tonight, we are hosting the

national launch of book of charlie by david van der elie the book of charlie has. yes. the book of charlie is a very special book about special man and was written by a special man. and i know and i tell you why. david von drehle was drawn to charlie because he is a younger charlie white, and i hope he lives to. be 109. i found it readable 48 years ago and over time i have found a few

books that represent i call high water marks and our love of reading and the book of charlie is such a book. it is a book for everyone. and i hope that everyone reads it. i agree with tom hanks, who gave this wonderful quote. i got to recommend this book filled with history wisdom, common sense, and laughs galore. i wish. i had lived across the street from charlie and. i make it to 109 so is on really formerly an editor at large for time magazine and now the deputy opinions editor at the washington post. now he's going to be conversation with tonight tyler, not berg, who is the chairman and chief optimist of u.s. engineering that is a part of the kansas city business and civic community and has done for

130 years. so also a friend of david's and a friend of rainy day books. so please help me welcome david tyler. it's wonderful to be here. it's great to see so many people. i feel like i won the lottery. steve, you were supposed to be here this evening. who's a kansas city treasurer, of course, but he was unable to make it. so i given this opportunity and i have to say that to able to interview someone who's forgotten about the history that he's learned than any of us will ever learn in our lives, it's it's a real privilege to be able

to interview david and to be able to be at this event with with rainy day books. so, david, welcome thank you very much, you everyone, for coming out this book is among other things, love letter to kansas city. because kansas city has been so good to. tonight's a great example of that this is also not just about history. it is history as those of you who have lived through so many years listening to me talk about what are you working on and hearing about, i'm sure, everybody expected a fat book given. the number of years that passed and to have just this little

thing. i know at least one of the questions is going to be really really. i won't start that one, but i will ask you how did you meet charlie? well, we had just moved to kansas city from washington, d.c., as i say, my wife was tired of. dollar a minute swim lessons for our four kids and having to part yeah pay to to go to the grocery store. and i was sick and tired of people arguing with each other which is what they do in washington d.c. and so we came back to the middle of the country, which is home for both of us kansas. karen grew up in kansas city. i'm from colorado when i was a kid that seemed very far away

from here. but now it seems next door we had moved into our new house and i had gone. the house was full of half empty packing boxes and and jelly smeared kids. and i had gone out one sunday morning in august to, pick up the newspaper this was back when newspapers used to on driveways and i know people here remember that as well as do i was down the driveway and i looked up and saw across the street. my new neighbor. he was in a pair of swim trunks, nothing else, bare chested, big barrel chested. his hair was flopping over his eyes. he had a garden in one hand, a sponge in the other, and he was his girlfriend's car car.

he was 102 years old. and i thought this somebody i want to know. so when you approached and you you started talking with him, obviously you all became friends. but when did that relationship go from you saying, wow, this is a really interesting guy, too. at some point you said, i should start writing this stuff down a not as soon as it have because, you know, they say that no one is safe with a writer. and there are circle of friends or family because we're ruthless about making out of everything and everybody but i was so i so much enjoyed the friendship with that it took a while to figure

out that he was just a story. he was a subject as well. and i didn't want that to change the relationship. i didn't want to be going to work. when i went over to see him and to hear his. so it really didn't crystallize until after he had passed away. and i wrote a short tribute to him in time and my editor at the time who had given me an advance to write a book that was not working out in any way, shape, form. she pounced on that and said, hey, you know, that terrible book working on what? why don't you write this interesting book instead. so as as began kind of going through that process, one of the

things that you say in this book that charlie in the future grew together. so take us back to some of those early stories that you heard from charlie that that led you to that conclusion and maybe talk a little bit about what that what that meant. well, if you find somebody who was born in the earliest days of the 20th century, the early 1900s and who manages to live to a very great age, the distance that they travel not just in years, but in culture and technology and social organization and mores is because charlie, born in galesburg illinois in 1905, 18 months after, the wright

brothers had first flown at kitty hawk. and i like to say that really hadn't flown at kitty hawk. they weren't three football fields, and then they went back to dayton and on their planning for playing two and a half years and. then they actually flew. in 1906, a or wilbur wright, got a plane up, flew 24 miles and landed it where he wanted to land and that really is the first, you know, true. so charlie was alive when that happened so people hadn't really flown there were about. one automobile per 100 americans. so the technology was coming in, but they didn't have anywhere to go in them because were no roads and no stations and no, you know, motel.

this was before radio, this elway years after the first experimental moving was shown at the chicago columbian exposition. and so there weren't movies or movie theaters yet. i could go on this list but you get the idea he's from a different world is an agrarian world that would have been really to napoleon and probably to michelangelo. and most people were farmers of majority of americans lived a farm by the time he died. he had, you know had an iphone. he'd lived through? i mean no one had ever been to the south or north pole when he

was born, he lived to see people walk on the moon, lived to see rovers going around mars as on and on. the so when i say he grew up the future all, the things that we think of as futuristic happened in his lifetime. and, that's what i wanted to get at with the book. that's why i realized that he was the great story he was because you know my kids, this really is a book for my kids kids. my mind boggles when think about how much change they're going to live through in their lives and i didn't live through that kind of dramatic social. you know, charlie lived the birth of a nation to barack obama. talk about social.

he lived from a women weren't allowed to vote when he was in high school. he lived to see, you know, women leading nations leading corporations, all of this sort of change. i realized he had experience that he had had to reinvent his career. and so on and so forth. and that that made him the perfect role model for. young people facing the 21st century. so being to convey what that arc of time is in such a short period there, when he looked back described kind of like what his early was like and how that informed his views as he made his way through that 109 years. what were some of those early experiences that were particular really influential on the development of his character or worldview? well, the most influential was

the fact that and i don't know if all mothers were like this. in 1910, but charlie's she didn't really give a much of a flip what he was doing all day and. i realize you know my kids might i'm sure they would have preferred it if i'd been that way. but they have been better off in ways as because charlie grew up very independent, very resourceful, very calm evident that he could navigate the world and do well it and get by in it and he gave his mother enormous credit for. even though she seems never to have done much of anything in terms of reading it. i would ask you like what did you learn from your mother.

he said, well, she told me, do the right thing. yeah, that's actually pretty good advice when you think about it. so some of the stories in there don't necessarily strike me as do the right thing. when he was perhaps one out that would illustrate the point that he was given a little bit more free reign than your average child. today. well, the the classic that just boggles the mind was charlie's favorite story about his life, which came in 1922. he had graduated at age 16 from westport high school and if this was typical of charlie, he explained how he had been. advanced from third grade to fourth grade. and then the following year was put ahead. another from fourth grade to fifth grade. and i said, must been very smart. and he said, no, i wasn't smart.

i think they just wanted to get rid of me. so was 16 years old, graduating from high school and. one of his friends was wealthy enough to own model-t ford, the first model-t was made in 1913, revolutionized the world. this car changed everything about life in the united states. in manufacturing, for sure but also in terms of travel in of where you might think about taking a vacation all the way up to the independence of of kids, you know, to off get away from their parents lord knows how many you know, unintended pregnancies of on and on all because of this invention, the inexpensive reliable car the

model t kansas city was the second place in the world they were manufactured. so bob long had a model t, he was 18. charlie and his friend edgar snow, who went on to become one of the world's most famous journalists but at that time was 16 and along with charlie, they decided they were going to drive from kansas city to los angeles. the hang up was that there were no roads from kansas to los angeles. there was a little guidebook. there was a group here, kansas city, the old roads association. it was its president for a couple of years was a guy out of work named. harry truman of, the old roads association was dedicated to for the creation of a paved highway

from coast to the other and. they weren't getting very far in 1922 with that idea, but they had published a guidebook book that would tell how to get across to the country. and once you got from kansas city west, it would say like drive eight miles to the old hemlock tree and turn, you know. that's how they went. but bob in particular was afraid that his mother wouldn't let him go. and charlie knew his mother would let him. but he thought it was fun to help bob trick, his mom. anyway, the said they were going to go out to and make some money working in the fields for college. so they did that and they made when they had 50 bucks in their

pocket they started west this trip through, you know, rainstorms sleep under the car when it was raining in northern arizona. they wake up in the morning and there there'd be some native americans just there waiting for them to wake up to say hello. one time the car broke down burned out a bearing in the middle of the arizona on a desert sun beating down is no triple a, you know, they don't know what they're going to do. it stood a very good chance of dying out there, but in classic sort of magical charlie moment you know this model t appears on

the horizon and putters up to them and it's a farmer from northern arizona and he says what what's the problem boys and they said we've burned out a bearing and he said oh well that happened to me a week ago. i've got a spare in the back of my truck this was the advantage their only being one kind of car in america. so they put in the new bearing, they, you know, puttered along got to los angeles which as charlie said was nothing but orange groves and a little town. here's a here's statistic for you. when charlie was born, the 1900 census st, missouri was bigger than. los angeles, seattle or atlanta.

the midwest was an important place in those days. still is me. anyway, they got los angeles and they looked around. they saw the ocean and they realized they had idea how to get home because the ford was completely shot. bob long sold the car for ten bucks, wired his mom, who was surprised to hear he was in los angeles. she came out to get him on the train and again, the way life sort of changes, they just left ed and charlie there. and so now they have to get home. so they decide, well, we'll hop freight trains coming back.

this was a bad idea for so many reasons hopping. a freight train is an incredibly dangerous thing to do because if you if you want to get on and not get caught, you have to until the train is moving to jump on it. and if you lose your handhold or something slip, you can be under a train and you're, if you're lucky, just lose a limb. but they hopped a freight train. they thought it was a going east. it was going north. so they went to san francisco. eventually eventually were in the middle of the biggest national strike in american history, which kind of complicated matters because. the lines were crawling with detectives. you to protect against sabotage of the trains. so all the way back there,

getting hauled off the train left in the desert, you know, left behind, they rode for hundreds of miles on the cow catcher of an engine of what could go wrong. there there. but they finally have this just increase cinematic scene. they're on a flat car. the missouri pacific railroad, they finally got the train that's going to take them all. they're coming out the rocky mountains through the royal gorge near canyon city. they're lying on their backs watching the ribbon of sky between the cliffs of, rock and they just say, this is the life. and they get back. kansas city and charlie's mom says, where are you, ben. so these clearly gave them

impetus to do whatever he wanted to do. and some of the things that you talk a little bit about in here describe the ways in which became actually here in kansas city, an influential physician almost a medical and a lot of ways he didn't really get into the medical school or go traditional path to be able to get there. so what was the jump that he made from cow catcher to. well i need sort of like a professional. well, he he started at the kansas city junior college, as it was called then. it's pretty institution at that time. and said, you know, he wound up ultimately graduating the northwestern university medical school. but he said the kansas city junior college was by far the hardest school he had ever gone

with the highest educational standard, the most demanding teachers at. and he had to we will go back and talk a little bit about the life changing event that happened to him as a little boy, but his mother had been forced to open their house as a boarding house and to make a living. and charlie grew at the kitchen table with these medical missionaries who would be in town and would be sitting around the table form this idea that he wanted to be a. he went to university missouri, where there was an undergraduate degree in medicine. again, showing how things had changed and he studied hard. he did well. he had a lot of fun.

and but his his he a brother in law by that point, one of these medical missionaries had fallen in love with one of his four sisters and married. and he had gone to northwestern to polish his medical. and so charlie wanted to do the same. they him down and so in a classic charlie moment, he took a train to chicago and, sat in the dean's office until the dean would talk him about why they turned down. i don't think you can talk your way into medical school anymore. but i do think it's a great example of advocate ing for yourself. nobody is going to make the case for you better than. you can yourself and so.

the education nation that a doctor got in the 1920s was as pretty sketchy because they didn't anything. they had a pretty good idea what the diseases were so you could memorize all the diseases. they had a pretty idea what the organs of the body were and that sort of thing. so you could memorize all of that. but they had no idea how to treat much less cure any of these things. so one of the joys of this book, reading through charlie's notes from his pathology class, which is basically a textbook of everything about treating disease and injury in, 1925 and most them are treated by either

mercury which is poison and or taking out your tonsils. the tonsils just really the problem with i mean, you know what they called female diseases. you know, better take out the tonsils. but no leeching, not a lot of leaching, although a little bloodletting. so. this this gave charlie a view of medicine that was interesting and that he kept, even as he has technology advance. then he became a very skilled doctor himself that doctors really can't do much for people and that the main job of a doctor is to you know kind of

combination of wellness coach grief counsel, learn and, you know, fitness instructor. let nature its course was his main medical philosophy but he ended up changing a lot of that. he ended up taking a much proactive approach things i think at one point you describe silicon valley approach to medicine that he began to take that might not be accepted these days, starting with the small incident over it. well, truman, with with a patient who had a dislocated arm. oh, yeah. so after after northwestern, charlie came to do his residency, the old kansas city general hospital and the story

he told of the residency were delightful a gentleman in with a dislocated shoulder and they gave him ether to put him out. and the residents started trying to put the shoulder back in, you know they heard about how this was done in school but they never done it and so they're giving away on this shoulder for a while and this body is on the table being jerked around. finally they had to call the attending physician and and he came in and here, boys, watch how it's done and he just slipped the shoulder back in and goes off and charlie and his two friends look at each other and they're like he's still under and so they pull the shoulder

back out. and they start trying to put it back in and it won't go in again. and this goes for a while. and, you know, they didn't want to call the attending again, but they finally did. and the guy came in, slipped the shoulder back in and and said, boys, please let, this man alone. so one of the things you talk about with with charlie is i think you say life seemed to rest more lightly on him than most of us. and you mentioned that it wasn't all fun and games with him growing up. he ended up a great deal of hardship on his in his life. and as you've said to me a couple of times before, you know, sometimes pianos really do fall from the sky know, but the experiences that charlie and his

family had early on, what how did those sort of inform his on that life and what it meant for him to take a life view on things so first eight years were as near as i can tell pretty idyllic you know classic boyhood hijinx and you know, playing with matches and setting fires and almost burning the house down just the usual stuff. but when he was eight years old, his family had moved to kansas city when he was five. they'd arrived at the old union depot in the west bottoms, which at that time was the busiest, second busiest stockyards, the world behind only chicago. you could smell kansas city a long time before you could see

it. the union depot was falling apart hard and there were plans to build a new train station. charlie's favorite memories of arriving in kansas city were going from his house on campbell street to the hill where eventually the world war one memorial would be built. and sitting up there on that and watching down below as union station being built with mules and horses and men with picks and shovels, putting up this incredible edifice of that whole perfect life was interrupted when he was eight years old. one day in may, he headed off to school and his father headed off to his job downtown.

a life insurance agent. he in one of the first high rises of kansas city, the lloyd building across the street from the commerce bank building. charlie's father's office was one on one of the upper floors, and at about 1030, he was going to go collect a premium from. a client who had their office in river market. and so he put his hat and grabbed his pipe and went out to catch the elevator and in a freak accident the elevator lurched up just as he was stepping into it instead of putting his foot in the elevator or his foot went into the elevator shaft and within a couple of seconds he first crushed against the the top of the doorway by rising elevator. and then when the operator

panicked and put it in reverse, he slipped out and fell down the elevator shaft, dead dead. so this is the blink of an eye. this is know my expression, the piano's falling out of the sky. and sometimes they land on you or you love of. and as we go on in life, there are more and more pianos falling closer and closer together. so. so, i mean, one of the things that you talk about and, one of the things that was really striking to me is i kind of read through that is, that i certainly find myself these days when those kinds of things happen, wondering, oh, you know, why me and you sort of get sucked into your own little world. you write a lot about how charlie didn't that he didn't dwell on those sorts of situations. he just kind of kept moving. do you see that in some of the entrepreneurial ventures that he went into? what how did he talk about those

sorts of things with you? charlie people have asked me, do you think charlie would be surprised? somebody wrote a book about. and my answer then i don't think he'd be surprised. somebody wrote down these stories because he knew they were good stories. i think he'd be very surprised. anybody drew any philosophic ethical lessons from them, because he was pretty allergic to the idea that he had a life. but i he did. and it was a version of the classic philosophy of stoicism the stoics. teach us that most the things in the world, like what happens out in the world, the people around us, the events of are totally out of our control. and because we can't control

them. we shouldn't give a lot of attention to them. but there are things that we can control. and those are the products of our own will. what do we choose to spend on? what do we choose to do with our energy? what do we make important? what do we try to, achieve? these things are in our control. i think charlie well, he was not a student of stoicism he was a natural, stoic a natural born, stoic and that lesson of leaving home for school as the son of a healthy dad and coming home as the son of a widowed mother of five with no job, i think learned very quickly from that that bad stuff happens in life

that you cannot control and that you either move on or you can be ruined by it. and i don't mean to suggest that charlie didn't grieve. he he was so grief stricken. he didn't eat for a while. but by the time he was, you know, in junior high and going high school, he was a self-made man, self-made little man. and and remained that kind of resource for person, for the rest of his life. and he sort of he took a lot of that with him and he used it help other people. uh, i mean, you talked in conversation even about there's no single individual that he would ever not help. so when you at some of the things that he did even as you described, you know the advances

in medicine, what are some of the things that struck you in conversation with him or upon reflection, that really illustrate how he chose to take that philosophy and apply it to others and, the individuals that he helped charlie charlie, one of the first things he would tell you about himself when you met him was that he was a doctor because he wanted to help people he considered it a privilege be a physician because. as he said, no other profession brings you in as intimate contact with other human beings when in need and puts in a position to be able to help them more than a doctor doctor. that was a good philosophy to have. you're starting your practice in

1929, as charlie was. if you your history books in 1929, the economy collapsed of the entire world. and so built his career as a general practitioner at a time when nobody had any money and there was an interesting study that i across done the depression in which they determined that the hardest hit economic sector by the great depression was doctors and because they had to keep doing what they were doing even though nobody could pay for what they were doing. you know, if you own a factory, you could cut a shift or maybe even close the factory. you could other professions could adjust. doctors just had to keep delivering their services, even

though, as in charlie's case, you know, once was paid in set of encyclopedias, you know, took whatever he got. he estimated that 40 to 50% of the services he provided in the first ten years of his medical were never paid at all. but he kept going out night after. on the streets of a pretty tough town, kansas city in the 1930s, delivering babies and, sewing up gunshot wounds and setting broken bones and everything in between and just random gunshot wounds. but for very influential, yes, he he had one story that he loved getting called out late at night on an ambulance to the

home. a woman who was dying bed with pneumonia and he they went upstairs, found her in bed. she was very sick they decided yeah, she better go to the hospital. so they he and the ambulance driver got the stretcher out, carried her down to the street and as they're getting ready to put her in the ambulance limousine pulls up a big long black and a window goes, a machine gun comes and kills the guy walking down the street right next to and drives off. this is the kansas city of brother, john lazear lazear, and the great kansas map. so they look at this guy and, they say, well, he more than she does. so they take take the old lady back the stairs, put her back in

bed, go down, get the guy on the sidewalk and put him in the ambulance and charlie's sitting in back. the ambulance driver is driving and the guy is gasping out. his last words in italian, which charlie doesn't speak, but the ambulance does. and so after they get him the dead body by then into the hospital, the girl more charlie says, what was that saying back there? and the ambulance driver looks over said are you crazy? i'm not trying to tell you you. so you got to see kansas city through. a different set of eyes. we consider you a native here, native kansas city and but you got to see it through a different set of eyes when you were doing research on this book, how did charlie see kansas city, how did you see kansas city through this this long

evolution? you said this a love letter to kansas city. what did you what do you mean by that? i mean is it a couple of things? first you learn how important kansas city was at turn of the century and the early years of the 1900s going back into its original days. i mean this is where all the great american stories of the settling of the western half of the united states basically start as kansas city stories. daniel boone jim bridger, you know, the mormons the mormon all these donner party, they started here everything from here and then went west from kansas city. so it's the it's the birth of

the west young man story with all the glory and all shame that's involved in tale. and then it becomes arms as the world is urbanized and all these americans on farms are looking to the cities. kansas city is the place where so many of the bright, young, ambitious people come. and so you get these stories that are so familiar to now of kid from rural nebraska stepping off the train at union station with a box of postcards and turning it into a company called hallmark for example or of a gal from eastern kansas who's pretty good with a needle and thread and starts making dresses and

nellie donned becomes the largest manufacturer of women's dresses in the world for a long time all of these so many of these classic city stories start as farm to city tales and you realize the walt is another one you realize what a magnet this was for talent, for excitement, for dreams. and and charlie never lost that love of the place. even though everywhere you went with him, he was older than the thing you were walking into. so that sense of that sense of of glamor, of sexiness, you know, charlie's kansas in the

twenties and thirties, that was the craziest, wildest, most risque place you could go in america before there was las vegas, there was city, the paris of the plains. they didn't mean that in a complimentary way necessary, really, but so to see our home and through eyes and particularly at a time like this when kansas enjoying such a no not a renaissance because that suggests we were dead but such a new infusion of energy and excitement and possibility and that that's that's the dna here. so i mean it really does strike me that this is a book that is good for us, right now. and by us, i don't just mean kansas city. i mean a lot of people who are in this room and a lot of people who are not in this room. why do you think that this book

is perfect right now? the the thing that i kept seeing through charlie's eyes was that, you know, america, has all been a deeply divided country, having really rough arguments with each other. lots people, me, you know, is this the most divided ever been? well, we had a civil war with 600,000 people dead. but not just the civil war. when charlie was driving in that model t across kansas. he was driving through a state where the government, including the governor of the state, would controlled by the ku klux klan, the 1920s were a horribly divisive period in the united

states. we've always argued over the role of immigration in country. we have always been fearful about the future. you know. do you really think that the people looking into the great depression were without anxiety or or, you know, the it's not new. we've economic trouble with the world always been a dangerous place. the united states has never sure exactly what our place in the world should be. so you see these arguments playing out in his life and what does that tell charlie? what does it tell me that we got through them before and we're going to get through them again. and the reason we're going to get through them again is

because we're a whole nation of charlie. whether we're up or down on a particular day. we're people who get work and try to solve problems. we don't let perfect become the enemy of the good. and and so that's why i think it's the right book at the right time, because we are going to get through going on now and the united has wonderful decades ahead of it. i, i, i won't live to see most of them because i'm not going to make it to 109. but i am absolutely convinced that my children are going to grow up in a fabulous country. and the reason is because they're going to make it their way.

i couldn't possibly agree more and i'm going to steal a little bit more time because i'm very interested in getting back to your suggestion that when you look at this book, you say really? so as you went through, tried to figure out how to do research how to distill these 109 years into something, that's relevant for all of us. what was the process that you used to conduct that research? i mean, it seems almost insurmountable if. you look at 109 years here. how could you possibly get through all of this, well, what do you do is you marry karen.

she's i've been in journalism for 45 years and she is the best reporter i have met. and i don't say that just because i've gone home with her this i'll tell you just one of my favorite stories, karen was working for a new york newspaper back in the nineties and this was not long after the fall of the soviet and one of the things that happened when the soviet union collapsed is that the russia turned from a worker's paradise into a mafia controlled dystopia just because the ideal put on different hats and became mob bosses. but anyway, the russian mob took over new york city.

this was new at the time. the place was run by a guy, a shadowy figure named yvonne of he was the godfather of the russian mob and the fbi was pretty sure that he existed, but they had no idea where he was. if he was in the united states or if he was back in russia, or if he was somewhere between he was on their most wanted list. they hadn't quite found him in the new york times, went and looked for him and wrote a long story, him saying, you know, nobody could find nobody was sure the figure, did he really exist? and karen was going. she covered the white house and was going to travel with the president then to russia and. and her editor suggested maybe

you could do some work on the russian while you're over and russia thought well maybe start working on it here in the united and long story short i was she got on an airplane one morning and 2:00 that afternoon. the phone rang on my desk and she said you'll never guess i'm having tea with in brighton beach. yvonne so in the 4 hours that she worked on it, she had found this guy that the new york times and the fbi couldn't. so all the hard parts of this book, i just asked her, do. and there are still people at the kansas city police department, the kansas city

public library and elsewhere bearing some of the scars of trying to tell her that certain historical records didn't exist or couldn't be found because they did exist and she found them. well we're very thankful for that. and a lot of ways. many of us have neighbors and we choose to exchange stories with, our neighbors. but as far as my wife said, she said, well, this was just like the perfect convergence of all things in the universe. you an incredibly interesting individual who lived next to you who happened to be david von drehle having these conversations, you've got a secret in karen and you chose to put all of this stuff down in, a book that you are able to share with all of us and. one of the things that you end the book with charlie's life

philosophy, where you say that he had written down work hard, spread joy, take a chance and enjoy, wonder. and i am very privileged to say that you did you gave that gift to all of us. and certainly you're a treasure here in kansas city. and certainly not underappreciated by the size. the audience right here. but i have to say it's been a real privilege being able to hear you talk a little bit about this book. and it's a real privilege. call you a friend and have you here in city with all of us. so thank you.

dr. theresa. girl duty. i am so honored to be here with you today to talk about