BRIAN LAMB: Bill Steigerwald, author of "Dogging Steinbeck", when did you first read "Travels with Charley" and what is it?
BILL STEIGERWALD: "Travels with Charley" is John Steinbeck's last major work. It was supposedly a nonfiction account of his trip around the country with his dog Charley. I read it, I remember reading it in, when I was 15, so probably would have been about 1963, '64, a couple of years after it came out. It came out in '62 and I just remember being kind of disappointed that on his great trek, he didn't come through Pittsburgh. The closest he came was Erie, about 110 miles north of us. I have a vague recollection of reading it and, but it made no impression on me and Steinbeck himself, I had to read "Of Mice and Men", "Grapes of Wrath". I didn't have to read his other sort of major work and that would be "Cannery Row" in high school, but they always say that Bruce Springsteen's life was changed when he read "Grapes of Wrath." It turned him into, it gave him a great social conscience and wanted to do work for the common working man. It had no effect on me. I was a Goldwater boy I guess. Hillary Clinton was a Goldwater girl in Chicago. She's almost the same age as I am and I was a Goldwater boy and that set me off in a whole different direction than Bruce Springsteen has gone.
LAMB: The book ends, the book "Travels with Charley", when did the trip happen for him?
STEIGERWALD: On September 23, 1960, after a great deal of preparation, he left his summer home in Sag Harbor, new York, on Long Island, at the European end of Long Island and he and Charley set off in his camper van. It was a combination pickup truck with a camper almost like a, it was almost like a sailboat cabin or a boat cabin on top of, set into the bed of the pickup.
LAMB: Yes, we'll show it in a minute.
STEIGERWALD: He took off on September 23rd and headed north into Massachusetts and visited his kid at Eaglebrook School near Deerfield, Mass. Then made his way, then Steinbeck and Charley made his way up to the top of Maine. For some strange reason, he thought if he was going to go west, which he was ultimately going to do, he had to touch the top of Maine first and boy was he sorry because he found out how big Maine is real fast. So he worked his way, he went to Bangor and then up the coast and up to Fort Kent, top of Maine and dropped down and then actually went west.
LAMB: How many days was he on the road?
STEIGERWALD: I figure 75, maybe 77 at the most. No one knows for sure. He kept no notes. There were no records. There are no expense reports, at least that I could find or that anybody had. So I know when he started, September 23, 1960 and I know that he was, he mailed something from, is it Pelahatchie, Mississippi, I think December 3, 1960 and he was pushing hard to get home then. He was sick of the road. He was sick of everything and he was just trying to get home.
LAMB: What kind of dog?
STEIGERWALD: It was a French poodle born in France, 10 years old, it was his wife's, his wife Elaine, his third wife and widow, it was her dog and at the last minute apparently, he said hey, how about if I take the dog for company.
LAMB: Quick background on you, where did you work most of your life?
STEIGERWALD: I grew up in Pittsburgh. I decided to get into journalism, went to Penn State, started to get a Master's, didn't work out, moved to Cincinnati for four years in say '73, I say Derby Day of '73 and then I left Derby Day of '77 and went to L.A., got in a side door at the L.A. Times as a copy editor, did a lot of freelancing, very lucky, had 12 great years in L.A. I went out there with I guess, I think there's a theme in my life here, a car with everything I owned on top including an old typewriter and I went out to see what would happen to me in Los Angeles. I was divorced at the time and had two kids and I ended up getting married again and having three Hollywood born children, that's my great gift to them, born in Hollywood, worked at the L.A. Times for 10 years from '79 to '89 and then quit and moved back to Pittsburgh, as I say to raise my children and die in peace.
LAMB: But you did work at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
STEIGERWALD: Then I worked at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for the '90's basically and then the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review which is Richard Scaife's conservative / libertarian alternative to the Post-Gazette in the '00's.
LAMB: On the cover of your book, it says discovering America and exposing the truth about "Travels with Charley", why is there a truth to be exposed?
STEIGERWALD: Well, I set out to do this, a lot of people think I set out to bring Steinbeck down, which is totally silly. I did a lot of feature stories in my life as a journalist, a Sunday feature story where you spend a week or two with somebody and it's a long piece and there might be analysis and you sort of, a perspective that I would bring to it, it wasn't a straight up and down reportorial piece, but more of a first person piece although I didn't write it in first person. I was very much in those stories. I thought that having quit my daily newspaper job in March of 2009, I thought I'm going to write books until I die. So how about this book? I'll find out where Steinbeck went on his trip and I'll follow that route faithfully 50 years later, exactly 50 years later. It's almost like a Sunday feature to the 10th power, a Sunday newspaper feature to the 10th power.
No newspaper today would let me go away for seven weeks or spend that kind of money. So I did it on my own dime and on my own time. My agent in New York did not think it was a good idea. Road books don't sell anymore unless you're somebody famous. I just started researching Steinbeck and the first thing I did was I bought the "Travels with Charley", read it…
LAMB: This is what it looks like now, this is the 1997 version.
STEIGERWALD: OK.
LAMB: I read it first, 1962.
STEIGERWALD: Yes, sure, and as did probably close to a million people. It sold 250,000 copies right off, immediately. So in any case, I went on the, I just started researching "Travels with Charley." I went through the book, I wrote down every place he went, every place he mentioned and I thought it would be fairly easy to find his route and determine what it was. I had a 1962 road atlas and I sort of plotted my trip. I did an awful lot of research. It was a good thing I didn't have a real job. So I just kept building this sort of database of time and place line for "Travels with Charley." I went to the Steinbeck Fest that summer of 2010. I went in the fall of 2010 which was exactly 50 years after he went. He went right in the midst of the JFK / Nixon race and I went 50 years later, the Tea Party fall of 2010. So by the time I left, I had read also the original manuscript of "Travels with Charley" which is sort of like a holy relic.
The west coast holy relic is Rocinante, the truck he went in. We've interviewed a Steinbeck scholar in that, in 2001 or 2002 I think and the east coast relic is the manuscript, the original handwritten manuscript of "Travels with Charley." When I went to read it at the Morgan Library, which is, I don't know if you've ever seen it, it's unbelievably beautiful, it's like getting in and out of the Pentagon and the Vatican at the same time, they have appointments and very, very strict.
LAMB: In New York City, I've been there many times, but it's on…
STEIGERWALD: Madison Avenue I think.
LAMB: Madison Avenue at about 37th or something like that?
STEIGERWALD: Somewhere there, I got off at Penn Station and walked around the corner.
LAMB: Named after J.P. Morgan, it's his old home.
STEIGERWALD: Yes, and they brought out the manuscript that had been donated by Steinbeck in 1962, handwritten. He wrote in long hand, in pencil mostly, margin to margin, top to bottom on legal pads. Its, I can read most of his words now but many of them are indecipherable. I compared the manuscript with the published book.
LAMB: Had anybody ever done that?
STEIGERWALD: The guy who runs the Morgan told me that I was the first person to do it I think since 2006 and that only maybe six or seven people had done it since the year 2000.
LAMB: Had anybody ever published anything like you did?
STEIGERWALD: No, no and when you read, I call it the smoking gun, the smoking artillery piece because when you read that and I did that last in my research, it was kind of strange how it worked out, it worked out very well and so there I am reading this manuscript and I had my little smartphone with the Kindle version of "Travels with Charley" and I paged through that and I'd look at the manuscript, compare, compare, and you realize that the untruth part about "Travels with Charley" is very, is betrayed by the manuscript and the edits made on the manuscript. You see what he really did, for instance, that his wife joined him in Seattle and spent the next 28 days with him on the west coast. That's not in the book. He had written that originally in the manuscript. He had all these scenes about them traveling together down the coast, going to resorts and staying at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco which is where Fatty Arbuckle and Queen Victoria stayed, a very palatial place. I just realized then that there was quite a large gap between what Steinbeck wrote and what he actually did on this trip, who he met, where he went and who he traveled with.
LAMB: You actually called it a fraud.
STEIGERWALD: I did and that was sort of a slow process. In my notebook, the day I read the manuscript, I wrote, scribbled the thing that this is a fraud, but I didn't use that word until much later. It was really introduced by a friend of mine at the Post-Gazette who put it in the subhead. He called it something of a fraud and I kind of liked the way that rang. In a sense, it is a literary fraud. It was marketed, sold, reviewed and taught for 50 years as a true story, as the true account of John Steinbeck's trip, who he met and what he really thought about America.
LAMB: How old was he when he made the trip?
STEIGERWALD: He was 58 and not in great health. He had had a couple of strokes and he was fine, but he was not a young man.
LAMB: Let's take a look at that, we were out there in Salinas at the Steinbeck Center, back in 2002. We did a series on writers. Here is Tom Steinbeck and Rocinante, which by the way, what was that named after?
STEIGERWALD: Don Quixote's horse, I hope. I'm a nonfiction guy.
LAMB: Let's watch.(BEGIN VIDEO)
Tom Steinbeck: So what I remember about this most was basically the setup of the vehicle and…
What is it?
Tom Steinbeck: It's just a Ford pickup truck but it had one of the first camper bodies that I'd ever seen. This was not a major sport in those days. There were very few large campers that contained toilets and all the rest of that and he sort of thought it made him look rather invisible on the roads. There weren't really that many of them in those days. But he called it the turtle.
Rocinante, why did he name?
Tom Steinbeck: Rocinante because my father was a great fan of Don Quixote and Rocinante was Sancho Panza's mount and it's just really amazing that he occupied this space. I wonder if I can still get in here.
Did he sleep in here?
Tom Steinbeck: Yes, this table goes down and there was another piece of mattress that went on top of it so you could sleep this way.(END VIDEO)
Did you talk or meet with tom Steinbeck?
STEIGERWALD: No, I tried several times. He was one of the first guys I wanted to talk to really because I figured who would know more about the real trip and what went on, on the west coast, than Tom. It was kind of awkward, his wife was kind of tough to get through, but then I sort of gained her I think confidence and she warmed up to me a little, but I never, I never, he was in Santa Barbara, I was never really going to be in Santa Barbara. I offered to go down there. I never did meet him. I never talked to him. I could have talked to him on the phone, I didn't need to actually meet him.
LAMB: Why should anybody care?
STEIGERWALD: That's a good question.
LAMB: Not about your meeting with Tom Steinbeck, but about this…
STEIGERWALD: About the whole thing, in a way, if I were only doing the book about the fictionalizing and some of the sort of deceit that went into the writing and marketing and publishing of "Travels with Charley," I don't think that's enough to write a book about. I think, and that was part of my problem selling the idea into the traditional publishers in New York. I had an agent. We tried everywhere. Road books don't sell. Steinbeck is not important enough or interesting enough to anybody, so I didn't have a real, neither one of those made a book, but I think everything made a book and my adventures, my sort of innocent, naïve attempt to follow this trail and then applying basic 30 years' worth of journalism experience to the process as opposed to being a dog fan or a travel fan or a Steinbeck fan. I was a journalist. I followed the trail. There is no great reason to say this was a, is a big deal, I don't think. But, there's fiction and there's nonfiction and there is quite a divide between the two these days, creative nonfiction and narrative nonfiction, all these different applications of fictional techniques to nonfiction that either are OK or not OK depending on how far you go in making things up or fudging the facts or changing things around. As they say, all good nonfiction contains fictional techniques, narrative and all, nonfiction contains fiction and fiction contains…
LAMB: He won a Nobel Prize for literature. What did he get it for, his whole body of work?
STEIGERWALD: Pretty much so, I think he had, he won it in 1962, a couple of months after "Travels with Charley" came out and I guess it just came out recently that he was sort of a, sort of like an OK, we don't have anybody else worthy of it this year, we'll give it to him because they had a bunch of people and they all sort of, I can't think of the woman who wrote "Out of Africa" was one of the finalists. They just, they gave it to Steinbeck and they just released the notes from the Nobel committee. He was sort of, not a second choice, but like OK, we'll give it to Steinbeck for his body of work but he, "Travels with Charley" had just come out and was a big success at the time, big commercial success. They did mention that in the release about the award and he had written "The Winter of Our Discontent" two years earlier.
LAMB: Let's look at John Steinbeck back in 1962 as he accepts the award.
STEIGERWALD: OK.(BEGIN VIDEO)
John Steinbeck: It is customary for a recipient of this award to offer personal or scholarly comment on the nature and the direction of literature. At this particular time however, I think it would be well to consider the high duties and the responsibilities of the makers of literature. Such is the prestige of the Nobel award and of this place where I stand, that I am compelled, not to squeak like a grateful and apologetic mouse, but to roar like a lion out of pride in my profession and in the great and good men who have practiced it through the ages.(END VIDEO)
LAMB: What do you think he was like? What do you know from what your research has shown?
STEIGERWALD: He's likable in a lot of ways and I guess he's, he became rich and famous. He started out as a struggling writer. He worked hard to become rich and famous. He was a big guy. You can tell there, he had a big, sort of heavy voice and I think he was a funny guy, a playful guy. He loved to travel. He traveled an awful lot with his family. At one point, they all took off for Europe, the two boys, a tutor and everything for almost a year. He was, I think, smart. He was a great writer. He was a great nature writer and he had trouble becoming a journalist. At 25, he basically got fired from a New York newspaper because he couldn't tell the story straight, tell the facts straight. He was always embellishing, which is kind of funny to me. He's a tremendous writer and any journalist would love to be able to capture the details and the colors and feeling of nature and just of reality as he took it in. Now, his biographer Jackson Benson claims that he was kind of cranky and not as good to his kids or his, a couple of his wives, I don't know anything about that. That's, to me, I guess my argument would be that of all the great celebrities and writers of his age, he was a pretty normal guy. There isn't any really horrible stories about him…
LAMB: Let's look at some video, at Steinbeck's Sag Harbor home. You took this video.
STEIGERWALD: Oh, OK.
LAMB: Do you remember when it was?
STEIGERWALD: Well, it would have been, it was either the night before or the day of the 50th anniversary of his leaving.
LAMB: You were starting your trip then?
STEIGERWALD: Yes, this was, once I see it, I can tell you when it is.
LAMB: OK, this is only a minute, we'll watch it and get your reaction.(BEGIN VIDEO)
STEIGERWALD: This is where Steinbeck would have started his trip, September 23, 1960 in the morning. This is his house on a private lane in Sag Harbor, very close to the border with Southampton. His house sits back there. He planted that tree right by his door. It was tiny then, now it's huge and out in the yard is the little writing house that he, where he wrote. This is the little house, the little writer's house, little writer shack that he used to write his books in. He'd come out here where he couldn't lie down and where basically no one could visit him. He called it that joyous guard and it looks like it's in pretty good shape. The sun is going down behind it, makes for a pretty spectacular, it's a pretty spectacular spot.(END VIDEO)
LAMB: Who controls that house now?
STEIGERWALD: His last wife Elaine, her heirs have control of the house in some way.
LAMB: Is it a museum?
STEIGERWALD: No, no, it's there, no one was living in it, its well taken care of. The New York Times had come by and taken pictures of the inside of it. I didn't look inside the windows or anything that day because I wasn't invited, but the Times did come and take a bunch of pictures and it looks like it's pretty much the way it was when he left it, but I think people lived there, or have lived there and there's sort of a struggle over the house as to what to do with it, whether it should be turned into…
LAMB: Back to what you said earlier about the, your agent said nobody wanted a book of travel, these tours. Why not? What's happened?
STEIGERWALD: I don't think road books work anymore. Unless you're, I'm trying to think, well, William Least Heat-Moon who wrote…
LAMB: "Blue Highways."
STEIGERWALD: "Blue Highways," yes, sorry I'm blacking out here, that was, started out very small but it grew into a big book, a big road book. I'm trying to think if there have been any other major ones since and I don't think, it's just that the publishing, the traditional publishing industry is all about selling books and if they don't think it's going to sell, they don't care who you are or what you're doing, they don't want the book and I was told by way of my agent who got responses from the editors at the publishing companies who would read my proposal, the idea is when you go to write a book, you write a proposal and the saying is that you sell the proposal then write the book. So I had to pitch this whole idea, what I was going to do, why I was doing it, what I knew about Steinbeck's book not being factual and how I was going to compare my America in 2010 with Steinbeck's 1960 America, all that stuff and basically, I guess I was about 0 for 35 in New York on this. It would be great if this became a best seller because I would have my final laugh, but I'm not holding up that much hope for that.
But it turned out much, much better than I ever thought because of, not only my trip and the people I met which didn't surprise me that I met so many wonderful people, interesting people, driving around like a maniac for 43 days, 11,276 miles around the country, I knew that I would meet good people. I've done things like that before. I've been on the road as a journalist. I know that just, if you're alone and you're on the road, you will meet many interesting people. You're not going to meet the kind of people that Steinbeck invented and put in his book because you don't meet traveling Shakespearean actors in the middle of a corn field in eastern North Dakota as he said he did and didn't. But you do meet a farmer on a big Ford truck.
LAMB: How do you know he didn't meet that Shakespearean actor?
STEIGERWALD: Because he betrayed where he really was on his trip. He took his trip, he took no notes. He had no tape record er, virtually no notes. He did write letters to his wife from the road, almost, very often.
LAMB: How many of those did you read?
STEIGERWALD: Probably about, a total of maybe seven or eight.
LAMB: Where were they?
STEIGERWALD: They were, conveniently, they're in a book called "Steinbeck: A Life in Letters" edited by his widow. He left Chicago where his wife joined him on the trip after about 10 days. He drove from Chicago to Seattle, that's 2,100 miles in seven days. Each night, he wrote a letter to his, his wife flew back to New York, it's just him and Charley, he's averaging about 300 or 400 miles a day. Each night, he wrote a letter to his wife and he said where he was, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. You compare that with what he says he does in his book and you realize that the night he says in the book that he's camped out under the stars in the corn fields of eastern North Dakota meeting an iterant Shakespearean actor and then next night, sleeping in the badlands hearing the barking of coyotes. Those two nights did not exist. They're pure inventions. He was actually, as he said in a letter to his wife, he was in a motel in Beach, North Dakota taking a bath. So he betrayed, he and then his wife inadvertently betrayed all of this too by publishing those letters. Now I don't know if those letters would have ever seen the light of day but I was able, anybody, I've often said to people what I did was nothing spectacular. Any kid with a library card and a healthy dose of skepticism could have done what I did.
LAMB: You mentioned William Least Heat-Moon, he's been here a couple of times and I want to run a clip of him talking about John Steinbeck and see what you think about what he says about himself.
STEIGERWALD: Yes.(BEGIN VIDEO)
William Least Heat-Moon: I think that "Blue Highways" is a better book than "Travels with Charley." It's a better written book. It's a better executed book but I must say this in John Steinbeck's defense. He was recovering from cancer at the time and this was really his swan song so to speak and he took that trip, a challenging trip about three months also, he took that in recovering from cancer and he never really traveled again after that. So for a man who was ill, it's a tremendous effort. I admire that tremendously, but it's not his best writing.
LAMB: Reaction to that characterization?
STEIGERWALD: I agree. I agree but he, it wasn't cancer, it was a series of strokes that was his malady, but he was in pretty good shape. I think it's easy to say, it'd be too nice to, it's too easy on Steinbeck to say that he was sick and that's why he had to make up this stuff that he made up. There are contemporaneous reports about Steinbeck when he was on the road. He met Curt Gentry, who wrote the book "Helter Skelter" way back, interviewed Steinbeck in his hotel in San Francisco and Steinbeck was playful and full of vim and vigor and others who saw him on this trip too, especially in San Francisco. He wasn't a sickly guy moping around the country. He was full of energy and good health apparently. He wasn't totally depressed either. He wasn't, based on these observations of people, and his local paper, the Peninsula Herald…
LAMB: In Monterey.
STEIGERWALD: In Monterey, Monterey Peninsula Herald I think it was called at the time, went over to his cottage in Pacific Grove and found Steinbeck there fixing a fence and they got a big picture of him. He's got a Zippo lighter around his neck and he was banging away at some fence trying to fix it and it was a very nicely written feature. He was perfectly fine.
LAMB: Back again just briefly, born in Salinas, California, went to Stanford, John Steinbeck, lived in Sag Harbor which is way out on the end of Long Island.
STEIGERWALD: In Manhattan at the same time, it was his summer house.
LAMB: And Manhattan, how long did he live in the Manhattan / Sag Harbor area?
STEIGERWALD: From the mid '50's, he died in '68 and…
LAMB: Sixty-six years old.
STEIGERWALD: Yes, and I would say he was in New York basically the last 20 years of his life, he was in New York.
LAMB: Go back to when you were at the Morgan Library in Manhattan and you're reading the transcript as he wrote it.
STEIGERWALD: Yes.
LAMB: Who do you blame for changing the transcript as it got finally to the book that was published?
STEIGERWALD: I think, let's put it this way, Steinbeck came back from his trip, he had to write a book. That was why he took the trip. It was supposed to be a nonfiction account of his trip. He didn't have a whole lot to talk about it. He, initially in his manuscript, wrote all about how his wife and he were looking for a good restaurant on the Oregon coast and having their troubles out there. Well that was all cut out by the editors. Other things that were cut out from the original manuscript that Steinbeck wrote and handed in was all of his politics. The Nixon / Kennedy election was on. Steinbeck saw every one of the four debates. He was on the road.
LAMB: That's part of the way you tracked him as I remember.
STEIGERWALD: Yes, because you could tell OK, he said he saw the debate in wherever he was and so you knew he was there on that date. That was taken out and some of the other editing is clearly designed to remove his wife, remove any mention that he paused, he says in this manuscript I paused five times, Chicago, Texas twice, California and Seattle. Well what he was talking about was he stopped driving like a maniac and he was in Seattle for three or four days with his wife. They drove down the coast leisurely to San Francisco for four or five days then down to Pacific Grove to the Steinbeck family cottage for another say 10, 12 days. It was Mr. and Mrs. Steinbeck the whole time. Charley was like oh yes, there's a dog somewhere, he was out of the picture pretty much. In fact, at one point, Steinbeck had to write a small paragraph that said basically people are asking what happened to Charley. This is after his wife joins him in Seattle and everything, when he says we, it's Elaine and John, it's not Charley and John. We, we, we did this and somebody must have said to him hey, where's Charley, he's disappeared. Steinbeck wrote about a page and a half of a legal tablet saying people have asked what happened to Charley. Well when my lady fair joined me in Seattle, Charley took this third position in the family thing, he's fine, well obviously that never appeared in the book because what they did do is the editors went in and just expunged Elaine entirely from the West Coast, almost 30 days of Elaine's presence with John on the west coast. They weren't camping out. They weren't studying America. They were basically on a vacation.
LAMB: You talked about his relationship with, Adlai Stevenson and LBJ and then the last chapter was supposed to be on JFK, but before we do that, I want to show the video of you, is it Libertyville, Illinois where you got this on Stevenson?
STEIGERWALD: Oh yes, at Adlai Stevenson's old…
LAMB: Adlai Stevenson is the former governor of Illinois, presidential candidate in 1952, '56.
STEIGERWALD: And Steinbeck desperately wanted him to be the candidate again in 1960.
LAMB: Did he write for him?
STEIGERWALD: He helped him with speeches and things and did some writing for him. It wasn't like he was the big main ghost writer but they had quite a bit of correspondence, which I saw quite a bit of at the Princeton Mudd Library, Princeton, and Steinbeck was very partisan, very political, geopolitical and national politics. He was sending Adlai Stevenson all kinds of advice and jokes and ideas and…
LAMB: Here's your video from Libertyville, Illinois.(BEGIN VIDEO)
STEIGERWALD: Adlai Stevenson's historic house and farm, Steinbeck came here 50 years ago and I suspect they walked in the woods because in the later letters, Stevenson, to Stevenson, Steinbeck reminded him of their walk in the autumn, blazing autumn woods. Great room and Steinbeck's, oops I mean Stevenson's books and his fabulous…(END VIDEO)
LAMB: As you went around, what kind of camera did you use to shoot this stuff?
STEIGERWALD: I just had a little Canon HD handheld.
LAMB: What'd you do with it, that video?
STEIGERWALD: The video, I created some YouTube videos. I thoroughly documented my trip. It's kind of scary. I had a Nikon digital camera, I had that Canon video and of course my notebooks, 10 or 12 notebooks filled up with things and it makes it great because when I got back, I could look at that video and use it to help me describe whatever it was I was going to write about.
LAMB: Do you have a price you can put on what it cost you to do the driving and the gasoline, staying and then writing it and then having, you self-published it.
STEIGERWALD: Yes, this is an entire, this is a one man project, for good and bad I guess.
LAMB: What'd it cost you?
STEIGERWALD: I would figure it cost me $5,000 and that's with about $2,000 of sort of fuzzy accounting, whatever deterioration of my car, depreciation of my car and incidental things that I just sort of lumped together, but I figure it cost, food, gas and lodging, was a little less than $3,000.
LAMB: What kind of vehicle?
STEIGERWALD: A Toyota RAV4 which I purchased, leased after testing out the back and seeing that I could stretch out in the back and sleep if I needed to.
LAMB: How often did you sleep in the car?
STEIGERWALD: I think 20 times, 20 nights out of 43, 10 of those were in Wal-Mart parking lots. Wal-Mart, I loved Wal-Mart, I'm not a Wal-Mart basher. I don't shop there, but I do like them. They have a policy that, a corporate policy that welcomes people to sleep in their lots overnight, truckers, RV people, and it goes all the way back to Sam Walton.
LAMB: The fellow you mentioned earlier, Curt Gentry, who was he again?
STEIGERWALD: Curt Gentry wrote "Helter Skelter," that's his claim to fame with Vincent Bugliosi in, I'm not sure what year, '68 or so, late 60's about the Manson killings. At the time, in 1960, when Steinbeck came through, Curt Gentry was a huge Steinbeck fan and he was a freelancer for the San Francisco Chronicle. He heard that Steinbeck was coming to town. He went, he called Steinbeck and begged him for an interview. Steinbeck said fine. Gentry showed up with a bag of 21 Steinbeck books that Steinbeck signed every one of them for him. Gentry is a really good, old fashioned writer / journalist. He's a tough guy, interesting guy, he's lived in North Beach, San Francisco for, since 1955. He was really nice to me. It was great to meet him, to interview him because he went and hung out with Steinbeck for that half hour, 40 minute interview.
LAMB: You said it was at the Washington Bar, Square Bar and it's not there anymore.
STEIGERWALD: No, I don't think so.
LAMB: And North Beach is right there near that.
STEIGERWALD: Right, and North Beach is where City Lights Bookstore was and Kerouac and The Hungry Eye, all that, was it Broadway and Columbus, huge at that time, in 1960, it was like the past, the present and future of American pop culture, the Smothers Brothers were there, Mort Sahl was there, it was a jazz thing at the time but rock and roll was coming and City Lights was there.
LAMB: How old was Curt Gentry when you met with him?
STEIGERWALD: I think he was about 28 or 29 then.
LAMB: But I mean when you met with him.
STEIGERWALD: Oh when I met him, he was 79.
LAMB: Still alive now?
STEIGERWALD: Yes and still writing a book, he was writing a book about the mob in Vegas so he's still going strong.
LAMB: So go back to the cost of this, $5,000 for the trip itself, did you buy the RAV4 new?
STEIGERWALD: I leased it new, yes.
LAMB: You leased it new, so you still have it?
STEIGERWALD: Yes.
LAMB: And what, in addition to that, what did it cost you to get this book published?
STEIGERWALD: Nothing but time. That's the beauty, it's an Amazon book, it's an e-book that cost me nothing to do the e-book. Amazon makes everything extremely easy and smooth and cheap to do and then I created the paperback version, zero.
LAMB: The paperback didn't cost you anything?
STEIGERWALD: No.
LAMB: Why not?
STEIGERWALD: It's print on demand. You go to Amazon right now and you can either get the e-book for about 5 bucks or you can get the hard copy or the paperback copy for I think 12 to 13 and as soon as you push the buttons, they call somebody in South Carolina and they print the book and mail it to you. There's no inventory cost. In the old days, you'd have to, I would not do this. If it weren't for Amazon, we would not be sitting here. That book would not exist.
LAMB: What's the reaction you've had, if any, from the Steinbeck family?
STEIGERWALD: I've heard nothing from the family. I've heard nothing from anyone really in the Steinbeck world. I was a journalist who was used to dipping into things for two, three weeks and then leaving and doing something else for two, three weeks. You become the expert and then you forget everything and move onto something else. The Steinbeck world that I've been in, it's been my home here now for almost three years and I've spent more time on this than probably anything in my life. It's both a good thing and a bad thing. It gets to be kind of a burden. I'm used to, I'm interested in everything, city planning, I'm a libertarian so you know that I'm very much full of ideas and opinions.
LAMB: Go back to John Steinbeck's politics, what did he think of General Eisenhower?
STEIGERWALD: He made fun of him. He made fun of his syntax as which they always used to do.
LAMB: In print?
STEIGERWALD: I don't know. In letters, he sure did to Stevenson and others. I can't remember if there's anything about Eisenhower in "Travels with Charley" but a lot of what was taken out of "Travels with Charley" was Steinbeck's partisan sort of sniping at Nixon mainly and a little bit at Ike, I think.
LAMB: What'd he think of Nixon?
STEIGERWALD: Oh he hated Nixon, he really did not like Nixon.
LAMB: On what point, what was the reason?
STEIGERWALD: You know, I think, Steinbeck was openly and again, this was taken out of the book, he was a partisan Democrat and he said that in the original manuscript twice and I think both times it was taken out. He just did not like Republicans and though he had sort of grown up the son of a Republican, his sisters were all Republicans, Monterey County in California went for Nixon in 1960, but he hated him.
LAMB: Where did you find the letter that he wrote to his editor at Viking?
STEIGERWALD: That is fairly easy to find. It's in, I think it may be, parts of it may be in one of the major biographies. It's floating around a lot. Bill Barich wrote a book where he sort of, where he went from across the waist of America from say New York to san Francisco, he uses that paragraph as a way to, as sort of a jumping off point to do his book and it's there, it's commonly found, I can't remember where I found it, I think it's in the biographies.
LAMB: Well you, I'm going to read some of what John Steinbeck wrote to his editor at Viking. When was it, after the travels?
STEIGERWALD: This would have been after the travels, and probably in the summer of '61 when he was struggling to write, still struggling almost nine months after his trip ended to write "Travels with Charley."
LAMB: Thinking and thinking for a word to describe decay, not disruption, not explosion, but simple rotting. It seemed to carry on with a weary inertia. No one was for anything and nearly everyone was against many things. Negro hating white, white hating Negro, Republicans hating Democrats although there is little difference. In all my travels, I saw very little real poverty, I mean the grinding, terrifying poorness of the 30's, that at least was real and tangible. No, it was a sickness, a kind of wasting disease. There were wishes but no wants and underneath it all, the building energy like gases in a corpse. When that explodes, I tremble to think what will be the result. Over and over, I thought we lacked the pressures that make men strong and the anguish that makes men great. The pressures are debts. The desires are for more material toys and the anguish is boredom. Through time, the nation has become a discontented land.
What's the difference between what he's saying then and what we are thinking now?
STEIGERWALD: I think that was a horribly pessimistic and inaccurate account of America. I think, I don't know where he gets it really. I have a grudge against people who are rich and famous and live in New York and then who go out into, fly over the country and say that the people out there are too materialistic. These are people who have everything they already need and then they go out and they complain about regular Americans wanting trucks and toys and things like that.
LAMB: How was America different for you once you got back off this trip?
STEIGERWALD: Not much, I knew, my trip did not surprise me. I had been around the country enough doing small, real journalism type stories and the people I met on my trip were no different from the people I had been meeting for 20, 30 years.
LAMB: Name some of the characters.
STEIGERWALD: The guy who, a German American who had a restaurant in Wisconsin named Rolf, I can't think of his last name, I'd go into his restaurant at, in the dark of a night and he comes out of the kitchen, he's all covered with grease and he's a big man and he was back there cooking, he owns the place, he tells me his life story. He tells me how he had seen Hitler when he was 8. He was born in Frankfurt and just amazing little stories which I retell in there at length because I, where do you meet a guy like that except in the woods of Wisconsin?
LAMB: What about the guy, I tried to find this on YouTube and couldn't, the guy that you said has made his own YouTube videos?
STEIGERWALD: I couldn't find it either. I think he may have taken them down. A guy named Bob and he was a wild man.
LAMB: It was Oehner, I know I tried to find it.
STEIGERWALD: Yes, something like that. There was one strange day in Wisconsin, I met four amazing characters in one long day. Bob was the second one. The first one was this guy in camo, he was riding on a camo ATV, ATV?
LAMB: Yes, all-terrain vehicle.
STEIGERWALD: That's right, and he was sitting on the corner in the middle of nowhere and he's the guy who just, he was like an MSNBC Democrat just ranting and he was tremendous. He spoke so slowly, I could just write every word he said and he was scary. Then I met Bob who was even scarier because he had done all these YouTube videos and he was challenging Tea Party people and Republicans to fights through his YouTube thing and he was a total character, a nice guy, but a certifiably and proudly kind of crazy.
LAMB: But he would say that Tea Party folks are scary.
STEIGERWALD: Yes, oh yes, and being a libertarian, I can sort of, I can adapt to both, all ends of the spectrum. I can, I said to Bob, I'm not a Republican, he hated Republicans. He hated CEOs, called them Hell's angels in suits. Then I met Rolf, the restaurateur and he was a tremendous guy.
LAMB: We've got some more video that I want to show. There's one of when you visit the Spalding Inn where Steinbeck allegedly stayed instead of his camper. Why do we say allegedly?
STEIGERWALD: Because there's no real, real, real proof. Two people told me he did, both of whom worked at the inn in 1960, but that allegedly maybe just left over, the left over caption from when I first put it up there.
LAMB: OK.
STEIGERWALD: Because I later pretty much proved that he stayed there.
LAMB: Here's the video that we're talking about.(BEGIN VIDEO)
STEIGERWALD: The Spalding Inn, where Steinbeck really stayed on one of his passes through Lancaster, New Hampshire. It's a lovely place. I hadn't seen it yet and here's how you get to it. This is where Steinbeck stayed according to a good local reporter named Jeff Woodburn. Steinbeck was seen here by six or seven people in there dressed to the nines. It's not really a camper is it?(END VIDEO)
LAMB: Did you find yourself getting irritated as you went through the trip?
STEIGERWALD: Not in a real sense, I think early on, I realized that what was in the book and what he really did were often very far apart and I didn't feel like, I think some people have accused me of being on a jihad of some kind. I was just doing basically, this is what happens in journalism. You set out to do something, I had to follow the trip and I had to complete the trip or I was, was no use doing it.
LAMB: Were you by yourself the whole time?
STEIGERWALD: Yes.
LAMB: Did you have a dog with you?
STEIGERWALD: No.
LAMB: Why not?
STEIGERWALD: I thought of a dog for about five minutes and then I thought how am I going to go crazy, go around the country this fast and worry about a dog too? I didn't have a dog at the time. No, you've got to do a trip like this alone. It's interesting, Steinbeck, when he set out to do this trip, he had great plans and it was going to be what amounts to, what would have amounted to a great journalism project by a great writer. He was going to go alone. He was going to take pictures. He was going to send dispatches from the road to various, to a newspaper chain if he could get one going. He did none of that and he didn't travel alone. He knew he had to go alone but he didn't, he wasn't alone very much of the trip.
LAMB: But you tried all along the way, and you write about it in your book, to get people to follow you.
STEIGERWALD: Yes, I did a daily blog back to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette called Travels without Charlie and so two or three times a day, I would send back much of what's turned out to be the core of that book, the people I met, what I did, what I was doing, where I was, photos, no video at the time. When I got back, I started putting up the videos on YouTube.
So I documented my trip pretty much as I went and that got to be a lot of work, but I had fun. I had no, this was not torture. I had a great time. I met people I'll never forget and they're in the book, thank God and thank God I had written so much about it as I went, because to put it together after the fact, I think would have been very tough.
LAMB: You had a reference to this network in your book when you talk about the call in show and that Steinbeck wrote about the voices that he heard sounding more and more the same across the country, but you say tune in this network and listen to the calls come in and you hear a lot of different voices. What was your experience out there? Did you hear a lot of accents?
STEIGERWALD: I heard plenty of accents. I taped one, a guy in Maine who gave me directions to the house that Steinbeck stopped at on his trip and it was, he was so amazing. I could hardly understand what he said although I turned on my smartphone and taped the directions he was giving me because his accent was so heavy. He had a great accent. Someone waited on me in Texas, a waitress, I could barely understand what she was talking, her accent was so heavy. There are plenty of people with accents still in America. I live in Pittsburgh where there are still plenty of people with a Pittsburgh accent running around. You'd think that TV and radio and everything else would have killed them, killed it off but it hasn't.
LAMB: On the front of this cover I have here of the Steinbeck "Travels with Charley" book, is a picture of John Steinbeck sitting in front of a tree with the dog in front of him, the poodle. You talk about this picture in your book.
STEIGERWALD: That picture was also used as part of the ad campaign and I think that's what I'm referring to. They did full page ads in the New York Times and elsewhere I guess, that's the picture they used with Steinbeck and Charley together.
LAMB: Charley is a big dog.
STEIGERWALD: Yes, apparently he was. He was a standard poodle which I guess means he's, he wasn't a baby poodle, that's for sure.
LAMB: How many do you, did you find anybody that could tell you how many books of the "Travels with Charley" had been sold since he published it in '62?
STEIGERWALD: The Penguin Group now owns the rights to Steinbeck's books. When Steinbeck wrote them, it was the Viking Press. The Penguin Group people said, I said can you give me an estimate of how many "Travels with Charley" books have been sold throughout history and they gave me the number 1.5 million. When it first came out, somewhere I saw the figure of 250,000 copies were sold within the first month or two or three.
LAMB: So if somebody wanted your book, they can get it on Amazon as an e-book or as a paperback.
STEIGERWALD: Both.
LAMB: What's the paperback cost?
STEIGERWALD: Its $12.99 I think. I can change, that's the beauty, I can change, I can make it $10.99 or $19.99 five minutes after I leave here.
LAMB: Is it in any bookstore?
STEIGERWALD: No, it is not on any bookstore, only on Amazon.
LAMB: Can they find your video on the YouTube channel?
STEIGERWALD: Yes, if you, I have a Web site called The Truth About Travels with Charley and it's truthaboutcharley.com. If they go there, they can eventually find my YouTube videos.
LAMB: Here's some video at Fremont Peak. Where is that?
STEIGERWALD: It's a beautiful place, it overlooks, it's the highest point in Monterey County in Steinbeck country. It is in, it's about 20 miles from Salinas and it looks over that whole Salinas valley and it's a little peak and you might, it's maybe about three times the size of your studio and you have to sort of be a mountain goat to get there. It's a great place.
LAMB: How long did it take you to get to the top?
STEIGERWALD: It's a 15 minute walk from the parking lot, but what it is, to me I loved it because there are no rangers, there are no guards, there are no railings or, it's a state park yet it, you're pretty much on your own.
LAMB: Let's look at what you videotaped.(BEGIN VIDEO)
STEIGERWALD: This is kind of high up here. In fact, it's ridiculously high and a little scary up here. I'm on Fremont Peak overlooking Steinbeck country, that glare behind me is the sun bouncing off Monterey Bay. I hope I don't kill myself trying to show this. I've already dropped the camera and miraculously, it seems to be still working. I am putting, I'm swinging around, I am now looking into the sun as you can see.(END VIDEO)
LAMB: What did this Fremont Point mean to John Steinbeck?
STEIGERWALD: There's a lot of good writing in "Travels with Charley" and I think one of my favorite sections is when he is leaving Monterey County and heading back east after, on his trip and he says that he goes up to the top of Fremont Peak which he could always see from his childhood home. You can see Fremont Peak, the little point, from everywhere in Salinas valley. He went up there and he used it as I guess as a metaphor to go up there and look back in space and time on his life and it's some really good writing. I never knew anything about it. I went there because he went there and it's hard to get to. You have to go around the back of the mountains and you have to go up 11 miles through this narrow road along these ridges and then you have to walk to the top where I was there in that picture, in that video.
It's worth it. You can sit there, usually by yourself, there's nobody there, and watch the sun sink into Monterey Bay 25 miles away.
LAMB: So what about this whole process and project for you? Did you want to make money off this?
STEIGERWALD: Yes.
LAMB: Do you need to make money off this?
STEIGERWALD: Yes, I mean not, I basically, I was living on my, what was left of my 401(k). I did it on spec, I had no advance. Ideally, I wanted to get an advance from some publishing company and they'd give me, even if it was $20,000 or $50,000 and then you go out and you write the book and do the traveling and everything while you're spending the publisher's money. Nobody gave me a dime so it came down to the, but when I tried to sell the book before I went, everybody said, the publishers and the agents and everybody said you've got to make the trip first. You just can't say you're going to take this trip. Nobody is going to give you a dime. So I did the trip and I came back and it was very easy to get an agent after I had made the trip. That's true, but it was impossible to get any of the legacy or the traditional publishers in New York to fork over any money.
LAMB: What do you think? Are you going to make enough money on this to make it worthwhile?
STEIGERWALD: It's already worthwhile. I had, to me it, this being here with you is reward enough. It's selling about four or five copies a day and if you do the math, and I make $3 or $4 a copy, if this will bring me in $400 a month for as long as I live, it's like a second little Pittsburgh Post-Gazette pension.
LAMB: What outlet gave you the most attention on this and has done the most good for you in American media?
STEIGERWALD: Reason Magazine, my friends, my libertarian friends at Reason, I wrote everything I wrote for the Post-Gazette within four weeks after I came back from my trip. I made my statement that the book was a literary fraud all that stuff. Five months later, Reason Magazine published a larger expanded version of that Post-Gazette article. I was able to get someone I knew at the New York Times to wave it in front of the New York Times. No national media had paid any attention to me other than, actually on the media, the NPR station, they were smart. They were on it, they were good, but that was back in December. But no print media, Reason did the article. New York Times saw it and once they did see it; I had a call from Charles McGrath of the New York Times. He did an article about me and my claims and the power of the New York Times is awesome. I suddenly given credibility. I was reading my name in Hungarian, literally all over the world. The story of Steinbeck's book "Travels with Charley" being outed as a piece of heavily fictionalized piece of work went all over the world.
LAMB: Our guest, Bill Steigerwald, lives in Pittsburgh, spent 10 years at the Los Angeles Times, a number of years with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and the Tribune-Review in Pittsburgh and has a book we've been talking about called "Dogging Steinbeck: Discovering America and Exposing the Truth About Travels with Charley." Thank you very much.
STEIGERWALD: Thank you.