Thurber House, in Columbus Ohio, was doing a contest for what we used to called short short stories, now called flash fiction. I liked the idea of trying to do a two-page story. The contest winners would be announced on the 4th of July and the theme was American history. At the time I was working on a novel which included scenes from the Columbian Exposition, the World's Fair held in Chicago. It had come up in my resarch that both John Phillip Sousa and Scott joplin had performed at or near the next World's Fair, held in St. Louis in 1904. I thought it would be interesting to speculate about whether Sousa could have heard Joplin's band at the Chicago fair, and possibly been influenced by the jazzed-up rhythems.
The scrawled word at the left near the top of the notes is not "stab," but "stub." Special rail lines had been built to allow trains to get to the Columbian Exposition, and these ended in "stubs" where the track abruptly ended. It would have been a great place for Sousa's special train car.
The details about Sousa's career -- travel by fancy train car, the number of white gloves he went through -- came from the 1952 film "Stars and Stripes Forever," which starred Clifton Webb and Robert Wagner. I also owned and played a cornet, which was favored over the trumpet in Sousa's day.
One thing about writing flash fiction is that it takes a lot of going over to prune away unnecessary words. It really does take much longer to write a nice tight little tale than a rambling narrative of a story.
Alas, all my hard work didn't win me the prize. But I did end up with a good story. It can be found here..
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