Jim Lehrer (1934–2020)

(2004)Very good tale that involves Birdie, who is found in the depths of KC's Union Station having claimed to lived there for 60 years. He had escaped from insane asylum in MO and his demon is having witnessed the Union Station Massacre in the 30s. Turns out he was a finger man for the mob and was hidden out in the asylum but he later escaped to live in the station.Washington PostEven though its epic scope spans all but a few years of the 20th century, Jim Lehrer's latest book, Flying Crows, is the almost painfully intimate story of a young man and a much older one who, for a brief time, were co-inmates at the Missouri State Hospital for the Insane at Somerset. This is the 14th novel for Lehrer, best known for anchoring the nightly "NewsHour" on PBS, and it's full of scenes and images that will stay with you long after you've finished reading.In 1997, just before restoration is about to begin on the old Union Station in Kansas City, the police are conducting a final inspection of the long-empty premises, and Lt. Randy Benton discovers an old man named Birdie Carlucci, who's been living in the terminal for the past 63 years.The book's plot tells how Birdie escaped from Somerset, how he got to the station and how he stayed there for so long. But as in most great novels, the story itself is only a small part of the richness, underscoring as it does the meanings of incarceration and escape, and delving deeply into the twisted logistics of America's official mindset regarding the mentally ill in the early part of the 1900s.The novel also tells the story of Joshua Alan Lancaster. He has been in the asylum since 1905, and when Birdie arrives in 1933, Josh senses in him a kind of sanity and innocence that drive the two together for reasons that will become apparent much later. Josh has been incarcerated because he witnessed a brutal massacre by Quantrill's Raiders in the small Missouri town of Centralia toward the end of the Civil War; the scenes of his retelling the story at an inmate's assembly are vivid and gripping. Birdie has been committed because he was present at a famous and deadly gangster vs. cop shootout at the old Union Station and became psychotic over it. Their common experience becomes the foundation of a touching and unshakable bond of understanding.As Randy Benton tries to piece together Birdie's story and find out who the old man in the train station really is, he uncovers more than he bargained for and gets an education as well.It's startling to realize that until a very few years ago state mental patients were treated in the way Lehrer describes -- watched over by attendants, known here as "bushwhackers," whose cruelty isn't sadistic or even particularly brutal, but almost casual. The inmates are soothed with long and pointless sessions in the bathtub, trussed up with leather straps, shocked by electric probes, tranquilized with padded baseball bats, threatened with death and vivisection; and always, every day, they rock endlessly on the porch in dark pine chairs that go bump . . . ta, bump . . . ta -- one of Lehrer's most potent and disturbing images.After their successful escape, however, Josh voluntarily returns to the asylum and Birdie hides alone in the train station for the rest of his life. There are all kinds of prisons. We learn much about the history of the Midwest -- both the Civil War massacre and the Kansas City shootout really happened -- as the action goes from one decade to another, bouncing back and forth from Josh's near-death in 1918, when he is saved by a doctor who is the asylum's only decent human being, to 1933 when the two inmates break out and stow away to Kansas City aboard the train known as the Flying Crow, and again to Randy Benton's investigation in 1997. The book's title refers not only to the train, but to the two men who, after tasting freedom, feel they have become as free as flying crows.Jim Lehrer's research into that history is impressive. Much more so, though, is Josh and Birdie's definition of freedom, and the author's insight into the prisons and asylums we all manage to construct for ourselves in our own minds.Reviewed by Les Roberts… (more)