Entertainment, Books - Marine Corps Times

Novelist Jim Lehrer is still swinging for the fences

WASHINGTON — Jim Lehrer, prolific author and anchor of “The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer” on PBS, often goes to his hometown of Wichita, checks into a hotel, and writes.

“I know. Some people go to the beach. I go to Kansas,” says Lehrer, chatting in his home office. It’s filled with tin signs from old bus stations, memorabilia he has collected for decades.

It was in Kansas three or four years ago that Lehrer got the idea for his 19th novel, “Oh, Johnny” (Random House, 219 pp., $25), which goes on sale March 24.

He was sitting in a downtown restaurant, having a martini, when he looked over at the old train station his father took him to in the mid-1940s, when he was a boy.

“My dad thought it was important to go and say hello to the troops,” says Lehrer, 74, referring to World War II soldiers heading west to California, then on to war in the Pacific.

“I started taking notes right there at the table. What if this happened? What if that? It all started coming together. I don’t think it was the martini, but ...”

And so Lehrer’s latest novel begins, with a soldier, Johnny Wrigley, stepping off a train in Wichita and being greeted by a young woman bearing a basket of apples and cigarettes.

He immediately falls in love and spends the rest of the book tracking down “Betsy Luck,” as he calls her, when he returns home at the end of the war.

“Oh, Johnny” is a coming-of-age tale of how life doesn’t always turn out the way you expect. Johnny is a baseball player, a center fielder who hopes to make it to the majors.

He is trying to live up to his hero, outfielder Pete Reiser, star of the Brooklyn Dodgers. War has other plans for him.

Lehrer’s newest novel bears many Lehrer trademarks. Relaxed storytelling, an eye for detail and his recurring themes of battles, bus rides and baseball.

He writes books in his spare time; his first, the fictional political satire “Viva Max!” was published in 1966. His 20th novel is already finished, and he also has written two memoirs and three plays. Lehrer says he doesn’t have a clue what writer’s block is.

His first newspaper job, as a cub reporter, was writing obits at the Dallas Morning News.

That was after he realized he couldn’t make it in baseball. “I wasn’t very good at it,” he says.

Enter Johnny Wrigley.

“Here’s a kid who had all these skills, and he didn’t make it,” Lehrer says. “Yet he went through the most hellish experiences (as a flamethrower operator in the war) and survived.”

Like Johnny, Lehrer is a survivor still going strong, despite heart surgery last year. He says he has no plans to retire.

“I just keep going,” says Lehrer, who has been at PBS more than 35 years. “I’m feeling great after my last operation. It’s going to happen (retirement), but when?”

And maybe one day he’ll be better known as an author who happens to be on TV rather than a TV anchor who happens to write books. Maybe not.

“At the time of my 10th book, I thought, ‘I am now a writer,’ ” Lehrer says. “But no, I’m still the TV guy. I’ve always felt it was a little bit bragging to say you’re a writer, to say ‘I’m a novelist.’

“I’m still trying to be a novelist, and it doesn’t get any easier.”