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Helen Howe’s audience on this bone-chillingly
cold day is an English class of about two-dozen seniors sequestered in the
library of Robinson High School in eastern Illinois. To get their
attention, the snowy-haired octogenarian pulls a well-preserved issue of
the now-defunct Saturday Evening Post from her valise and holds it up. The page she
displays depicts an embarrassed boy buying a heart-shaped box of
Valentine’s chocolates from a smirking clerk as two other youngsters
snicker in the background. The illustration accompanies the James Jones short
story “The Valentine,” which was published in the magazine on
Feb. 16, 1963. Howe knows the coming-of-age tale well, having taught it to
high-school and college classes for years. She also knows the true
identities of its fictionalized characters and the actual locations of its
scenes because she has lived in Robinson for more than 50 years. Jones, the noted author of From Here to Eternity, was born and
raised here. He graduated from Robinson High in 1939 before joining the
Army. Within two years of his enlistment he witnessed the attack on Pearl
Harbor and saw combat on the island of Guadalcanal, in the South Pacific. Howe became acquainted with Jones and his mentor,
Lowney Handy, after the war, through her late husband, Sylvanus
“Tinks” Howe, a friend and classmate of the famed writer.
“When Tinks and I were married, in 1950, they
were the first two people I met,” Howe says.
Twenty-five years after graduating from high school,
in 1972, Howe enrolled at Lincoln Trail College, in Robinson. After earning
bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Eastern Illinois University,
in Charleston, she returned to teach English at the community college she
attended. She also helped found the James Jones Literary Society. As part of its effort to keep Jones’ literary
legacy alive, that organization sponsors an annual essay-writing contest,
based on Jones’ short story, at Robinson High and other nearby
schools. The annual awards are presented on Valentine’s Day. As she analyzes elements of the story’s
sentimental plot for her young audience, Howe stops to explain what a dime
store was. Her listeners have never heard of Woolworth’s. Most have
little idea of Jones’ prominent place in American literature, either.
So a few years ago, with the help of a cooperative high-school English
teacher, Howe introduced one his stories into the curriculum. She says she
found it disgraceful that the works of an author of Jones’ caliber
had until then been excluded from the curriculum by the administration at
the high school he attended. “The reason they didn’t want them to read
them was because they didn’t approve of some of the words he
used,” she says. “Mamas didn’t want their babies reading
that kind of stuff.”
More than 50 years ago, Howe sat at a kitchen table
in Robinson with Jones and Handy, removing four-letter words from the
galley sheets of From Here to Eternity. Scribner’s, the publisher, wanted fewer vulgarities
uttered by Jones’ fictional soldiers, but Jones persuaded his
publisher to retain most of the original dialogue. Times have changed, but not that much. The school
district in nearby Oblong, Ill., Howe says, still bans The Valentine.
This article appears in Feb 14-20, 2008.
