Century Rolls

by Nathan Walpow

So I get this package from my sister, and inside is a DVD that my nephew burned with about 500 of our childhood photos, and I looked at them all this past weekend, and of course I started wondering where it all went wrong. I mean, I was supposed to be this rich scientist who could retire at 50 and send his mother to Hawaii in her mink coat, and I’m not. (Then, later, I was supposed to be this successful actor, and then a best-selling author with gigantor royalties, but I didn’t know about that when I was a kid.)

Instead, here I am, 59 years old, with not a whole lot of retirement money, and last year I got laid off (from the job that was supposed to be my final one) because Washington Mutual bought the bank that bought the bank I originally worked for, and so I’m trying to make it as a freelance web designer, and fortunately the story didn’t end up as sad (and as stereotypical) as it could have because I met Jon Webb.

What happened was, the middle bank decided someone should go interview clients (aka customers) for the annual report, and because I was a writer (and I actually did have a best-seller once; one week on the paperback list at some Dallas paper) they decided I was the webmaster for the job. So I bought (and expensed) a little digital recorder and off I went. And one of the clients was Project Access, which is sort of an offshoot of the Foundation for Social Resources, which Jon is executive director of, and he was one of the interviewees, and of course I gave him a postcard pushing my then-current book, because I need every reader I can get. He bought and read it and then another, and we became friends, and then there was The Best Dinner Party Ever, where I met Rebecca Schoenkopf and Jim Washburn (and his lovely wife Leslie), and somewhere along the line Jon said he had this idea for an affordable housing advocacy website.

We kicked the thing around every couple of weeks or months, and let the stars align and the flavors meld and the compost form, and then, with the layoff imminent, we decided to go ahead. And FourStory is what eventuated. We still didn’t know exactly what we wanted to accomplish; only that we wanted to talk about affordable housing, (stealing from last Friday’s article here) whether affordable means finding the right cardboard box at the right price, or whether it applies to a young couple looking for their first house. But we didn’t want to have dry figures and boring analyses; we wanted, like it says in the masthead, a human perspective. So we brought Rebecca on, because she’s as human as they come. And Jon had said he’d like to have fiction on the site, so I got hold of fellow mystery writer Gary Phillips and he came up with The Underbelly. And I wrote the first Up From the Co-op, and we debuted on July 9, 2007.

I came up with a naming scheme for the story files that included a three-digit number in the front, so while I’m working in Dreamweaver the stories are in chronological order, and I remember thinking, was I being overly optimistic making it three digits? Because other than the three of us I didn’t have any writers, so where would I ever get 100 stories?

But we did. This is our hundredth feature, spurring me to get off my ass and write the third Up From the Co-op (this editing thing, not to mention the webmastering, takes a whole lot of time, and I haven’t been able to write as much for the site as I intended—something that will soon be remedied, as you’ll find out below). It’s a retrospective, a look back at those first 99 stories or pieces or articles or columns or whatever you want to call them.

Let’s start with Rebecca. Because her California Dreaming has been one of our constants, and because it never fails to amuse, edify, and piss people off. Plus, a little while in, she added the Neighborhoods series, wherein she tells of her adventures in various vicinities in Orange County and environs. Rebecca keeps us honest. She’s the one who calls bullshit on us. She also has credibility as a journalist, which most of the rest of us don’t. I don’t know if I could’ve gotten through the first several of these seven months without her. Every time I’d be sitting there thinking, I got nuthin’, one of her little masterpieces would float into my inbox, and I’d go, “Yay!” and I would format it and put it up, and I’d never have to worry about typos and bad punctuation because Rebecca never does those things. (Except fatiges. Hee hee.)

We had something called The Ground Floor back then, which was a weblog, and Becca and I and occasionally one or two others contributed to it in a desultory way. Then one day we had a meeting at my place and we started talking about The Ground Floor and Rebecca said, “I think we should get rid of it,” and we all looked at each other and decided it was a fine idea. Because a weblog needs new content every day or so, and we just weren’t providing it. So the energy went into the main part of the site (the French have a word: plupart; I like it a lot), and I think things got a lot better then.

(But I haven’t given up on the idea of a weblog, so if anyone out there wants to talk about taking it on, and can promise regular updates, let me know. Because—I’m getting ahead of myself now—we seem to be approaching critical mass in terms of contributors and the time may be right to bring the thing back.)

My thing, Becca’s thing, and The Underbelly. Gary sent me the first installment, and it was about a homeless Vietnam vet named Magrady who got caught up in downtown nefariousness. We didn’t know how long it would be or some of the directions it would go in, but we got a cool illustration from Spartacous Cacao and we forged ahead. And Magrady has never failed to delight as he stumbled across clues, kicked ass and got his own kicked, and generally illuminated a side of L.A. that most of us don’t see. Two weeks ago we ran the final installment, number 16, and the story ended—for now, I like to hope—and downtown lived to see another day. Now there’s talk of a print version, and Gary’s writing a serial story for The Nation and maybe we started something here.

A month or two in, I got a piece from a young man named Tony Chavira. It wasn’t quite what I was looking for, but I invented a section on The Ground Floor named Readers Write and stuck it there. He sent me another and it fit better, and we ran it on the plupart, and then they started coming in batches, and all of a sudden I had another regular contributor. Tony works for RACAIA Architects in downtown L.A., so he brought housing/design/construction cred that we maybe lacked at that point. He writes about whatever catches his fancy, but a couple of series have emerged. There’s MasterPlanning!, and now there’s Trip the Light Rail too. But Tony’s been invaluable to FourStory for reasons beyond his writing. He’s been beating the bushes for more contributors, and I’m happy to say the quail have taken flight. (Forgive me.) We’ve had two articles from Mike Plunkett, with a third in the hopper, and we’ve got contributions from at least three more writers who’ll debut in the next couple of weeks.

Which is not to say that our slots are filled. We are always looking for new contributors (and we pay), so if you’ve got something to say about housing or transportation or anything else you can even vaguely relate to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (about which you’ll be seeing more in the coming weeks), send it in. Or talk to me about it.

Another regular contributor: Jim Washburn. Jim brought additional journalistic cred, and he brought several of our longest and most insightful pieces. He’s a gifted observer of the stupid age we live in, and I am soooo pleased to have him aboard.

He’s also our video interviewer. A couple of months ago we started running these sessions, and they’re damned good. The most recent was with the residents of Ontario’s Tent City, and it kind of makes you ashamed of our society. And we’ve got one coming up in March with Mayor Beth Krom of Irvine, who’s got a lot to say about affordable housing and isn’t afraid to say it.

Speaking of video ... we had Rebecca do a version of one of her Cal Dreamings for the camera last week, and it rocks. You can see it here or on YouTube. Look for more soon.

And speaking of Rebecca ... FourStory tends to be California-centric, mainly, I suppose, because that’s where we all live. That’s why I was so pleased when Becca sent on something her mother had written. Donna Schoenkopf worked for many years in a South Central elementary school; then she upped and moved to Oklahoma, and decided to build a house. The travails of that project have been the basis of the Oklahoma Dreaming series. But OK Dreaming is more than that; it’s our nature department too, a land of hawks and dragonflies and owls and a man called Peewee. Now the house is more or less done, and Donna’s moved in, and we can’t wait to see where Oklahoma Dreaming goes from here.

(More Schoenkopfs: look for our first contribution from Rebecca’s brother—Donna’s son—John soon. He’s a geography student and promises to talk about demographics and stuff like that.)

And what of the future?

One of our biggest challenges has been met. We’ve now got a steady stream of meaty content from people who know of what they speak. (Again, more is always welcome.) But there are two more hurdles to overcome. One is funding. It costs money to keep this site going. Best I can tell, it’s not the Internet norm for a site like this to pay its contributors. A lot of places, people are so pleased to see their work in e-print that they’ll do it for free. And, of course, you gets what you pays for. There’s a lot of crap on the Net. Some would argue (thanks, Theodore Sturgeon) that most of it is crap. There’s no crap here. We believe we’re doing something truly worthwhile. If you think you can help us keep doing it, or you have ideas on where we can raise some cash, let me know.

Our other barrier: visibility. Though our number of visitors has been rising steadily since our baby days, it’s still pitifully low. I’ve gone through search engine optimization procedures—though there’s still more to do—but we think if more people just knew about us they’d keep coming back. Ideas? Let me know.

One last thing ... somewhere back there I said something about soon writing more for FourStory. That starts next week. Some of you have read one or more of my Joe Portugal books. There’s about to be another—sort of. The next Joe Portugal adventure will appear right here on FourStory, in serialized form, following the path blazed by Gary Phillips with The Underbelly. Joe gets involved with shady developers, porn producers, and who knows who else. I haven’t decided on a title yet. Anyone got any ideas? (The Overbelly has been suggested and shot down.)

Okay, that wasn’t the last thing. This giveaway is: first one who emails me at nathan@fourstory.org and tells me where the title of this article comes from gets a free autographed copy of One Last Hit, the third Joe Portugal mystery. (But you gotta know it already; no looking it up on the Internet. You’re on your honor.)

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