The Time Capsule: Diamonds and stones: local book reviews

Some days are diamonds, John Denver explained, and some days are stones. The same can be said of books.  
I recently read two that were set in Montgomery County, with one falling into each category. The clunker was “Muffett & the Dust Storm.”  Although represented as a factual account, the book is largely misleading fantasy. It is purported to be based on a diary that, it turns out, wasn’t written, about a week-long dust storm that, if local newspapers are to be believed, didn’t happen. The writing style is erratic, inconsistencies abound and I was disappointed.    
That disappointment lingered as I began reading “The Day I Met Clark Gable,” by Marian Marquardt Murphy and edited by Helen Murphy. I was more cynical than otherwise would have been the case, and after a few pages suspected the book might be superficial and whimsical. Reference is made to a silver spoon bearing a likeness of the great trotter Alix “overlaid by a baby’s tooth marks,” and I wanted to know more.  We briefly meet Archer Payne, an apparently colorful character who managed the Hotel Johnson.  Murphy relates a story about how Payne chose the couple that would get the last table in his crowded dining room, but tells us little about the man. We learn that Judge Smith McPherson had red hair, a temper, and that he once kicked a roasted duck across the floor and out the door. I wanted her to tell us more about McPherson, a noted lawyer and politician, than that he’d once drop-kicked a stuffed duck.  
As I read on, though, I found things unsaid to be part of the charm. When Marian Marquardt Murphy made her written sketches she did not do so to please or educate me. In her matter-of-fact manner, she does exactly what she set out to do - record observations as she experienced them. She wrote of incidents, some first-hand and some hear-say, some important and others not, and felt no need to elaborate or explain things she already knew.  
She emerges as a remarkable woman.  Her father-in-law (T.D.) and husband (Tom) owned a newspaper and managed a major business. Their art calendar operation was the gold standard, employed and influenced the careers of some of the nation’s leading artists, and had a sales staff that operated from coast to coast and into Europe. Men of the Murphy’s status, engaged in the selection and publication of fine art, are more likely to be headquartered in New York or Los Angeles than in a small town in rural Iowa. The family accumulated wealth and gave much of themselves and their resources to community improvement. Marian Marquardt Murphy was witty, inquisitive, and entirely unpretentious.   
Her random vignettes, some only a few sentences, take us from her earliest memories of living near Lake Michigan in 1901, to Des Moines and, as a newlywed, to Red Oak. She tells of Jersey cows on Grand Avenue and of a little girl who sang the hymn “Oh, Easter Morn,” as “Oh, East Des Moines.” She and her family spent summers on the west coast, were regulars in New York City, and she makes passing reference to encounters with Gable, Astaire, Niven, the Barrymores, Charles Lindberg, Amelia Earhart and national politicians.  
The pace changes when Helen Murphy writes later chapters. She and sister-in-law Nancy give us the details, history, the rest of the stories, rounding out the book by blending biographical material with insightful anecdotes about their hometown, family, friends, Red Oak hospitals past and present, and The Red Oak Express.  
I started “The Day I Met Clark Gable” at about 7 p.m. and read it straight through.  The following evening I re-read most of it.  The book really is that good.