Media Kit:
Letters to Zerky,
a Father's Legacy to a Lost Son and a Road Trip Around the World
Book description - Bill will write this Link to some book pages - Bill will let me know Bill Raney Bio - link to "About the Author" Photos (hi res photos of Bill, cover, other) Link to a high-resolution photo
Press releases Radio interviews Music Video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INdvGU4cHbs
Press Releases
Santa Cruz Sentinel http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/ci_12104260 Forty years after the fact, Nickelodeon founder Bill Raney tells an astounding story of adventure and pathos Click photo to enlarge * « In the period between 1966 and 1970, Bill Raney experienced enough sublime joy, crushing tragedy and pivotal life changes to embarrass a Russian novelist. In that brief span, Raney and his wife JoAnne adopted an infant son, traveled with the child by van across the length of Europe and Asia, and later moved from San Francisco to Santa Cruz. There, the Raneys adopted a second child and JoAnne became pregnant with a third. Together, Bill and JoAnne opened an art-house movie theater -- the same movie house that Santa Cruzans now know and love as the Nickelodeon. Then, JoAnne, eight months pregnant, died suddenly. A year later, the oldest son was killed in an accident. He was only 4 years old. Forty years later, Raney is reliving those exhilarating and awful years in a new book that focuses on the most epic of those experiences. "Letters to Zerky" is Raney's account of the year-long trip across Eurasia he took with his wife JoAnne and his young son Eric Xerxes Raney, aka Zerky. In the spring of 1967, the Raney family traveled overseas with no real plans other than to wander through Europe. In Germany, they bought a Volkswagen camper-van and later decided to make it a trip of a lifetime. After circling through Western Europe and going into the Eastern bloc as far as what was then Czechoslovakia, the Raneys shot south along the Adriatic coast through Greece, east to Turkey and then down through southern Asia. They ended up spending significant time in Iran, But what's especially intriguing about the travelogue is that it was not written by an older and wiser Bill Raney looking back on an adventure that largely defined his life. It was culled from letters he was writing at the time while traveling, from a narrator that has no idea what crippling surprises life has in store for him after the trip, from a father speaking to a son he knew would be too young to remember. "There was no intention that this would ever be a book," said Raney, who ran the Nickelodeon with his second wife Nancy until 1992 when he sold the theater. "These were actual letters that I wrote to Zerky at the time. JoAnne and I knew we would be talking about this trip because it was the biggest event of our lives, and we knew he wouldn't remember any of it. But he'd hear us talking about it, and feel left out. So we came up with this idea that I would write him a series of letters." Raney's letters were combined with his wife's diary entries of the trip, to create an immediate account of a journey through a world before globalization and terror alerts, along paths rarely frequented by American tourists. But shortly after the Raneys' return to the U.S., tragic events gave the trip a patina of sorrow and wistfulness. In the summer of 1969, not yet a month after the opening of the Nickelodeon, JoAnne Raney suffered an aneurism in her brain and died suddenly at her home where the present-day Nickelodeon now stands. A year later, young Zerky, riding his tricycle in the residential streets near Santa Cruz High School, was accidentally struck by a truck and killed. As a result, Raney's letters to his son were, in Raney's mind, rendered moot. "After he died, the whole thing became academic and I just forgot about it." Five years ago, however, when Bill and Nancy Raney were living on a houseboat, Bill rediscovered the letters and eventually, combined with JoAnne's diary and photos and maps of the journey, he fashioned it into a book. As a travel book, "Letters" presents not only a portrait of different places, but of different times. One of the reasons that Raney was moved to put out the book was that the Iraq war, and other events in the Middle East, made Americans much more aware of the region than they had been before. "If you said in those days that you went to Afghanistan, well, most people didn't know what Afghanistan was. When they thought of traveling, they thought of going to Hawaii, or something." In that year of travel, the Raneys experienced several bizarre moments: being held a gunpoint by a group of Turkish soldiers, watching their young son taken away by a Persian tribesman on horseback. Raney wants to talk about the grand trip, not only because of what it says about the world outside the U.S., or about the times. But because it's his way of keeping the memory of his first wife and his lost son alive. He's also written and recorded a song about the trip called "Zerky's Waltz." He's refurbished an old VW van as the "Zerky-mobile," and he's working to establish a small park near the playing field at Santa Cruz High in memory of Zerky. "I loved JoAnne and I loved Zerky," he said. "Talking about them has always been refreshing to me. I've been comfortable all along about it. I think it's therapeutic." ____________________
home | metro santa cruz index | the arts | books | review http://www.metrosantacruz.com/metro-santa-cruz/04.08.09/books-0914.html Phaedra Photograph by Traci Hukill Nickelodeon founder Bill Raney pens a fine travelogue and a moving portrait of grief in 'Letters to Zerky.' By Traci Hukill The late 1960s, author Bill Raney reminds us, was a time when ordinary people could go on adventures without risking their futures or plunging into debt. The potent combination of cultural foment at home and a Herculean dollar abroad meant that trips to Europe--even lengthy ones--were not just appealing but attainable. In 1967, two years before they built the Nickelodeon Theatre on Lincoln Street in Santa Cruz, Raney and his first wife JoAnne took their 10-month-old baby Zerky (short for Eric Xerxes) and miniature dachsund Tarzan on a trip around the world in a Volkswagen camper. Conscious that his infant son was essentially missing the trip, Raney kept a diary in the form of letters addressed to Zerky. Together with photos from the trip, they form a travelog from a distinct moment in history, one in which the Cold War rumbled on even as a new global youth movement began to stir. As literature, Letters to Zerky does not particularly distinguish itself. The young Raney's musings reveal a level of self-consciousness that former diarists may find uncomfortably familiar. Youthful writers are often doing it for posterity--not the most attractive thing in a piece of prose. As a window into the world pre-globalization, however, it's excellent. Raney writes with a judicious level of detail. Southwest Spain, he writes early on, is the poorest place he's ever seen until he visits Kosovo. Sarajevo's Ottoman history is immediately obvious in the architecture and dress. Pakistan has too many guns. Examined today, these details reveal history, movements, phases in Cold War geopolitics. San Francisco.com Real Estate San Jose.com Real Estate It's as a portrait of grief that Letters to Zerky truly excels. In July 1969, about a year after their return to California and a month after the opening of the Nick, JoAnne died of a cerebral aneurism. She was eight months pregnant. Raney sleepwalks through the next year. "How do you handle the death of a spouse?" he asks. "I can only speak for myself: I think you don't handle it, it handles you." And then things actually got worse. In the summer of 1970, 3-year-old Zerky was struck and killed by a car while riding his tricycle. Looking back, Raney is graceful, restrained, anything but maudlin. "After the passage of nearly forty years, Zerky's death haunts me more than JoAnne's, even though hers hurt more at the time," he writes. It doesn't just explain how the book came to be; it imbues it with a gently persistent message not to wait, not to squander, not to miss anything. BILL RANEY The author reads from 'Letters to Zerky: A Father's Legacy to a Lost Son ... and a Road Trip Around the World' on Sunday, April 12, at noon at the Nickelodeon, 210 Lincoln St., Santa Cruz. Free. For info call 831.429.4234 or visit www.letterstozerky.com. ________________________ Good Times http://www.gtweekly.com/20090407404108/a-e/literature/book-of-love Book of Love | Print | E-mail Part homespun diary, part travelogue and part history lesson, “Letters to Zerky,” is a fascinating, lighthearted and touching tale. In 1967 Bill Raney, local resident and founder of downtown Santa Cruz’s venerable Nickelodeon Theatre, undertook an adventure of behemoth proportions. Along with his wife JoAnne and their infant son, Eric Xerxes (thus the nickname Zerky), Raney set out from San Francisco on the ultimate road trip—across Europe, the Middle East and Asia—in a Volkswagen bus. The trio bravely crossed mountains, deserts and oceans, and the couple captured their harrowing experiences in a series of letters written to their young son, so that he could later relive the around the world adventure that he was then too young to contemplate. Tragically, Zerky died only a few years after returning from the trip and the letters became “lost”—stored away at the Raney residence for more than 30 years. “I stumbled across the letters in a file cabinet about five years ago,” Raney says. “Most of them were written in the back seat of our bus. The purpose was to create letters I could give to Zerky when he was older, so when he died, the raison d’être of the letters disappeared and I basically forgot about them. After I found them, I decided they could be made into a book. I knew I could do it myself so I ended up self-publishing it. That’s how the book came about—serendipity.” “Letters to Zerky” is an astonishing tale that encapsulates a bygone era. While war was raging in Vietnam, the countries of Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan were relatively peaceful, allowing visitors to pass right on through—a situation completely unheard of in today’s political climate. Raney sums it up by saying, “Times were different back then.” Although it was relatively smooth sailing, the family encountered more than a few terrifying experiences. Raney recalls one incident in particular that took place as they were passing through Eastern Turkey. “I woke up with soldiers pointing guns at me. Americans are paranoid when it comes to traveling to far off places. We have a predisposition to thinking that danger lurks about, but these soldiers were actually trying to save us, from potential robbers. They didn’t want us to fall victim and they conveyed that in the manner that soldiers do, which was to point their guns at us. It wasn’t what it seemed, and that happens a lot when you’re traveling in strange places and you don’t speak the language or know the culture. It goes with the territory of traveling,” Raney wisely says. Would Raney undergo this cross continental excursion again? “I’d love to, but I’m getting up in years,” he says. “It probably wouldn’t be wise to drive through Afghanistan today. And Pakistan seems to be falling apart at the moment, but all the other places you could go to. It would be insightful.” As a tribute to Zerky, Raney is creating the Zerkymobile. “It’s going to be rather unique and is kind of a story in itself. It’s a VW bus very similar to the one we drove, that is decorated with advertisements for the book,” he notes. “You’ll see it all around Santa Cruz.” “Letters to Zerky” is Raney’s first attempt in the writing and publishing world, and he says it is a labor of love for the darling little boy who never got to read his dad’s letters. _______________________
Library Listing: _____________
|
||||||
|
Return to Home Page | |||||
