Joyful Trek: A Texan's Times and Travels Review

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(More customer reviews)I didn't know until this morning that Amazon sales ranks went as low as 5,100,000th. That is the rank assigned to my father's toothsome memoir, "Joyful Trek." Why a book this readable and informative should sink into those gloomy depths, I don't well understand. My dad, Robert H. Williams, was a West Texas farm boy who grew up to go to Harvard (all right, for only one semester, but that was on a graduate fellowship), to report for newspapers in Boston, Dallas, Denver, and elsewhere, to sail around the world as a radio operator in the Merchant Marine, to see combat in both world wars, and to invent a mailing machine and sell it for enough that he could finally return to Texas and be a rancher. His memoir is full of detailed and zestful stories. Here is a sample, set in 1921, when he was job-hunting in Galveston, Texas:
"Just about sundown, passing for the nth time a sign which said 'SEAMAN'S EMPLOYMENT BUREAU,' I stuck my head in the door. I did not especially want to go to sea, and how could there be a vacancy when hundreds of old seadogs were on the beach.
"A big man about fifty with bulging midsection was talking on the telephone. I presently got his drift: a ship was looking for a radio operator. I had little notion of the duties of a ship's radio operator and not the slightest knowledge of the kind of wireless equipment aboard a ship. I was, however, an expert with a key and had a fair knowledge of radio theory and of CW (continuous wave) equipment, meaning equipment using the then-new three-element vacuum tubes. The man on the telephone must have seen that I was listening with interest, and I mumbled, while he was talking, that I had been radio officer for the First Army Air Service. Instantly he said, 'Hold it! I've got you an operator.'
"I was flabbergasted. I tried to tell him that I had no idea what the job required, but he had already hung up. He was not even slightly concerned about my protest. He almost pushed me into a Cadillac parked at the curb and drove me round the bay to the waiting ship. He said he was port captain. As I kept trying to protest, he explained that the important thing to the ship's owners was to have on board a radio operator so the owners could get insurance. In view of my qualifications, for which he simply took my word, asking not a single question, they could sign me on temporarily without a license. That did not entirely satisfy me, but a job was a job. And the sudden vision of the kind of job it might be began to tantalize me."
I give "Joyful Trek" four stars instead of five lest my closeness to the author and his subjects might influence me. But I am sure that if I had never heard of Robert H. Williams I would find his book absorbing--a vivid account of an energetic and imaginative life that took in most of the twentieth century and a bit of the nineteenth.

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Following this colorful Texan through the extraordinary details of his life is more fun than an afternoon at the movies. Like the hero in a Gary Cooper movie, Robert H. Williams marches through the history of the twentieth century on the front lines of American culture. And editor/historian Craig Miner makes certain the reader never wants for a deeper understanding of all that our protagonist experiences.Pairing the original memoir with a lively running commentary rich in historical context and unexpected detail, Joyful Trek guides the reader across the wild prairies of central Texas at the turn of the century into World War I with the infant Army Air Force and around the world in the Merchant Marine. Williams goes on to become a Harvard student, a journalist, an intelligence officer in World War II, an inventor, a Hollywood writer, a family man, a bit of a philosopher-and foremost a consummate storyteller. This is a journey to savor.

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