Adirondack
Wild School Tales from Miami
by
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“My recollections of James began with the South Florida golfer story that went like this: In the mid-1950s, a foursome was out on the fairways in nearby Coral Gables when a terrific thunderstorm came up. It was the usual monsoon-style downpour with blinding sheets of rain, powerful wind gusts and deadly slices of lightning. The foursome took shelter under a large Ficus tree on the course that was promptly struck by lightning. The tree was gnarled up and split in half, looking finally like a gigantic burned matchstick. One of the foursome ‘bought it’ as they say in golf and war with a direct hit that actually melted the keys in his pocket. The other three of course were badly shaken up by the loss of their colleague and the near miss on themselves. When asked what they did next by a reporter, back at the clubhouse, one of them said “Did? Why we continued playing naturally. Bob would have wanted it that way!” People took their golf seriously down there and lightning strikes were real, like being bitten by a poisonous snake. Golfers saw themselves as taking part in a heroic struggle against tropical risks and the elements. Less well known was how his parents, Janice and Robert Brooke, were killed in a magical realist twist, perfect for the neon flooded golden glitz of South Florida. Such deaths were fitting for a Garcia Marquez novel or B science fiction film. In any case, they added a novel chapter to the ongoing saga of dramatic and unusual demises in South Florida. James’ parents had died ‘mysteriously,’ locals described it, in the early 1930s. A lightning bolt sizzled right through the roof of their house in the Grove and killed both his mom in the bathtub and his father in bed during a spectacular storm late one night. But most storms always killed someone else---someone you didn’t know. This one killed his parents. To round out the story, there were dark rumors of their eerie séances, visiting hypnotists, conjurers of paranormal magnetic forces, and otherworldly magical events that surrounded their life there. That made their tragic end almost expected and predictable, as if they had conjured up the death bolt onto themselves. Some even said that the bolt might have been conjured up by one of their oddball guests with a grudge against them. Someone had “put a spell on them” as the Nina Simone lyrics went…!”
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About the Book
When private school English teacher John Gausman learns that his former student, James Brooke, had been killed in the recent Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, he decides with support of his school Adirondack Grove School near Miami to delve deeper into Brooke’s life. Reviewing his incomplete diary, interactions and interviews with former classmates, discussions with friends and faculty, and recollections of his own experiences with James as his student at the boarding school, Professor Gausman prepares the diary for publication. From his research, Gausman is surprised to learn of the inner doubts, personal reflections and boisterous experiences of his former student whom he had known for only three years as a middle school boarding student in the late 1950s. Years later in an effort to explain and understand Brooke’s experiences through school and to the end of his life, with his faculty interactions, and himself, Gausman begins editing Brooke’s diary entries that describe his boisterous times as a middle school student in a Miami boarding school in the late 1950s. Gausman is able to explain much of Brooke’s peculiar behavior at school from his tragi-comic family relationships, schoolmate friendships, and innocent romantic experiences with girls from a nearby school. Brooke’s writings follow his maturation journey through competitive athletics, multiple humiliations of being bullied, and later as he becomes intertwined in the political regime of Fidel Castro—slowly unveiling the dramatic events of his short life. Adirondack is a coming-of-age tale that traces the life of a boy and his friends at a Miami boarding school and beyond during a turbulent geopolitical time in South Florida sociopolitical history.
About the Author
George Guess holds a PhD from the University of California, Riverside, and a bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley, both in political science. He was a Fulbright scholar to Uruguay, Honduras and Costa Rica; a tenured associate professor at Georgia State University, Atlanta, and worked in the Fiscal Affairs Department at IMF in Washington, DC. Dr. Guess is the author of several other academic books and novels.