My Short History of Oak Park, Vol. 1, 2004-2005, announced on the first page, is based on my Wednesday Journal columns of those years. They drew on my life-long affiliation with this, the world’s once largest village, home of Hemingway, Rice Burroughs, and Ray Kroc.
Ditto for Short History, which is in the self-publication tradition of
Margaret Atwood, William Blake . . . Robert Bly, Lord Byron, Willa Cather, Pat Conroy, Stephen Crane, e.e. cummings, W.E.B. DuBois, Alexander Dumas, T.S. Eliot, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Benjamin Franklin, Zane Grey, Thomas Hardy . . . Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ernest Hemingway, Robinson Jeffers . . . Stephen King, Rudyard Kipling, Louis L’Amour, D.H. Lawrence . . . John Muir, Anais Nin, Thomas Paine, Tom Peters, Edgar Allen Poe, Alexander Pope, Beatrix Potter, Ezra Pound, Marcel Proust, Irma Rombauer, Carl Sandburg, Robert Service, George Bernard Shaw, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Upton Sinclair, Gertrude Stein, William Strunk, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Henry David Thoreau, Leo Tolstoi, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, and Virginia Woolf.
I am delighted to see Shelley among them. Blithe Spirit in this context is, of course, based on “To a Skylark,” as was Noel Coward’s play title. I make that clear enough on the third page of Short History, quoting:
Hail to thee, blithe spirit!
Bird thou never wert-
That from heaven or near it
Pourest thy full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.
— from Shelley, “To a Skylark”
Go Shelley. Go Short History of Oak Park.
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Later, from fellow Midwest Writers Assn. member Hal Higdon, in the matter of self-published authors, with a Hemingway-esque twist:
I hope you didn’t miss Rick Yager, the long-time Buck Rogers artist. His older sister was a friend of Hemingway, who once fired a revolver in the Yager house. The bullet may still be in the ceiling. Of course, I tell you this after the fact.
More about the industrious and adept Higdon, who ran seven marathons in his 70th year (he told me, and I believe it), here. Indeed, soon to be published is his novel Marathon.
Blithe Spirit 
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