The audience quiets and the lights go up in Wine Recital Hall.  In an instant, Dr. Scott Strode makes his appearance, hurried and rattled, briefcase in hand.  When he speaks, with recollection and assuredness about his good friend and neighbor—the author Booth Tarkington—Strode disappears and the audience gets to know Jackson Edward Spriggs Jr.

  
Booth Tarkington is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, Spriggs will tell you.  And he is, having won for the books “Alice Adams” and “The Magnificent Ambersons.” 

What he also will tell you is something that most may not know:  Booth was an Indiana boy, and was rather mischievous, but was loyal and hardworking.  Tarkington attended Purdue University for a brief time, but went on to Princeton University.  When he became a famous author, he was ranked among the top 12 greatest Americans in the New York Times. 

  
As a friend of Spriggs, he was humble, and rather addicted to tobacco and alcohol.  “He was nuts,” Spriggs recalls. 

Throughout his life, Tarkington sometimes doubted himself, but did what he felt he was good at.  He wrote and analyzed literature, and he spent time with the affluent.  But he never forgot where his roots were.

When retired Manchester English professor Charles Boebel was asked to write the play to commemorate the centennial of the North Manchester Public Library, he had originally planned, he said, to write the part of Tarkington to fit Strode. 

He hit a few roadblocks along the way, including Strode’s beard for the clean-shaven Tarkington, and had to completely rethink what he had planned to write.  Boebel thinks that the script worked out better this way and offered a more personal and different feel than it would have had Tarkington himself narrated it.  He was able to expand on the information he had gathered, which was no easy feat.

Finding personal information on Tarkington was arduous, but after the performance on April 9, it was well worth it.  Tarkington was an intelligent and articulate man, and loved his home state.  Thanks to Boebel’s extensive research and Strode’s great performance, we were able to learn about a very talented and very underrated author…a great neighbor indeed.

  
A discussion of Tarkington’s famous book, “The Magnificent Ambersons,” will be held on April 17, 7:00, led by Dr. Donald Gray, professor emeritus at Indiana University, at the public library.  Free copies of the book are available from the local library.

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