Read Beat (...and repeat)

If you're like me, you like to know things but how much time to invest? That's the question. Here's the answer: Read Beat--Interviews with authors of new releases. These aren't book reviews but short (about 25-30 minutes on the average) chats with folks that usually have taken a lot of time to research a topic, enough to write a book about it. Hopefully, there's a topic or two that interests you. I try to come up with subjects that fascinate me or I need to know more about. Hopefully, listeners will agree. I'm Steve Tarter, former reporter for the Peoria Journal Star and a contributor to WCBU-FM, the Peoria public radio outlet, from 20202 to 2024. I post regularly on stevetarter.substack.com.

Read Beat (...and repeat) is a history podcast hosted by Steve Tarter, with 300 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

Steve Tarter hosts Read Beat (...and repeat), a history show with 300 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

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  Episode #33

  "The Last Ride" by Chris Enss

  Sep 30, 202629 minS6

  Your typical cowboy movie features stagecoaches, lots of horses, Indians, and a saloon with swinging doors. The women depicted are either saloon girls or school teachers, noted Chris Enss, who’s worked hard for the past 30 years to dispel that image. Enss has written numerous books detailing the history of the Old West, most of it focusing on women's exploits during that period. Her latest book, The Last Ride , is the 61st book she’s had a hand in producing. Some of the titles that Enss has cranked out include Buffalo Gals (highlighting the women of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show ), A Bedside Book of Bad Girls, Gilded Girls and Entertaining Women (women entertainers), High Country Women (pioneers at Yosemite National Park), No Place for a Woman (suffrage), Hearts West (mail-order brides of the frontier), Daughters of Daring (stuntwomen), and Frontier Teachers , among many others. Enss believes that the accomplishments of women have been overlooked in general, but especially when tales of the Old West are recounted. Enss talks about female doctors like Sophie Herzog, who hung patients upside down in order to extract bullets from victims more safely. She had a necklace made of all the bullets she removed from patients, a necklace she was buried with, noted Enss. The first female photographers of the Old West made use of walking darkrooms, flipping big dresses over their heads in order to handle film safely, she said. Enss is a fountain of knowledge when it comes to recalling overlooked accomplishments of women such as actress Maude Adams, who not only was a friend of J.M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan , but also played Peter Pan on stage over 1,500 times. Adams was a star off the stage, later working on the development of stage lighting for General Electric. “(Adams) contributed to what became the largest light bulb patented to date. Adams, a giant in the art and science of theater, nonetheless kept fans in the dark as to her personal life and private passions,” noted Adam Bisno, writing on the website of the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office. In a previous interview, Enss noted that the quirkiest story she ever came across involved Calamity Jane. At her funeral held in Deadwood, S.D., mourners took pieces of her dress and hair as they passed by her body to pay their respects. The undertaker eventually had to cover Calamity with special wire to keep people from further disturbing her remains, said Enss. The most notorious woman of the West was Lola Montez, she said. The Irish-born entertainer was known worldwide for her “Spider Dance.” She was eccentric and daring, and had lovers everywhere, said Enss, adding that the most famous of Montez's paramours was King Ludwig I of Bavaria. Montez is reputed to be the inspiration for the saying “Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets,” Enss noted. In her interview on Read Beat , Enss points out that many of the stunts you see executed so expertly in westerns from the silent movie era were performed by women. Ruth Roland, Alice Van Springsteen, and Mary Wiggins were among the former rodeo stars that performed in movies that starred Tom Mix and William S. Hart, she said. In The Last Ride , Enss recounts the story of Laura Bullion, who was part of Butch Cassidy’s Wild Bunch around the turn of the century. After being jailed in 1900 for her part in a train robbery, she went straight, the author stated. Bullion changed her name, working at a department store in St. Louis before going into business for herself as a seamstress. She died in 1961 at the age of 85 without fanfare. Enss departs from her focus on the Old West next year when she returns to her comedic roots with the book Jessica of the Jungle , a rom-com romp already highlighted on her website, chrisenss.com .

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  Episode #32

  "Forty Ways to Know a Tree" by Joan Maloof

  Sep 24, 202625 minS6

  Rose Maloof doesn’t think hugging a tree is silly. As the founder of the Old-Growth Forest Network, an organization that seeks to preserve the few old-growth forests we have left in this country, Maloof is passionate about trees. Today, less than 5 percent of Western and only a fraction of 1 percent of Eastern original forests, on average, remain standing. The author of Forty Ways to Know a Tree , Maloof, professor emeritus of biology at Salisbury University in Maryland, said old forests are rare because so many have been disturbed—sometimes by nature (insects or fire)--but mostly from logging. As a lifelong supporter of plant life in all forms, Maloof said she realized there was no one national organization that made it their mission to protect old forests. That’s why she founded the Old-Growth Forest Network (oldgrowthforest.net) 12 years ago. The organization has grown in that time, she said. The network website now provides information on where to find old-growth forests in every state across the nation. Maloof said those who have never experienced an old-growth forest are likely to be in for a pleasant surprise when they do. There are health benefits and psychological benefits to be gained from forests, but perhaps the chief attribute of older forests is their beauty, she said. Forests of all ages have an important ecological role to play, but the old-growth stage is especially important because of its unique structure, noted Maloof. Trees are important in their own right, but they’re also important for the community they create, she said. Various canopy layers and berry-producing plants are beneficial for many bird species. In a forest that has not been disturbed for hundreds of years some trees will develop hollow cavities. These cavities become important nesting places for animals. In an undisturbed forest, some large trees will die and fall, creating yet more habitat: numerous insects, fungi, reptiles and amphibians benefit from the fallen trees. The moisture retained within an old-growth forest benefits lichen and mosses, and the species they support. Along with encouraging visits to old-growth forests, the network also seeks to protect trees when “so many people are going after the forest to purposely destroy it,” said Maloof. “The roadless rule has protected more than 45 million acres of forest in this country, with 9 million of those acres old-growth forests. The present administration is looking to rescind that rule,” she said of the U.S. Forest Service rule limiting access on national lands. Information on the oldgrowthforest.net website provides information on that issue, said Maloof.

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  Episode #31

  "When Women Ran Fifth Avenue" by Julie Satow

  Sep 17, 202621 minS6

  You remember the department store, that big, multi-level center of the downtown that offered everything from an afternoon tea to wedding attire? That's where Jack Benny went every year to find a tie for Don Wilson or something for Mary Livingston, but always ran into trouble. Julie Satow recalls the glory days of some of New York’s most distinctive department stores in When Women Ran Fifth Avenue . But Satow isn’t just documenting an aspect of the retail scene in the 20th century. She’s profiling three women who broke the glass ceiling to enter the executive offices at Bonwit Teller, Lord & Taylor, and Henri Bendel’s. The American department store was a palace of consumption that epitomized modern consumerism, noted Satow. It was a place of goods, display, and style. It was a place where women, shoppers and shopgirls alike, could stake out a newfound independence. Whether in New York or Chicago or on Main Street, USA, men owned the buildings, but inside, women ruled, Satow stated. In the 1930s, Hortense Odlum came to her husband’s department store (Bonwit Teller) as a housewife tasked with attracting more shoppers like herself, and wound up running the company. At Lord & Taylor, Dorothy Shaver championed American designers during World War II and beyond, becoming the first businesswoman to earn a salary of more than $1.5 million. Geraldine Stutz left a career as a magazine editor to take on Bendel’s, reinventing the look of the modern department store in the 1960s. Stutz served as store president from 1957 to 1986. While women dominated the department-store scene, both as clerks and consumers, the three women profiled by Satow rose to unprecedented heights at a time when men controlled the reins of power in almost every business. The department store was a cauldron of creativity in its day, recounted Satow, noting that Stutz “found” an unknown Andy Warhol to boost the store’s artistic offerings while store windows—not just Christmas displays—but actual window arrangements designed to draw customers into the store—involved everyone from L. Frank Baum, creator of The Wizard of Oz , to Salvador Dali. Dali was so upset with Bonwit Teller rearranging one of his window displays in 1939 that he pushed a bathtub through the store window (getting himself arrested in the process). (Julie Satow was interviewed earlier on Read Beat , but due to technical issues, that program wound up running only six minutes.)

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  Episode #30

  Working-Class Girls Don't Become Artists" by Janet Zandy

  Sep 17, 202621 minS6

  Janet Zandy makes a case for art, both its appreciation and its execution, not just for the select few. In her book, Working-Class Girls Don’t Become Artists (University of Illinois Press), Zandy shares the exploits of nine artists whose work aligns with the histories and living conditions of working-class people. Zandy's work includes the quote, “Workers can also realize that art is a career and a social activity that is useful, and not the idle pastime that the bourgeois philosophers pretend it is.” That’s her point: Art must belong to everyone. The artists she includes in her book amplify that message. Through Elizabeth Catlett’s depiction of working Black women to Ruth Asawa’s rise from her time in a detention camp during World War II, Zandy shows that art isn’t reserved only for the pillars of the community but also for those who help build those pillars. “Asawa wanted to be a teacher but, because she was Japanese-American, she wasn’t allowed to student teach. She had to pivot,” said Zandy, pointing out that Asawa’s artistic talent was soon realized at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. “Asawa brought art out of her house/studio into the community—through public commissions and through centering art and gardening in public schools,” noted Zandy, adding that Asawa designed Garden of Remembrance at San Francisco State University in 2002 to honor the many Japanese and Japanese-Americans incarcerated during World War II. Zandy: “About incarceration, she said, 'The arts saved us.’” Zandy opens her book with a news item about a plumber denied entry to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1897. The New York Times editorial on the incident stated, “A plumber fresh from a job of work is no more eligible in a place where he is likely to come into contact with other people or with works of art than a painter in the same condition. For him to attempt to visit the Museum in such a guise and without removing the traces of his toil argues either mere carelessness or lack of self-respect.” The author demands that we see art as a teaching tool. Just as she was drawn as a youth to view Picasso’s Guernica at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Zandy wants art to be recognized for its ability to lead to self-taught history. “Much later, after college, after family losses, I learned about Guernica, the Basque market town bombed on April 26, 1937, and the international Abraham Lincoln brigades, the volunteers who fought fascism in Spain,” wrote Zandy.

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  Episode #29

  "Woodlands of the Mind" by Kevin O'Donnell and Scott Honeycutt

  Sep 11, 202624 minS6

  Not all the lessons learned at college take place in the classroom. That’s one of the takeaways from Woodlands of the Mind: Rambles Through Campus Forests by Kevin O’Donnell and Scott Honeycutt. There’s more. You learn that stately old buildings aren’t the only prominent landmarks on campus. Some are growing right outside. "Readers should take note that this collection of essays is about more than the actual forests themselves," noted Joan Maloof, executive director of the Old-Growth Forest Network. "Here are stories about daughters, and deer, rivers, and roads, soldiers, and slaves, stiltgrass, and stones, politics, and pollutants, gales, and glaciers, hills, and history...These things determine the birth and the death of the forests," stated Maloof in the book's foreword. As you tour the forests of the 15 colleges the authors visited for their book. you learn that some schools have a lot of trees. Take Berry College in Rome, Ga., for example, the first stop on the Woodlands tour. Berry College is a private school with 2,300 students. The campus size is 27,000 acres, nearly as large as the peninsula that holds the city of San Francisco, O’Donnell notes. Not all of the land is developed, of course. Eighty percent of the campus footprint is unoccupied by buildings. Part of that land is a working pine plantation where the college cuts loblolly pine for income. A wildlife management area, maintained by the state of Georgia, occupies part of the college land while another portion of the property is devoted to restoring longleaf pines in the region. Longleaf pine used to dominate across the South, but by 1995, less than 3 percent of the tree’s original range of 92 million acres was still longleaf pine. In case you’re wondering (and one of the wonders of Woodlands is the information provided on a wide variety of topics), the longleaf pine holds a mystical place among forest lovers. “With no deciduous leaves to rustle, the wind blows through the long, finely tuned needles, creating a music that people who have heard it say is unlike any other sound on earth,” stated O’Donnell. There’s also the longleaf fragrance: “People who have experienced it say that the olfactory sensation of being in the middle of an intact longleaf forest is like no other,” he added. One of the quotes used in the book comes from Aldo Leopold, the celebrated author of A Sand County Almanac : “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.” Among the wounds we suffer in Woodlands is learning that, in 2010, at Ohio University’s Dysart Woods, one of the last remaining stands of old-growth trees (white oak, sugar maple, and beech) in the state of Ohio, the Ohio Valley Coal Co. dug a coal mine under the forest. Within a year, half of the old-growth trees died. Dysart Woods, which is an hour-and-a-half drive from the school campus, is now run by a conservancy. The book also focuses on those who love the trees on the various campuses visited. One of those is Clint Patterson, the 10th forester at Berea College in Kentucky, who follows in the footsteps of the school’s first forester, Silas Mason (1857-1931). Patterson said Suffolk Punch draft horses are now used to pull logs for selective logging done in the Berea Forest, where the money earned goes back into the school’s forestry program. Honeycutt said that white oak from the carefully maintained Berea Forest has helped restore two celebrated ocean-going vessels, Mayflower II, a replica of the ship that brought the Pilgrims to this country , and Western Flyer , a boat once used by author John Steinbeck and marine biologist Ed Ricketts, who collaborated on The Sea of Cortez (1941). Woodlands discusses the many challenges facing forest maintenance in the 21st century: money troubles (no small matter for some schools), invasive plant species, extreme weather, and deer. O’Donnell and Honeycutt included the following from a 2022 issue of Natural Lands Magazine : “The most dangerous wild animal in Pennsylvania has caused 69 deaths and 6,208 injuries in the past five years. It’s ruining crops, damaging future timber harvests, and changing the state’s forest composition. It’s not the black bear, bobcat, or wild boar. It’s the official state animal of Pennsylvania (and Illinois, along with 10 other states): the white-tailed deer. And humans made it so.” The problem with having so many deer is that they eat some plants but not others, so invasive plants take over forests in many places, the authors noted. Rutgers University finally had to install fencing around Mettler’s Woods to keep the deer out, allowing native plants to rebound. “The story of academic forests is still unfolding, and the future is anything but certain,” warn the authors, suggesting that since the 15 schools represented in Woodlands are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to collegiate forests, readers would do well to explore some of the hundreds of others found across the country for themselves.

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