This is the Foreword for the autobiography I have posted on this blog. The next step is put this in a hard bound format and publish a few copies to give my kids and grandkids. And organize the biography in this blog.
My purpose in writing this book is to leave a record for my great grandchildren and their children. When I was 12 years old I spent a couple of weeks with my grandfather, Munroe Lashley. He told me the family history and he knew it to his great grandfather Thomas Lashley who had been a Captain in the Confederate Army. He knew the Lashleys were from across the pond and had started their American journey from South Carolina Piedmont. In the Duggan Family my grandfather and his brothers told their own stories and everyone adored their mother the Duchess, my great grandmother whom I met. Her husband was the youngest son of Michael Duggan, the immigrant from Ireland to Missouri.
These stories are the stories I would wish to have from my Great Grandfather. I wish I were a better writer. My own vision of an autobiography would be more complete and better writing than these, but this is my answer to the Hollywood saying “Do you want it done or do you want it perfect?”
I was inspired to write this book when a friend quoted his father from his biography. I was surprised Richard’s father was a published author. “No,” he said, “he just wrote it for us.” A book, I thought, had to be good enough to publish and I wasn’t capable of that, but I could make a record for my family. I am not Emily Dickinson who wrote poems that were only discovered and appreciated after her death. When I write I want people to read it and for that I started a blog, Stories I Tell Myself, and all of this was published there first as a blog post.
I have some readers. One or two I know about and some who are a mystery to me. In 11 years I’ve had over 15,000 hits on my blog. In the world of blogs it’s not much, but it’s a few. I suspect most of them are tractor programs from remote parts of the world looking for personal data, but some of them, maybe a few, are from real people, people who know me and people who don’t.
For my family, people I’ll never meet, I’ve put in as much detail as possible, places, dates and events. It’s a personal history not a general history but I hope it gives a sense of what it was like to live in the last half of the 20th century and the first part of the 21st. I think of my grandmother who was born in 1892. When she was born there were no cars on the road. When she died in 1963 the country was crisscrossed with freeways and cities jammed with cars. She went from horses to cars, from trains to planes from telegraph to television. And like her I’ve seen some changes to the world and this is how it felt. It has been an interesting time.
I’ve told the stories honestly, not fictionalized anything I experienced. The people I admire I’ve used their real names. People who would be embarrassed by these stories, I’ve changed the names and clouded some of the facts. People I disliked or had bad experiences with I’ve changed the names. My experience was bad, but of course, there are two sides to the story and people I don’t like aren’t necessarily bad people.
I hope you enjoy these stories. I hope they tell you something about where you came from, who your ancestors are or just what it was like to be an ordinary man in this place and these times. Maybe they’ll inspire some of you to write your own record, an essay at least or a book. Thank you letting me tell you these stories.
