Volume 11, #4
Fall, 2002

In this issue:

New Edition of The Ice-Cream Headache Now Available from Akashic Books
Past JJLS President Ray Elliott Publishes First Novel
Saigon: Paris of the East -- Hugh Mulligan with James Jones in Vietnam, 1973
JJLS General Membership Business Meeting, June 22, 2002, American University of Paris

New Edition of The Ice-Cream Headache Now Available from Akashic Books

First published by Delacorte Press in 1968, and out of print for fifteen years, James Jones's The Ice-Cream Headache and Other Stories is now available in a new edition from Akashic Books. The thirteen stories in the collection, written from 1947 on, reflect 20 years of Jones's development as a distinctive and essential American writer of short fiction.

   Many of the stories, including the title piece, are set in the Midwest of the 1920s and 1930s, and touch on themes of childhood not otherwise found in Jones's fiction. But the stories embrace a wide variety of themes, moods and settings.

   The Akashic trade paperback edition features a new introduction by Jones's daughter Kaylie Jones, and a study guide.

   The Ice-Cream Headache and Other Stories (ISBN 1-888451-35-1, 231 pages, $13.95) is available at most book stores, online at Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble and other sellers, or directly from Akashic Books: http://www.akashicbooks.com/icecreamheadache.htm

Past JJLS President Ray Elliott Publishes First Novel

A coming-of-age story of the time during and after World War II, Ray Elliott's new novel Wild Hands Toward the Sky introduces young, fatherless John Walter McElligott as he grows up — lonesome and longing — in a rural Illinois farm community. He and his mother now live with his aunt and uncle, but he is inescapably drawn to the other men of the area who served in the war and returned — especially his older cousin, Sam, who was injured during the D-Day invasion and fought on through Europe until the end of the war. Out of their own respect for John Walter's father, who was killed on Guadalcanal, these veterans treat the boy with a calculated deference and are compelled to teach him their hard-earned lessons about life, responsibility, duty and honor. John Walter tries to apply their lessons to his own life as he struggles to find his place and learn who he is destined to become amid the sheltered, quiet life of the rural Midwest that, too, is on the brink of change in the aftermath of the war.

   Ray Elliott is an editor, a publisher and an author of numerous works of nonfiction. As a longtime English and journalism educator, he has encouraged and inspired young people to pursue their dreams. In 1999, he left the classroom to pursue his own dreams and began work on the book that had been running through his mind since the days following World War II. Since that time, he's also been a farmer, a Marine, an oil field roughneck, a construction laborer and a truck driver. He now lives in Urbana, Illinois, with his wife and two daughters. He served as president of the James Jones Literary Society in 1999-2000. This his first novel.

   Wild Hands Toward the Sky ($28.00, ISBN 0-9641423-7-6) is available from Tales Press, 2609 North High Cross Road, Urbana, IL, 61802 (phone 217-384-5820; fax 217-384-7996; e-mail tales@soltec.net) See also http://www.talespress.com

Saigon: Paris of the East
Hugh Mulligan with James Jones in Vietnam, 1973
 

Remarks of retired Associated Press Correspondent Hugh A. Mulligan at the James Jones Literary Society Symposium, June 22, American University of Paris.

   Saigon often has been called the Paris of the Orient. Now it is officially named Ho Chi Minh City, but people who live there rarely call it that.

    If Saigon was ever the Paris of the East, then the old Continental Palace Hotel where James Jones checked into top floor room 62 on February 27, 1973, was the Brasserie Lipp of the Far East – a homing place away from home for writers and journalists, dreamers and drifters.

    Somerset Maugham stayed in this rambling old French colonial style hostelry and wrote some of his best South Sea stories. Graham Greene booked for an extended stay when Vietnam, for the Americans, was a distant rumor of war. Here he was inspired to write The Quiet American, one of his best novels and still perhaps the most prescient book written about troubled Indochina.

    James Jones, for some reason, had a low opinion of Somerset Maugham. He said the British novelist probably treated the room boys with the same snobbish hauteur and cruelty as did the French rubber planters who still come to town each weekend from the huge Michelin and Terra Rouge plantations. They religiously attend noon Mass at the Catholic cathedral and spend the rest of the afternoon drinking pastis all afternoon on the Terrace Bar of the Continental Palace.

    Jim was certain, however, that Joseph Conrad stayed at the Continental Palace and over cigars on the Terrace, beneath the slow turning ceiling fans, listened to Marlowe spin his dark sea yarns of the inscrutable East.

    By the time Jones got there the Terrace Bar had lost its colonial charm and was now nicknamed "The Continental Shelf" because of all the social scum and low life that washed up there every evening.

    James Jones wasn't the first famous writer I met during my nearly four years covering Viet-nam and Cambodia. I had dinner with the French historian Bernard Fall a few nights before he was killed by a land mine on Route One, which he had prophetically named "The Street Without Joy."

    Mary McCarthy, after visiting Hanoi, came to see the American side of the war. She had the seat behind me on a very bumpy flight heading out to the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk off Danang and threw up all over my shoulder. Jones did not have a high opinion of her impartiality and regarded her reporting as "strongly biased on the side of the North Vietnamese."

    And of course I knew as friends and colleagues David Halberstam, Neal Sheehan, Frankie Fitzgerald, Margaret Higgins, Bob Shaplen and Joe Galloway, whose We Were Young Once and Soldiers has just been made into a hit movie starring Mel Gibson.
    More famously, John Steinbeck had come out to Saigon in 1967 to write articles for Newsday, while I was in residence at the more modern Caravel Hotel just across the square from the Continental Palace.

    Strangely, less than a month before, while I was based at AP world headquarters in New York, I was assigned to write a feature on Steinbeck who was then living at Sag Harbor, Long Island.

    His wife Elaine answered the phone and said he was behind on a manuscript overdue at his publisher and would I please call back in a week. Which I did, of course. But he was still behind on the book so she asked me to call again in another week, because he was very willing to grant an interview to the Associated Press.

    Well this went on over several months. Finally I had to tell her, look, I'm being sent out to Vietnam, but AP would still love to have the interview, and another writer named John Barbour would be calling. She graciously agreed. Less than a month after I checked into the Caravel Hotel, Steinbeck arrived and was given a balcony room directly upstairs over mine.

    His wife Elaine was trying to coax him off the booze, so Steinbeck used to drop by my room for a chat and made some serious inroads on my PX ration of booze. I had a PX card, but he didn't, because he was staying less than a month. He was a wonderfully friendly man, a great story teller and he'd stay for hours, long after the 11 P.M. curfew sounded. He was delightful company, but at times his prolonged visits could be wearying.

    One morning I had to get up very early, almost at dawn, to catch a Navy COD plane – carrier on board delivery – out to the aircraft carrier USS Midway off Dixie Station in the South China Sea. And I found myself saying to a Nobel Prize winner, "John," – by now I was calling him John – "a month ago I couldn't get an interview with you. Now I can't get you out of my room."

    He shook with laughter, refilled his glass and launched into a story about pearl divers in Bahrain. Or was it Mexico?

    With James Jones, the ambiance was more low key. He was on the wagon, and made serious inroads into my cans of PX grapefruit juice.

    Jones had come out to Vietnam to write his impressions of the war for the New York Times Magazine at a time when the American army was standing down. GIs were going home by the thousands each week. A so-called cease fire had been arranged at the Paris peace talks, and according to the schedule all American fighting units had to be out by March 29. The deadline was only a few weeks away.

    Charles Mohr, a good buddy at the N.Y. Times, called me one day and said "Hey, Mulligan, I know you went to Harvard and love authors. I'm taking James Jones out to MACV headquarters at Tan Son Nhut to get a press card. Want to ride along?"

    I jumped at the chance. As soon as we met, Jones handed me a long Cuban cigar, a Cohiba, Castro's favorite, which he had bought at the duty free shop at Paris airport. Then he asked: "Hey, where do you get one of these jungle outfits?" I was wearing the unofficial correspondents' uniform, the safari jacket with many pockets that we all called the "DAN RATHER COMBAT READY, TAKE ONE, TAKE TWO, SAFARI SUIT."

    So James Jones became a Bao Chi – a reporter in Vietnamese – and was issued Press Card No. 638 – of which he was very proud. He had it reproduced on the book jacket of his Viet Journal, wherein I am proud to be included among the acknowledgements.

    Then the three of us headed off to Tu Do Street, Saigon's Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, to the cluttered little shop of honorable Minh the tailor, couturier to the world of war correspondents. Minh measured Jim Jones carefully with a tape measure, calling out the numbers in Vietnamese to an as-sistant. And as usual they got it all screwed up. When the Vietnamese cutters actually read those numbers, they never could believe that Round Eyes – the Americans – had such long arms. Then they always lopped a few inches off, so the sleeves invariably climbed up toward your elbow.

    They say Minh knew only a few words in English. His favorite was seemed to be "Thursday," because he would invariably say "come Thursday, I have for you." No doubt if you came in to be fitted on Wednesday afternoon, the 6-year-olds at the sewing machines in the sweat shops of Cholon, the Chinese section of the sprawling city, probably labored all night to get your order done on time. But they always did.

    For some reason James Jones seemed to prefer hanging out with the Associated Press staff to the New York Times crowd. Perhaps, as he himself mused, the Times Saigon bureau resented him be-cause he was writing for the Times Magazine and also because he had a high level friend from Paris in General Fred Weyand, then the top boss in Vietnam.

    I also knew Fred Weyand. I had covered him in the field when he commanded the 25th Infantry Division, Jones's old outfit, which had come out to Vietnam directly from Schofield Barracks in Hawaii. This of course was the setting for From Here to Eternity.

    I think James Jones preferred the AP reporters because he thought the Times staff was overly preoccupied with analyzing and prognosticating about the war rather than covering it day to day. In his Viet Journal, his only non-fiction work, he makes fun of these "thumb suckers" and their preoccupation with rumor, gloom, gossip and speculation.

    Jones, the reporter, was still Jones the infantry grunt. He preferred to hang out with the foot soldiers of journalism, the photographers and day-to-day reporters rather than the analysts and big picture big thinkers.

    There is no doubt Associated Press had a terrific staff of war correspondents. AP won eight Pulitzer Prizes in Vietnam. Malcolm Browne for his photo of the burning monk. Eddie Adams for General Luan shooting the prisoner. Nick Ut for the naked little girl with her back on fire after a napalm raid. Horst Fass who won two Pulitzers. Then came Pulitzers for Peter Arnett, Sal Vidor, Neal Ulevich and Michel Laurant, who was killed on the last day of the war. Michel, who lived here in Paris, aimed his longest lens camera at the first truck load of North Vietnamese troops entering Saigon, and they aimed a hand-held machine gun at him. I had just won the Overseas Press Club award for covering Cambodia, and Jones apparently knew I had written a book about Vietnam. He may even had read it.

    We never discussed the wrongs or the rights of the war when we occasionally met for breakfast. Always at his hotel, in that funny little garden behind the Continental Palace, with its ceramic elephants, gecko lizards running up the wall and an occasional rat scurrying under the Banyan trees. And, oh yes, great sweet fresh pineapple, and strong café filtre from coffee beans grown in the Vietnam Highlands.

    James Jones was fascinated by the people and by the country. I think I fueled his ardor to visit the Central Highlands and his obsession to get to Dak Pek. This was a small Special Forces camp way up on the Laotian border monitoring troop and supply movements along the Ho Chi Minh trail. I had been to Dak Pek sometime before, when the neighboring camp at Dak Sut was overrun by an infiltrating North Vietnamese unit. These remote surveillance camps deep in the triple canopy jungles were manned by an A-team of twelve Green Berets and a company or so of colorful and courageous Montagnard or highland tribesmen. Re-supply helicopters visited them about once a week dropping mail, food and ammunition by parachute.

    I told Jones about a young corporal I interviewed whose girl-friend had enrolled him in the Book-of-the-Month Club to keep his mind off native lovelies. But he never could shut off the book selections that he didn't want in time. So the books kept fluttering down by parachute in mail sacks, and he piled them around his bunk like sand bags as a protection against a mortar and rocket attacks. Jones said he would be gratified if any of his books kept a GI from "getting a bullet up the butt."

    In the little over three weeks he was in country, James Jones covered a lot of ground in Vietnam. He ventured all the way north to the DMZ, the demilitarized border with North Vietnam, down to the tip of the Mekong Delta and west to the Cambodian border and the U-Minh Forest, rarely visited by journalists.

    He took his first ever helicopter ride out of Pleiku in the Highlands and flew low over the Mang Yang Pass along Route 14 where Groupement Mobile 100 met the disastrous end so vividly described by Bernard Fall.

    Jones was exhilarated by tree top flying, when helicopters at top speed skimmed for miles along the jungle canopy as if clipping the leaves of the palm and mahogany trees with their rotor blades. He had great rapport and mixed easily with the macho young chopper pilots and their flamboyant handlebar mustaches and daredevil Red Baron scarves. "Most of them," he wrote, "were good-naturedly aware that about half the nation considered them anathema...but I did not see one man who might be involved in a military industrial conspiracy against the United States." Some of them later turned up at his Paris apartment and were welcomed to join the Saturday night poker game.

    Jones rode a helicopter to My Lai 4, the scene of the massacre by Charlie Company that so shocked America and inflamed the anti-war movement. He was disturbed that America was not equally shocked and upset by the North Vietnamese massacres at Hue during the Tet invasion. In twenty-four days of February, 1968, NVA and Viet Cong deliberately shot, clubbed to death and buried alive some 2,800 civilians: teachers, priests, nuns, nurses, doctors, government clerks, and an entire German medical team.

    Jones interviewed survivors and witnesses to these mass murders. He visited the Strawberry Patch where hundreds had been buried standing up. He went to the school yard at Gia Hoi high school, the scene of a mass execution of victims who were clubbed to death, rather than shot, to save ammunition. Jones was shown another mass grave behind the Catholic cathedral in Hue, and spent the night with French Bishop Paul Setz who had witnessed similar horrors in Pleiku. It saddened him to note that liberal friends back home ignored the mass slaughter at Hue and that anti-war activists had written off such gross inhumanity as justifiable rage against the American puppet government.

    As his daughter Kaylie has noted in her wonderful memoir, her father dared to be out of style with his time. He was open-minded about Vietnam, had no preconceived opinions. He saw it from the viewpoint he knew best: from a soldier's viewpoint. In short, he was unafraid of being politically incorrect, a term that didn't exist then.

    By badgering the brass, James Jones got his wish to visit Dak Pek and came under hostile fire. Flying at 5,000 feet, the maximum for the latest model Huey helicopters, he saw pink flowers of smoke blossoming around his chopper. Ack-ack fire. Fortunately, the NVA's biggest guns only had a range of 4,500 feet. SAM missiles had not been deployed that far south. The helicopter he rode in was unarmed, in accordance with the cease fire. It had to do a quick, corkscrew landing onto the camp's tiny pad in a jungle clearing lit by green signal flares. Jones sat on two flak jackets to protect, as he joked, his "wide assets."

    There had been a fire fight and an attempt to overrun Dak Pek a few nights before. The skeletons of NVA infiltrators still hung on the barbed wire, rotting in the sun. There was no way to reach them for burial across, an active, un-charted mine field.

    Two days after Jones left Dak Pek, a resupply helicopter like his came under fire while spiraling in for a landing. Two Americans were killed and four wounded.

    Flying near the Ho Chi Minh trail, he day after day saw that, despite the cease-fire, the NVA were building fire bases, widening roads putting in gun emplacements, erecting barricades and clearing landing fields.

    Jones then journeyed down to the Mekong Delta. He arrived at My Tho, a busy market town on the river bank, just after a terrorist hand grenade attack killed worshipers in a Buddhist temple. The Canadian and Indonesian peace observers duly reported the truce violation, but they were overruled by the Communist Polish and Hungarian observers who – he noted – followed a policy of seeing no evil when the Viet Cong were implicated.

    Next he flew to a hamlet in the Seven Mountains region near the Cambodian border. Here Viet Cong grenade launchers manufactured in Russia killed two teachers and seven kids in a school house. Again the Canadian and Indonesian observers hurried to the scene of yet another obvious cease fire violation, but the Hungarians and the Poles refused to sign the report.

    Against the advice of his escort officer, Jones insisted on visiting the village of Tri Lon which had been under attack for four straight nights by 122mm Russian rockets and 82mm mortars. Just before he arrived, an ARVN captain had both legs blown off by as mortar round and died on his way to the aid station. The cease fire was by now in its fourth week, Jones noted in one of those huge note-books he always carried, yet the entire Province of Chuong Thien near the U-Minh forest was under continuous siege.

    He mused one night after his return to Saigon: "Paris and Washington may talk peace, peace, but here there is no peace. The cease fire is a joke, and the joke is on us. Thank God they're pulling our kids out at last."

     I had just moved to a brand new hotel, the Mirimar, and had a top floor room opening out on a large rooftop terrace. Below me was the night club. The bar girls used to come squealing up the stairs and onto the roof when there was a vice raid by the White Mice, the Saigon keystone cops. In his book Jones complimented me for avoiding "media chic" by not staying at the Continental Palace or the Caravel.

    The Mirimar roof was a great place for war watching. You could see the freighters for miles twisting and turning up the snaking Saigon River. Occasionally one would burst into flames, hit by rockets and mortars launched from the rice paddies, and one night an ammunition ship lit up the sky with an incredible incendiary display that outdid Macy's Fourth of July fireworks. Jones arrived one evening when the oil refinery south of town was ablaze, the flames outdoing the spectacular sunset.

    Strangely, well perhaps NOT SO STRANGELY, we talked about terrorists and terrorism way back then, almost 30 years ago. Regardless of the merits of their cause, Jones observed, the Viet Cong survived and even thrived on tactics of terror and tax, enforced by political assassinations. A policy of eliminating doctors, lawyers, priests, teachers, and province officials weakened the people's confidence that the Saigon government could protect them or even rule effectively.

    He spoke of a Jesuitical self-righteousness that seemed to possess all terrorists going back to Danton and Robespierre.

    Some of this was echoed in his Viet Journal: "It's hard to know what goes on in the mind of a ter-rorist. But in every case the terrorist seems to carry with him, like moral armor, a sense of vast moral superiority, which is untouchable…And this made it IMMORAL for his enemy to commit the same acts upon him, because they did NOT enjoy his moral position."

    But more often, we talked about writing. I mentioned that Somerset Maugham in his "A Writer's Notebook" wrote that "there are three main rules to writing. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are."

    I told him that when I quoted this to John Steinbeck, he took a stab at formulating three main rules of writing: "Never make excuses or let them see you are hurting. Never get separated from your luggage. And, oh yes, find out what time the bar opens and when the laundry comes back."

    James Jones pondered the ques-tion and took a more serious approach to filling in the blanks for Maugham. Glowing cigar stub poised to punctuate his three points, he growled out in blunt in-fantry lingo: "Fill your notebook with more impressions than quotes, absorb the scene as well as the scenario. Number 2: Talk WITH people, not AT them. Writers aren't trial lawyers on cross examination. Sometimes if you keep your ears open and your trap shut, you might learn something you never thought of asking. Lastly, tell it like you would when talking to a buddy late at night in a bar."

    Jones was a good listener, a keen observer with an expert rifleman's knack for targeting telling details. He was great at absorbing the Saigon scene. His Viet Journal throbs with the pulse of a war-swollen city: cyclo drivers wheeling in and out in the maddening traffic of huge military trucks, whining Hondas and tiny blue French Renault taxicabs held together by bailing wire...old ladies in conical hats smiling through betel-nut blackened teeth over their pots of pho – watery noodle soup – at sidewalk soup kitchens...black market stalls selling hijacked PX cigarettes…He noted that Salems with their strong menthol flavor were a favorite with the natives...They wiped out the smell of nuoc mam, the dried rotted fish sauce that the GIs with their gift for the elegant variation labeled "armpit sauce"...He abhorred the ugly Marine monument in the square in front of his hotel that was the first thing the Communists demolished when they came to town.

    Jones's heart went out to the legions of street orphans, the lepers on the steps of the Cathedral, the war crippled beggars almost everywhere, including a pathetic one called "The Crab," who crawled in the gutter on stumps of elbows and knees. Along the same treelined boulevards promenaded lovely, slender, doe-eyed Vietnamese girls in the traditional a-dais, a long colorful blouse over white pajamas with a V.P.L. – visible panty line – as the GIs designated this provocatively revealing fashion. Jim never ordered iced tea after he saw dogs peeing on the ice delivered every morning on the sidewalk outside the restaurants and night clubs.

    He felt sorry for (but was streetwise enough to beware of) the cute little tots selling jasmine blossoms who could steal your watch right off your wrist then literally jump in the Saigon River. The garbage piled high in the streets must have reminded James Jones of the chaos around him during the Paris student uprising in The Merry Month of May.

    Jones was fascinated by my visit to a Vietnamese dentist near the old French city hall where I had a root canal done by acupuncture. He asked if I had suffered any pain. I told him very little, even from the long needles inserted in my neck and behind my ear that the practitioner wiggled back and forth. He said his father was a dentist and might have had a more successful practice if he had mastered acupuncture. Years later I never got to tell him that, while indeed painless, the Saigon molar mechanic had failed to remove the root. And the procedure had cost me two cartons of PX Salem cigarettes.

    One night, AP bureau chief Richard Pyle and I took James Jones to the Kon Tiki, a grungy supper club favored by hard hat civilian construction workers and helicopter pilots based at Ton San Nhut airport. Pretty, overly made-up bar girls offered to sit with you if you bought them Saigon Tea – watered-down rice wine at vintage champagne prices. The floor show featured talented Vietnamese singers who, having mastered their difficult four-tone language, had a wonderful ear for deft mimicry. They could imitate Frank Sinatra, Andy Williams, Ezio Pinza, or the Beatles. The most popular record-ing star called himself Elvis Phung and elicited squeals from school girls when he was spotted one day in the Central Market.

    The girl chanteuses were equally adept at echoing Diana Ross, Liza Minnelli, Peggy Lee. But all were undone in the lyrics by words beginning with an "R" or "L." Jones reveled in "Lead Lozes for a Bru Rady," "Herro, Dorry," and "Moon Liver, wider than a Mire."
    The main act was a sensuous stripper, a gorgeous matisse – part French and part Vietnamese – whose costume consisted of rhine-stone pasties and a 12-foot long boa constrictor. The serpent writhed through her legs and wrapped itself around her body to the bawdy beat of jungle drums.

    What Jones liked best about Saigon was to sit on the terrace of the Continental Palace sipping a citron presse and watching the chaos when the warning whistle for curfew sounded at 10:50 pm. Jeeps and taxis revved up in a raucous haste to get off the streets. Prostitutes frantic for an all-nighter rode around the square on the buddy seat of tiny motor bikes driven by their pimps, known as "Saigon Cowboys." Bars and restaurants emptied out as if by fire drill. GIs hurrying back to their barracks, climbing aboard every available pedicab. By 11 o'clock the city was dead, and a lonely White Mice jeep prowled the empty boulevards.

    In three weeks he had seen a lot, experienced a lot and filled dozens of notebooks. I never saw any reporter take as many notes.

    In his Viet Journal he revealed that he had paid his dues as a certi-fied Bao Chi, a war correspondent in Vietnam. "I was suffering from diarrhea about half the time I was there."

    As Dave Halberstam once so lucidly and loosely observed, "in Vietnam, happiness is a dry fart."

    James Jones hated war. As Kaylie wrote in her memoir: "he was a true pacifist." But he was fascinated by the tragic and bizarre Vietnam scene. Like me, and thousands of GIs, he found the countryside – in his words – "fantastically beautiful." He said he'd like to come back someday and see "how it all worked out."

    I did several times, but he never did. We said goodbye almost at curfew that last evening. Next morning he flew off to keep a date with his past in Honolulu. There in December, 1942, he left the 27th Regimental Quadrangle at Schofield Barracks at age 21 and headed off for Guadalcanal without knowing he had a novel in his duffel bag.

    How lucky I am to have known him and to have seen a great writer at work in a wartime milieu that so saddened him with its senseless slaughter but entranced him nonetheless.

    I harbor the hope that someday soon the James Jones Literary Society will venture out to Vietnam for a seminar and sample something of the countryside he deemed so horribly beautiful. We better hurry before the sands of China Beach have all been hauled away by Japanese cement corporations and before the Continental Palace becomes a Holiday Inn with a Häagen-Dazs ice cream parlor on the infamous terrace.

    They say snakes live a long time, so that boa constrictor might still be writhing around for after-dark activities.

JJLS General Membership Business Meeting

June 22, 2002,
American University of Paris

   Ray Elliott moved that the minutes of the November 10, 2001 meeting held in Robinson, IL. be approved as presented in the Winter, 2001 Newsletter. Seconded by Judith Everson, the motion carried.

   Warren Mason presented the treasurer’s report. Beginning balance, January 1, 2002 there was $12,237.90 in the treasury. As of June 17, the Society had incurred $7,600 in expense; income was $14,480; check-book balance was $19,045.17. As of June 17, $10,275 was realized from pre-purchased tickets for the Sunday fund-raiser with Norman Mailer and George Plimpton. Judith Everson moved, seconded by Mike Lennon, that the treasurer’s report be approved. Motion carried.

   First Novel Fellowship Committee Chair, Mike Lennon, reported that 665 manuscripts were submitted for this year’s competition generating $10,000 in entry fees. This count is up from 442 last year. The award this year is $6,000 for the winner with $250 being awarded to the runner-up. Both winners will be announced later this year.

   Finance Committee Chair, Don Sackrider announced that Jones's collection of short stories, The Ice Cream Headache, is being reprinted. He recommended that the Society purchase copies at wholesale and distribute to university departments for adoption considerations. It was moved by Judith Everson, seconded by Diane Reed, that the Society purchase up to 500 copies of The Ice Cream Headache and distribute them to English departments throughout the United States. Motion carried. Don reported that our $50,000 CD has been renewed at 5% interest. He said this is a very advantageous rate given the current market.

   George Hendrick Research Award Committee Chairperson Judith Everson reported that the committee is not recommending a recipient this year. The committee is researching and considering possible candidates for future awards.

   Mike Lennon, James Jones Lifetime Achievement Award Chair, announced that Norman Mailer would receive the first plaque and citation today.

   David Nightingale, Membership Chair, reported that as of May 23, 2002, 250 members are currently enrolled in the Society. There are 70 Life/Honorary Members. 26 members are 1 to 12 months in arrears. They have been notified of their membership status. Ten members, one to two years in arrears, have been notified that their membership has been terminated.

   Under new business, Ray Elliott moved, seconded by Kaylie Jones, that Roger Ebert and Kris Kristofferson be named Honorary JJLS Life Members. Motion carried. Kaylie moved that Monique Gonthier be named Honorary JJLS Life Members.. Seconded by Judith Everson, the motion carried. Judith Everson moved that Berna Huebner and Constance Board be named Honorary JJLS Life Members. Seconded by Diane Reed, the motion car-ried.

   Don Sackrider moved, seconded by Mike Lennon, that the following board members be nominated for three year terms serving from 2002 through 2005:  Jerry Bayne, Richard King, Jim Turner, Judy Everson, Warren Mason, Tony Williams, Barbara Jones, Michael Mullin, Maxine Zwermann. Motion carried.

   As immediate past president, Don Sackrider presented for nomination the slate of officers for 2002-2003: Kevin Heisler, President; David Nightingale, Vice President; Warren Mason, Treasurer; and Kathy Stillwell. Secretary. Discussion followed.  Mike Lennon moved, seconded by Kaylie Jones, that the slate be accepted by acclaimation. Motion carried.

   Mark Heberdone of the Paris Voice presented for discussion the possibility of creating James Jones workshops based in Europe. He stated a lack of opportunity for participation in workshops for writers in the European Community. He wanted to see this changed. Discussion followed as to the difficulty of the logistics of such an endeavor and the question of participation by the Society. It was suggested that Mr. Heberdone research the possibilities of the American University of Paris sponsoring such workshops in the summer months.

   Kevin Heisler reminded everyone that the next symposium would be the October 11, 2003 at the University of Texas at Austin. The James Jones papers in the UT-Austin library archives will be available to the public at that time.

   Don Sackrider mentioned that this year’s Fellowship winner and the winner 2003 winner will be presented at the October, 2003, UT-Austin Symposium.

   Judy Everson moved for adjournment at 9:20 A.M.. Seconded by Mike Lennon, the motion carried.
 

Respectfully submitted,

Kathy Stillwell, Secretary