“Snippets”: A life told in ‘Snippets’

Gordon Strayer, known to many from his long career with the University of Iowa News Services, has collected memories from his long life into 'Snippets: A Memoir” (Xlibris, $19.99, 292 pages).

He began writing essays in the 1990s when the UI Retirees Association started a memoir writing group, now known as the Gray Hawks.

Strayer was born in Saskatchewan, Canada, where his American-born parents were wheat farmers. When it was time for high school, he lived in Avon, Ill., with relatives, returning to Canada to help on the farm in the summer.

Now 91, Strayer writes about outliving all the members of his 'Gang of Seven” from high school. 'Maybe you think this isn't a sobering thought,” he writes. 'I'll be surprised if I don't catch some curious glances in my direction at our next class reunion - or even worse, notice someone pointing and asking his tablemates, ‘Why him?'”

After school, Strayer worked at the Caterpillar factory in Peoria before enlisting in the Army during World War II. His essays about 'my completely undistinguished military career” provide an interesting perspective into the lives of ordinary soldiers - no romance or drama, just a lot of moving around, waiting and training.

Some of the book's best snippets come from those wartime years - flying a glider, sharing the somber mood of GIs when President Franklin Roosevelt died and witnessing the moving reunion of his crotchety German 'landlady” with her soldier brother. You'll cheer when you read his account of a military trial involving a sergeant who spoke his mind to an incompetent commander.

Back home, Strayer met and married Faye Hyde, an Iowan. Strayer tells funny stories about the couple living in 'Hawkeye Village,” the tiny, temporary, Spartan trailers set up on the east bank of the Iowa River to accommodate the flood of GIs after the war.

He began working for University News Services before he finished journalism school. He worked there from 1950 until he retired in 1990 as director of health communications.

Reading his essays shows how news gathering has changed over the years - the transition from black-and-white photos to color slides; the introduction of charts and graphs into news stories; and the first 'live” film footage of a spectacular fire at the Chemistry-Botany building in 1953.

Strayer had a front-row seat to UI physicist James Van Allen's early space experiments and to the 1957 Rose Bowl, which the Hawkeyes won. He knew poet Paul Engle, and he organized coverage of businessman Roy Carver's first big financial gift to the UI.

You'll find some repetition in the stories, which goes with collecting essays written over a period of time. But Strayer always finagles some new angles that make the story fresh. Overall, the book is a nice visit with a good storyteller who enjoyed his job, his family and his friends.