Book Reviews
Letters from the Pen
Review by John Lovett
From the March 21, 2007 Hot Springs Sentinel-Record.
A collection of columns Dale McCurry wrote from the inside for the Lovely County Citizen in Eureka Springs, Letters offers a rather inspiring perspective on life amid an otherwise depressing predicament, partially due to the humor he finds in some of his fellow inmates.
"E" is an Elvis impersonator from Branson who "breaks into dated song lyrics to comment on any situation," McCurry writes. An excerpt from Sept. 28, 2000: "Don' be cruel," E pleaded with a female officer who finally took away his smudged late-Elvis wardrobe. "You're a hard-headed woman. If anyone needs me, I'll be crying in the chapel."
Another recurring character is a feminine inmate McCurry calls "Marti," because of his high regard for Martha Stewart. "Marti" would rather go barefooted than be made to wear white shoes after Labor Day, and when the prison garden produced Romaine lettuce, it was a day of celebration.
Readers of the Citizen also met through McCurry's often-times enlightening stories the characters of "X," "Kid," "Crazy Charlie," and "Slick."
It's not every day that a man like McCurry goes behind bars. Although a well-read man, McCurry seems to be the kind of guy who can run with the dogs, but he'd prefer to just sit back on the porch and observe.
The product of his observations is entertainment, not just on the way of life on the inside, but on life in general. Although at times the reader may wish he would've kept going with a particular thought or story, understandably, the Citizen only had a certain amount of space.
The columns are about a book-page long and on a wide variety of subjects: Pop culture, music, politics, literature, race relations, the human condition, and of course, the prison system.
One of the more memorable and interesting columns McCurry wrote was on April 19, 2001, telling of a 1979 Harvard psychology study led by professor Ellen Langer in which a group of men age 75 and up took a little trip through time.
After a few weeks of living like they were in the 1950s again at a resort - with '55 T-Birds and '57 Chevys, daily newspapers and music from the '50s - Langer found that the men got stronger, stood straighter, moved easier, and saw things more clearly. Their fingers even grew back a little longer. McCurry says the results "scared the bejeezus" out of him.
"If those powerful changes can result from a few weeks spent role playing at a resort, what about a few years living in prison?... Eventually, I began to readdress a now familiar daily challenge: Look beyond these walls to the big picture. As always, the key to 'out there' lies within. The men of Ms. Langer's study may have been prodded along by external stimuli, but the physical changes were brought about by a change of heart."
McCurry's pen name for the 242 columns behind bars was Curly MacRed. He is former editor of the Citizen and resides in Eureka Springs, a free man, after serving time for wire fraud. "Letters from the Pen" is the first from Boian Books, and sells for $14.95.
