Reading the Boyd manuscripts is going to be a challenge. Its death by a thousand details. I know that in the end a simple and straight forward story about one guy getting screwed has to emerge but finding it is going to be like cutting a path in the rain forest with a machete. I’m going to get big fat calluses on my poor old brain.
Only the vegitation I’m having to machete down is TMI. That’s an acronym kids on the Internet use meaing too much information.
If I get around to interviewing other people who were involved I can expect a lot resistance, not so much because of the financial implications but because of the Peyton Place kinds of things that happened. Today these folks are all grandmas and grandpas. None of them will be eager to have somebody digging around in the sexual dalliances of their past? And yet these relationships help explain why people looked the other way or didn’t look the other way for the financial misdeeds that took place.
I wrote a column for the Reader a couple weeks ago which touched on the freewheeling sexual attitudes of the seventies when the Upper Great Lakes crimes took place. I began that column by talking about John Grunseth’s exposure for child molestation.
I had run across Grunseth in 1972 when I worked for the State Republican Party. He was a Party fieldman for one of the Congressional Districts. He was older and I barely recall him at all. I do recall the anything goes seventies however like when I attended the state convention that year along with my new College Republican buddies. People today would barely recognize the party then. Before religiously conservative folk innundated the party all the politicians hospitality suites had free flowing booze. One of the CR’s I was mingling with was given the key to a hotel room by a pretty young women at one of those hospitality suites. It was a like that moment in the movie Happy Days when one of the boys is trying to hook up with a “divorcee.”
In later years I heard from other sources that Grunseth had been a swinger but that was a far cry from the married father of teenaged daughters chasing his daugher’s friends around the pool. That’s the sort of thing that almost makes one welcome the influx of morally rectitudinous people into the party. Its so ironic that it was amoral folks like Grunseth, Ralph Reed, and Jack Abramoff that brought them into the party.
Don Boyd keeps telling me about the optimistic boy who sifted through piles of horse manure sure that he was about to find a pony. If I have to stop reading his manuscript every couple of pages to wax philosophic like this it will take me a heck of a long time before I find my own horse.
