September 21, 2006

Yellow Springs author Ralph Keyes in the “toaster museum” of his Omar Circle home. Keyes’ most recent book is “The Quote Verifier: Who Said What, Where and When.”

By Virgil Hervey

According to Ralph Keyes, the first book he ever worked on was in 1963 when he took a year off from Antioch College to assist former Antioch President Arthur Morgan in the researching and drafting of his book, Dams and Other Disasters. In 1966, Morgan said of Keyes in the Antioch College Record, “In my long experience in writing, I have never had so able an assistant as at present.”
In a recent interview, Keyes credited that experience with giving him the tools and confidence to become the writer he is today. Since his Antioch days, he has written 14 books of his own, many of them on the subject of writing and language, and has appeared on “Oprah Winfrey,” “Today,” “Tonight,” “ABC World News Tonight,” and “20/20.”
Keyes’ work has caused him to travel a lot, and for some 25 years he and his wife Muriel lived away from Yellow Springs. But 11 of his books were written right here, since they moved back in 1990, he said.
The books he writes require a great deal of research. However, with the digitization of research materials and their availability through the Internet, he has been able to cut down on some of the shoe leather and time away from home. Talking about the research for his latest published work, The Quote Verifier: Who Said What, Where, and When (St. Martin’s 2005), Keyes said the digitization of very old reference materials had enabled him to trace quotes back farther than he would have thought.
“For a writer,” Keyes said, “the great thing about the Internet is you can live and work in Yellow Springs,”
Keyes tries to be accessible to his readers, he said. He has a Web site, www.ralphkeyes.com, and regularly responds to e-mails from his readers. Reviews of his work often note his sense of humor, so it is no surprise that a visit to his Web site includes a virtual tour of the toaster collection he keeps on shelves along one wall ceiling high in the basement of his home on Omar Circle.
He had always admired a 1938 vintage toaster that his mother-in-law, Reba Gordon, had in her home, Keyes said. He felt the toaster evoked a certain period in American life, but by the time he mustered the nerve to ask her if he could have it, she had discarded it. He regarded this as “another missed opportunity,” he said. So when he started finding toasters in all kinds of odd places, he began to acquire them. The pride of his collection is a 1940s “Toast-O-Lator” that works by moving the bread from one end and to the other along a conveyor belt. He also owns old radios, cameras, mix-masters, hair dryers and an antique typewriter.
Interviewed in the “toaster museum,” Keyes said that a talk he gave at the Rod Serling Workshop on the fear of writing had led him to pen The Courage to Write: How Writers Transcend Fear (Henry Holt, 1995) some 20 years later. The Courage to Write, which has been in print for over 11 years, and Is There Life After High School? (Little, Brown, 1976), which was the basis of a Broadway musical, are his two most commercially successful books. However, he feels that The Post-Truth Era and Timelock: How Life Got So Hectic and What You Can Do About It (Ballantine Books, 1992) contain some of his best writing.
A tour of the rest of his basement reveals Keyes’s pack-rat tendencies. Ancient filing cabinets are stacked two-high everywhere around the 1,400 foot space. And there are more in his office. “This is why I can never move,” he said with a sweeping gesture.
Oddly enough, according to Keyes, it is from these files that he gets the ideas for his books. He gathers and stores newspaper and magazine articles and other bits of information, often his own jottings, as he comes upon them and stores them for possible later use. While searching his files for a work in progress, he may very well come upon the seed of an idea for his next book or article.
Often one of his own books will lead him to write another on a related topic. To learn that Nice Guys Finish Seventh: False Phrases, Spurious Sayings, and Familiar Misquotations (Harper Collins, 1992) gave rise to The Quote Verifier, which in turn, sparked Retrotalk, the book Keyes is currently working on, should come as no surprise. They are all about getting it right when it comes to quotations and sayings.
Retrotalk, his fifth book on language, will be about words and phrases that have their roots in past events. Not only will it reveal the fruits of his research on the true origins of such phrases as “cut and run” and “show me the money,” but it will serve as a primer for immigrants who want to understand American English and those too young to know what it means to be a “Mrs. Robinson,” or to do a “rope-a-dope.”
For Keyes, writing about words, the tools of his trade, is a natural. “I’ve always been fascinated by the ways in which language evolves with the times, in this country especially,” he said. He is particularly intrigued by the detective game of who said what, where, and when, “where so much of what we think we know just ain’t so.”
A disciplined writer, he generally works from 9:30 in the morning until 1 or 2 in the afternoon, writing, doing serious research, or editing. Every other day, when he is done with his morning work, he exercises by running, walking, or biking. After a late lunch, he naps, then works again from 5 until 7 or 8 p.m. Regarding their late dinner hour, he said, “We eat like Europeans.”
Keyes marvels that he can never gauge a book’s success in advance. He said he wrote The Courage to Write for his peers, but surprisingly it found an audience of aspiring writers who, to this day, send him heartfelt letters and e-mails. The subject matter of that book has become the major topic of his frequent speaking engagements at writers’ workshops.
“When people ask me if I gamble,” he said, “I tell them, ‘Yes, I write books.’”