Tales of the Tinkertoy (ePub)

When 15-year-old Gus Mazur leaves his Oklahoma birthplace to live with his aunt and uncle in New York City, he narrowly escapes the blame for getting a girl "in trouble." In the Big Apple, a whole new life opens for Gus-from boarding school to university to Marine Corps duty in Paris to a career at the WBN television network.

It's the dawn of civil rights struggles; WBN needs reporters with insider access to events off limits to their white counterparts, which enables Gus, as the network's only non-white producer, to be promoted to executive producer by the age of 30. Yet, he chafes when he's forced to run civil rights and Vietnam stories that hide the truth from the American people. But the money is good and there aren't many opportunities for "someone like him."

It is also a time of liberation when women in all walks of life assert themselves. No more so than in television. It's against a backdrop of war, a struggle for civil rights, women's liberation, and television that Gus's encounters with three exceptional ladies lead to a greater self-awareness:

• Joanna/Vicki: Gus's first love whose dedication to her career as an economist dictates a relationship based on yearning and remembrance as they pass through each other's lives-on-again, off-again.
• Lil: A gentle Chinese-American who keeps Gus real in the face of the compromises he's forced to make and the commercialism that pervades the television industry. After Gus is waylaid in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic Convention, she's instrumental in helping him piece his life back together.
• Skipper/Miriam: A dedicated third-grade teacher and exceptional athlete-Gus's bi-sexual lover, who by exposure to Gus's work, imagines herself an anchorwoman-a dream come true when she becomes the first woman to shatter television's glass ceiling.

Skipper's popularity takes WBN's management by surprise. She embodies the pent-up hopes of thousands of women long denied access to jobs such as hers. As she receives more and more mail from adoring fans, she begins to believe in her infallibility. To encourage this cult of personality Noah Goodstein, the manipulative, conniving president of WBN, surrounds her with sycophants and toadies.

The lives of the main characters begin to unravel when Skipper refuses to answer questions about her sister's disappearance. Her career threatened, she turns to Goodstein who will go to any lengths to protect the network's popular anchorwoman, provided Skipper agrees to marry him, a surefire way, he believes, of binding his most precious asset to the network. He's counting on her popularity to pay for the losses incurred by the News Division, which puts him at loggerheads with Gus who wants to preserve the objectivity of the News. And yet…despite Goodstein's clout with the authorities and Skipper's popularity, the police decide to look into her sister's whereabouts.

Simone de Beauvoir once called Stendhal and Joseph Conrad feminist writers. Add to that list Tolstoy (Anna Karenina), Henry James (Portrait of a Lady), and Theodore Dreiser (Carrie). Tales of the Tinkertoy carries on the tradition of these great minds.