Tag: Paperboy

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Book Features Books

Paperboy Trilogy

I worked with Vince Vawter at the old Memphis Press-Scimitar when it was in the now-demolished Memphis Publishing Co. building (what we veterans still call “the old building”) at 495 Union Avenue.

It looked like those old newsrooms in the movies of the 1930s and ’40s. And it was full of characters that rivaled any character actors in those old newspaper movies.

Vawter brings that old newsroom — and the Memphis of another era — to life as part of the background of his latest book, Manboy, which is part three of his Paperboy Trilogy.

Vawter’s 40-year career in newspapers includes publisher and president of the Evansville Courier & Press, managing editor of The Knoxville News Sentinel, and news editor of the Memphis Press-Scimitar.

Vawter, who lives in Louisville, Tennessee, will be at a book signing at 2 p.m. on February 10th at Novel.

I recently asked Vawter some questions about the book.

Vince Vawter at the Blount County Public Library (Photo: Betty Vawter)

Memphis Flyer: Were you ever a copy boy? I seem to remember you telling me you weren’t.

Vince Vawter: I was never a copy clerk. I started my newspaper career as a sportswriter at the Pine Bluff Commercial in Arkansas. My first job at The Press-Scimitar was on the copy desk. I thought that placing the protagonist, Victor Vollmer, as a copy clerk was a good way for him to enter the newspaper business, just like somebody else I know.

What was it about the old Memphis Publishing building that made it so special?

The Memphis Publishing Company building was once owned by the Ford Motor Company and was re-adapted for newspaper publishing. It had the openness and feel of a newsroom with its 20-foot ceilings and desks jammed together with pneumatic tubes running hither and yon. I liked to feel the concrete floors rumble when the giant presses would crank up to full speed. I wanted readers to experience the feel of a genuine newsroom in the heyday of newspapers and explain how a newspaper was actually produced on deadline. All the newspaper headlines in Manboy are verbatim from The Press-Scimitar and The Commercial Appeal.

How much of your lead character is like you?

Victor Vollmer is certainly based on my early life in all three books of the trilogy, especially the portions dealing with my stutter. … Some readers question the naivete of the protagonist, but you have to remember this was the ’60s and another world from what we have now.

I love all the history of Memphis that I can relate to because I grew up in the ’50s and ’60s.

Of the three books in the trilogy, this is the one that treats the city of Memphis as almost a character in itself. When Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated, I rushed back to Memphis from Pine Bluff, Arkansas.

I spent that weekend in April 1968 just watching the city and listening. I remember those four days like it was yesterday. My most vivid memory is watching the Downtown march on that Monday after the assassination and then being swept up in it. I can still hear one of the parade marshals telling everyone “not to chew gum” while they were marching. The march was orderly and personally inspiring.

Will there be another one of these? Maybe the lead character becomes a newspaper reporter or an editor.

Paperboy introduces Vic when he is 11. In Copyboy, Vic is 17. He is 21 in Manboy. I envisioned the trilogy after the publication of Paperboy when literally hundreds of readers emailed me questions wanting to know what happened to the characters in the book. I decided to bring readers along on the complete journey. I doubt there will be another Paperboy book because a four-book set is known as a “tetralogy,” which seems a little off-putting and Jurassic.

What kind of feedback do you get from readers of these three books?

Readers say they appreciate that I shared the entire journey from adolescence to adulthood with them. This is rarely done in literature these days. Although most of my readers seem to be older than the “young adult” label, I did want the narrative to grow along with my readers.

The books were published over a 10-year period, just as the narrative encompasses 10 years of Vic’s life. Close readers, especially speech-language pathologists, say they admire how Vic’s attitudes about his stutter change over the 10-year period. After the success of Paperboy [Newbery Honor, quarter-million in sales, translated into 18 languages], I was a little taken aback that Penguin Random House chose not to continue with the story. The reason given was that the publisher did not like popular protagonists to grow older. That’s not life, I said, and my books are my life. My publisher said that it may not be life, but it’s publishing.

Any news on the musical made from Paperboy? Anything else happening? A movie maybe?

The musical’s creative team entered Paperboy and its 22 original songs in two musical theater competitions this spring in New York City. We hope that this will result in another production besides the one we had at the Manhattan School of Music last year. We continue to hear rumblings from movie types, but nothing to report so far. I think the trilogy itself and the boy’s 10-year journey would make a more complete movie narrative and satisfy more viewers, but we’ll just bide our time.

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News Feature Theater Theater Feature

Paperboy — Musical Based on Former Memphian’s Novel — Gets a New York Run

A reading of the "Paperboy" musical with the show's Kolter Erickson and a fellow student at Manhattan School of Music (Credit: Vince Vawter)

Memphis will take a bite out of the Big Apple when the production of Paperboy opens in New York March 24th and runs through March 26th at the Manhattan School of Music.

The musical is based on the 2013 book by the same name written by veteran newspaper editor and publisher Vince Vawter who grew up in the Bluff City. Memphis theatergoers and transplants will recognize identifiable locations.

“There’s a whole lot of Memphis in it,” Vawter says. “I was afraid it would be kind of sanitized and there wouldn’t be any Memphis in it. No, it’s all Memphis. It’s set in 1959 Memphis and there’s no doubt about it.”

Vawter, 76, now lives in Louisville, Tennessee. He worked in newspapers for 40 years beginning with the old Memphis Press-Scimitar, where he was news editor, and continued as managing editor of The Knoxville News Sentinel. He then became publisher and president of the Evansville (Indiana) Courier & Press.

The book, published by Penguin Random House, is about a boy who stutters and takes over his friend’s newspaper route for a month one summer. In addition to the challenges of stuttering and collecting money in person from his newspaper customers, the book deals with growing up in the segregated South.

Vawter is excited about the opening of a New York musical based on his book about how he dealt with stuttering as a child, and how throwing the newspaper and meeting all the characters on his route was therapeutic.

Manhattan School of Music is “kind of the Juilliard of musical theater,” Vawter says. “It’s well respected.” The students “are on their way to Broadway. They’re all just fantastic.”

Paperboy won a prestigious Newbery Honor in 2014. In 2018, his sequel, Copyboy, was published by Capstone Editions.

Vince Vawter is author of Paperboy, which was made into a musical of the same name (Credit: J. Miles Cary)

Vawter was surprised how Paperboy took off. “I had no idea. I didn’t know if anybody would buy the book. I didn’t know if anybody would read the book. And it has been translated into 17 foreign languages. It’s just unbelievable.”

The performing arts community took notice after the book was published. “We started getting a lot of feelers from movie production companies. And I kind of had in mind it was going to be made into a movie.”

Then around 2016, Vawter began talking to John Verlenden, an old classmate from Southwestern at Memphis (now Rhodes College). “I said, ‘John, I think I’m going to try to write a stage play based on Paperboy.’ And without missing a beat he said, ‘Vince, I think it should be a musical.’”

Verlenden told Vawter he should talk to Jim Wann, a friend he grew up with who lives in Chattanooga. “Jim was nominated for a Tony for writing and performing in Pump Boys and Dinettes.” Vawter contacted Wann, but then put it out of his mind because he didn’t think anything was going to come of it. “Then I started getting these songs on MP3s. He wrote them and he sang them with his guitar. I’m saying, ‘Golly, Bill. There is something to this.’”

He and Wann worked together for a couple of years. “I tried to write what is called the ‘musical book.’ Well, I just kind of replicated my story. We finally realized what we needed was some real Broadway talent.”

Wann contacted producer friends in New York — Don Stephenson and his wife, Emily Loesser. And that’s “Loesser” as in the legendary Broadway playwright Frank Loesser of Guys and Dolls fame. “He contacted them and they got interested. And this is the thing that I just can’t believe: In addition to being a Broadway producer, Emily Loesser is a licensed speech pathologist. She still teaches there in New York.”

Stephenson, a Broadway actor and director, also teaches at the Manhattan School of Music. “He’s taught and directed plays there for years and years.”

Stephenson and Loesser “took what I had written and turned it into the language of Broadway.” David Shenton, who orchestrated the music, “put it into sheet music and everything.”

The musical features a variety of music associated with Memphis.  “It’s got a lot of rockabilly in it. It’s got a lot of blues. It kind of taps into the Memphis sound, because it’s set in Memphis in 1959 like the book is.”

As if everything wasn’t fantastic already, veteran Broadway choreographer Liza Gennaro choreographed the show. Her father, the late Peter Gennaro, was the choreographer for the 1957 Broadway production of West Side Story. “She is the dean of musical theater at the Manhattan School of Music. Liza came to a few of our readings and she was so enthralled that she signed on as choreographer.”

Vawter got together with Gennaro, Stephenson, and Loesser. “We read through it. We played the music. And then Don said, ‘I’m going to try and get a workshop at the Manhattan School of Music.’”

They did one workshop at the school. “Then Covid hit and everything just got thrown up in the air. But we did two workshops in ’21 and ’22 with the Manhattan School of Music. And then I think once Liza saw what we had, she said Manhattan School of Music would like to produce it.”

The theater on campus seats 625. “It kind of reminds me of the Orpheum. It was an old theater and they’ve completely redone it in style.”

They began rehearsing January 11th. “They rehearsed three and a half hours a night six days a week. It’s just so intense. We’d Zoom into all the rehearsals.”

Kolter Erickson, who plays the paperboy, is a “great singer and dancer,” Vawter says. “He just nails all the songs.”

Erickson, who doesn’t stutter, had help learning how to stutter from Emily, Vawter says. “Occasionally, I would jump in with something, but he kind of nailed it on his own. He doesn’t stutter like I do. He stutters in his own natural way. He’s very fluent.”

And, Vawter says, “He stutters a lot better than I do. Truly. His stutter now is just very natural. In fact, at one of the rehearsals I told him if he needed to go to speech therapy after this is over, I’d fund it. One of the underlying themes of this whole production is that 98 percent of the people who stutter can sing without any problem. So, his songs are beautiful. He doesn’t stutter when he sings.”

The story is “just like the story which is in the book. But it’s told in the language of musical theater. So, while I had some input in how the narrative was created, it’s mostly Don and and Emily because they speak that language. But the main plot of the story itself is like the book. Some of the characters are different, but it’s told for the 2023 New York musical stage.

“I will say, Don and Emily, when they made a big change they did run everything by me and I so appreciate that. I said, ‘I don’t care what you do with the story, I do want to keep it my story, though.’ In fact, they did it a lot more than I anticipated. It starts out with the old paperboy who is my age who has written a book. Then the middle of the story is the 11-year old paperboy that one summer.”

Vawter and his wife Betty traveled to New York three times to watch the rehearsals. And they’ll be back this week for the two live dress rehearsals before the show opens, as well as opening night.

“What most amazed me is there are things I wanted to do in the novel, which I couldn’t do because it was on the printed page. And they can do it on the stage. Like there is one scene where the paperboy gets embarrassed at a big party.”

The scene is based on an incident that happened to Vawter at the old Grisanti’s restaurant downtown on Front Street. “I said something. I stuttered a lot. And some grownups started laughing at me and I got embarrassed and I wound up throwing up all over the table. I threw up my spaghetti. There’s a whole song written about this called ‘Splishghetti.’ It ends with a crazy Jerry Lee Lewis type of dance.”

The songs, backed by a 16-piece orchestra, include “Streets of Our Neighborhood,” which include recognizable Memphis streets. “Vinton, Melrose, Goodbar, and Carr, Bellevue, and Belvedere. He took all the names of the streets I had in my book and he turned it into a song.”

“Memphis Minnie,” which is about the late blues singer, is one of the most popular songs in the show, Vawter says. In the musical, Vawter’s speech tutor “sings how Memphis Minnie turned her life around by her force of nature and that the paperboy can do it, too.”

The show’s creative team are inviting “every commercial producer they know to come to the performances. And we’re probably talking at least a couple of dozen.”

The Vawters, of course, invited their friends. “There’s a bus going up from Knoxville and it’s got 60 people on it. And I’ve got another 40 or 50 friends and family that are coming up from all over the country. So, it’s going to be a Tennessee takeover of New York on that weekend.”

Categories
Intermission Impossible Theater

Vince Vawter’s Paperboy a Future Musical?

CREDIT: Michael Donahue

Michael Donahue

Vince Vawter

Paperboy: The New Musical?

That’s the working title for a musical now in development based on former Memphian Vince Vawter’s 2013 novel, Paperboy. Jim Wann, composer/lyricist, author and star of the 1982 Tony-nominated Pump Boys and Dinettes, is doing the music.

The semi-autobiographical novel is about an 11-year-old boy named “Little Man” (Vawter), who throws a paper route in Memphis one summer in 1959. The novel recounts the adventures of the boy, who stutters, and the characters he meets on his Midtown route.

Vawter, 72, who threw the old Memphis Press-Scimitar newspaper as a teenager, went on to become news editor of that paper. He was managing editor of the Knoxville News Sentinel and publisher and president of the Evansville Courier & Press.

Paperboy was a Newbery Medal Honor book in 2014. Vawter’s current novel is Copyboy.

Vawter says the whole musical idea began about two years ago after he asked John Verlenden, a friend who went to school with him at Southwestern (now Rhodes College), what he thought about Paperboy becoming a stage play. “He said it ought to be a musical,” Vawter says. “You need to talk to my friend Jim Wann.”

“So, I contacted him,” Vawter says. “Sent him the book. And I didn’t hear anything for a couple of weeks. And then these damn songs started coming. And they blew me away. I don’t know much about that stuff, but he did what he calls ‘song sketches.’ Plays them on his guitar, writes the lyrics.”

Wann sent the songs as mp3s. “It’s just him and his guitar.”

Among the songs were “Paperboy Song,” “The Typewriter Song,” “Streets of our Neighborhood,” and “Lay That News Gently at my Door.”

They’re all “songs you wind up humming,” Vawter says.

Wann, 70, who lives near Hudson, New York, says he “was just entranced” by Paperboy after he read it. “Like so many people.”

He described Little Man as “a wonderfully brave character. And that impressed me so much. His bravery. His struggles to find a way to overcome his feelings about his stuttering. I guess he would have loved to wake up one morning and have it not be there at all, but he had to come to terms with it somehow.”

Wann, who is from Chattanooga, and Vawter share similarities about their Southern upbringing. I thought, ‘Well, I’ll write a few songs and see what Vince thinks of it.’”

Describing “Streets of our Neighborhood,” Wann says, “I just loved the sounds of these streets: Vinton, Melrose, Harbert, Union. It was a way of introducing Little Man into the world of delivering papers into the neighborhood.

“All of the music in all of my shows has a Southern roots connection. It always comes in some form of Southern roots music, whether gospel, folk, blues, rhythm and blues. And I felt like this being set in 1959, would be a good fit for that.”

When will the musical be finished? “We are still a good distance from achieving our goals for this story as a stage musical,” Wann says.

And, he says, “I feel, even though we have a full draft at this point, it’s still very sketchy and I think we’ve only just started figuring out how to let the other characters live and breath on their own. The other parts of the story are so rich and the characters are so interesting. I still think we have a way to go with really expressing Little Man’s feelings of loneliness and isolation and his bravery in going out into the world and making new friends, however awkwardly.”

Getting to know Vawter was the icing on the cake, Wann says. “We’ve worked together on and off for a couple of years now. I really enjoy his company. And all the things he tells me. It’s a real friendship between us now. And that’s a huge plus.”

Jim Wann