting tribute to the kids and their families.

Are there any other creative areas you’d like to explore in the future?
Well, I’d like to do another book. The first two books I’ve had nothing to do with what I was covering at the time. So,
clearly, I’ll never do a political book. I don’t want to sit there and write about politics; I do that every day of my life. Creative
writing … I don’t know. I’m not a poet; I’m not Hemingway. I’m a reporter. We’re talking about a reporter telling a story as
clearly as they can.

In fact, the first rule when you’re writing something like this is that, when you have strong facts, restrain the writing. Almost
to the point where the reader gets irritated with the writer. The reader’s going: “Don’t you know how sad this is? You’re just
saying it almost matter-of-factly.” I want to do another book. At least one more. There’s nothing I’ve ever enjoyed more in
life than writing and reporting.

Thanks for your time.