Tacoma Reads Together Discussed Shoeless Joe by W.P. Kinsella 2012

A part of Cheney Stadium for people who were students in Tacoma in 1963 was the speech by President John Kennedy when he had started his re-election campaign in autumn 1963.  All the students were brought to Cheney Field to hear him speak.  I was brought by bus from my junior high school and remember seeing President Kennedy.  I was of course at the baseball stadium.   It must have been more than ten years later that I went to a ball game with cousins on a summer evening to gaze quietly at a huge American flag on the near horizon. 

The Fred Meyer store used a flag that size because they were the view from Cheney Stadium. 

Present at King's Books April 25th at 7 p.m. for the discussion listed in the Shoeless Joe program were Mayor Marilyn Strickland, Past-Mayor Ebersol, and Library Director Susan Odencrantz.  Mayor Strickland and the Tacoma Reads Together Group, she said,  picked "a book about  baseball" for the 2012 selection because they were dedicating part of Cheyenne Avenue as Clay Huntington Way this spring, a piece of road close to the Ball Park.

The Tacoma Reads Together Group hoped Kinsella would come to Tacoma to read, because he lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.  This was not possible.    Kinsella was an Iowa Writers' Workshop student from 1976 to 1978.   Shoeless Joe is about Iowa and Iowa City.  I was a student there from 1972 to 1974.   I scanned the photo in this blog entry at the Fred Meyer store, the site of the enormous American flag.   There I had first read on a poster on a metal stand at their door about scanning.  The description of this photo service was completely understandable and interesting.  It is my 1972 photograph of a farm outside Iowa City where two other students and I were at a Fiddler's Picnic. 

I had always accepted the sight of the store's very large flag without more thought about myself or others and Cheney Stadium.