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R.I.P. Chester Aaron, 96, garlic farmer, YA novelist, and WWII liberator
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leno...@yahoo.com
Sep 9, 2019, 3:52:48 PM9/9/19
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He lived in Occidental, California.
https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/pressdemocrat/obituary.aspx?n=chester-norman-aaron&pid=193804986
Most of it:
Chester Norman Aaron
May 9, 1923 - August 30, 2019
Chester was born in the coal-mining village of Butler, Pennsylvania, in 1923. He graduated from Butler High School in 1941 and was a boxer in the Golden Gloves program. After working in steel mills for two years, he enlisted in the US Army where, until the end of the war, he served as a heavy machine-gunner. He participated in the liberation of the concentration camp at Dachau. His personal account of his war experience is recorded in The Veterans History Project of the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress. His first published writing, a fictionalized impression of concentration camps, was published in UCLA's Daily Bruin, in 1946, under the editorship of Frank Mankiewicz. Seven photographs of the Dachau Camp he took and several post-liberation musical programs were contributed to the U.S. Holocaust Museum.
Following the war, he attended UCLA, then earned his undergraduate degree at UC Berkeley and his Masters' degree at San Francisco State University. He next worked for ten years at Alta Bates Hospital in Berkeley, as Chief X-Ray Technician, then joined the faculty in the English Department at Saint Mary's College in Moraga where he retired in 1997 as a full Professor. While serving as an X-Ray Technician, he testified at the State level against the then common practice of giving additional radiation to African Americans and sought to end the practice.
While teaching at Saint Mary's he lived on a sheep ranch in Bodega before building a home near Occidental. In Occidental, he became a garlic farmer and for more than 40 years grew over 60 varieties of garlic from 20 different countries. He is known worldwide for his books on garlic and his efforts in popularizing garlic farming.
He was also a prolific author of adult and young adult novels, stories and memoirs, publishing 28 books from 1967 to 2016. His books have been translated into French, German, Dutch and Chinese. Following publication of his first novel in 1967, About Us, he wrote well-received young adult novels. Better than Laughter, a Margaret K. McElderry book, was an early problem novel. Anne Fine said of An American Ghost that it should never go out of print. It was made as an ABC Weekend Special television program, Cougar! in 1984. Gideon, published in 1982, offered an adolescent hero acting as a resistance fighter in the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II. His first book, About Us, a semi-autobiographical novel recounting life growing up in the Depression Era as a Jew in the coal country of western Pennsylvania and his later collection of short stories, Symptoms of Terminal Passion, depicted his reoccurring themes of Jewish identity, the natural world, and the effects of war.
Chester received grants and awards from many organizations including the National Endowment for the Arts. He appeared numerous times on PBS and NPR, most recently discussing his memoir about his experiences with the artists who produced Salt of the Earth, the only blacklisted American film in history. He conducted memoir writing workshops at Santa Rosa Junior College...
(snip)
https://www.stmarys-ca.edu/professor-emeritus-chester-aaron-remembers-horrors-of-holocaust
(from 2006)
https://www.fantasticfiction.com/a/chester-aaron/
(book covers)
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22chester+aaron%22+books&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjig4-Sv8TkAhXI1FkKHZBFBKYQ_AUIFCgD&biw=1198&bih=934
(more covers)
https://www.google.com/search?source=hp&ei=16l2Xc-wOeXm_QbnspCwDA&q=chester+aaron+kirkus&oq=chester+aaron+kirkus&gs_l=psy-ab.3...1655.5437..5630...0.0..0.102.1494.19j1......0....1..gws-wiz.......0i131j0j0i10j0i22i30j33i299j33i160.PKcHd-sXYxU&ved=0ahUKEwiP-OzIvsTkAhVlc98KHWcZBMYQ4dUDCAc&uact=5
(Kirkus reviews)
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/59346.Chester_Aaron
(reader reviews)
https://www.facebook.com/kingofgarlic/
https://www.sonomacountygazette.com/cms/pages/sonoma-county-news-article-564.html
(2012 interview about the over-radiation of African Americans)
https://www.google.com/search?biw=1198&bih=934&tbm=vid&ei=KKp2Xf-WNq2O5wLHgLrQDg&q=%22chester+aaron%22&oq=%22chester+aaron%22&gs_l=psy-ab.3..0i8i30k1l4.4263.5046.0.5835.2.2.0.0.0.0.78.152.2.2.0....0...1c.1.64.psy-ab..0.2.152....0.r3PDxBfVnVM
(videos - about his farming)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0365083/?ref_=nm_flmg_wr_1
(about the TV special "Cougar!" 1984)
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/rec.arts.books.childrens/IoSVuJ05sNk/tNCRFGIsNvUJ;context-place=forum/rec.arts.books.childrens
(birthday post from 2013, with booklist, synopses, and a long, shocking interview from 2006)
Excerpt:
From Contemporary Authors:
Aaron's parents, Jews from Poland and Russia, emigrated from eastern Europe at the turn of the twentieth century to settle in the Pennsylvania mining town of North Butler (south of Pittsburgh) where they operated a small grocery store. Aaron's five brothers and one sister were nearly adults when he was born in 1923...
Realizing that many of his students were ignorant of the Nazi concentration camps, he knew the time had come to write about the Holocaust. In 1982's Gideon, which Naomi Lewis labeled a "powerful and important book" in St. James Guide to Children's Writers, a brave fourteen-year-old boy survives the Warsaw Ghetto and later the death camp at Treblinka through his own resourcefulness. A contributor to Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books praised the novel as a "moving and terrible story, written with craft and conviction."
Since publishing Gideon, Aaron has written several other well-received novels for younger readers. In Out of Sight, out of Mind, twin teen psychics find themselves orphaned and their efforts to present a talk on world peace thwarted by an aggressive foreign government. Lackawanna finds six homeless orphans bonding together as a family during the Great Depression of the 1930s, their sense of invulnerability shattered when one of them becomes lost while jumping a freight train. An American Ghost draws readers back to 1850, as young Albie and his home are washed down river during a flood, his only companion a female cougar seeking shelter so she can give birth to her cubs. Noting the "lasting quality" of these novels, Lewis praised Aaron's work for young readers as containing "an unquenchable spark of optimism, a hopeful energy, [that is] always to be found in the central youthful characters."
(end of excerpts)
From a brief bio, self-told:
"After I left the army I went to universities (UCLA and UC Berkeley and San Francisco State) and received a Masters Degree. For the next 20 years I worked as an x-ray technician in various Bay Area hospitals and became very political, helping organizing unions and writing about the practice (then prevalent in US hospitals) of over-radiating African Americans, young and old. I was fired. After 2 years walking the streets and living off my wife I stumbled into teaching at Saint Mary's College in Moraga, California."...
Lenona.
https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/pressdemocrat/obituary.aspx?n=chester-norman-aaron&pid=193804986
Most of it:
Chester Norman Aaron
May 9, 1923 - August 30, 2019
Chester was born in the coal-mining village of Butler, Pennsylvania, in 1923. He graduated from Butler High School in 1941 and was a boxer in the Golden Gloves program. After working in steel mills for two years, he enlisted in the US Army where, until the end of the war, he served as a heavy machine-gunner. He participated in the liberation of the concentration camp at Dachau. His personal account of his war experience is recorded in The Veterans History Project of the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress. His first published writing, a fictionalized impression of concentration camps, was published in UCLA's Daily Bruin, in 1946, under the editorship of Frank Mankiewicz. Seven photographs of the Dachau Camp he took and several post-liberation musical programs were contributed to the U.S. Holocaust Museum.
Following the war, he attended UCLA, then earned his undergraduate degree at UC Berkeley and his Masters' degree at San Francisco State University. He next worked for ten years at Alta Bates Hospital in Berkeley, as Chief X-Ray Technician, then joined the faculty in the English Department at Saint Mary's College in Moraga where he retired in 1997 as a full Professor. While serving as an X-Ray Technician, he testified at the State level against the then common practice of giving additional radiation to African Americans and sought to end the practice.
While teaching at Saint Mary's he lived on a sheep ranch in Bodega before building a home near Occidental. In Occidental, he became a garlic farmer and for more than 40 years grew over 60 varieties of garlic from 20 different countries. He is known worldwide for his books on garlic and his efforts in popularizing garlic farming.
He was also a prolific author of adult and young adult novels, stories and memoirs, publishing 28 books from 1967 to 2016. His books have been translated into French, German, Dutch and Chinese. Following publication of his first novel in 1967, About Us, he wrote well-received young adult novels. Better than Laughter, a Margaret K. McElderry book, was an early problem novel. Anne Fine said of An American Ghost that it should never go out of print. It was made as an ABC Weekend Special television program, Cougar! in 1984. Gideon, published in 1982, offered an adolescent hero acting as a resistance fighter in the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II. His first book, About Us, a semi-autobiographical novel recounting life growing up in the Depression Era as a Jew in the coal country of western Pennsylvania and his later collection of short stories, Symptoms of Terminal Passion, depicted his reoccurring themes of Jewish identity, the natural world, and the effects of war.
Chester received grants and awards from many organizations including the National Endowment for the Arts. He appeared numerous times on PBS and NPR, most recently discussing his memoir about his experiences with the artists who produced Salt of the Earth, the only blacklisted American film in history. He conducted memoir writing workshops at Santa Rosa Junior College...
(snip)
https://www.stmarys-ca.edu/professor-emeritus-chester-aaron-remembers-horrors-of-holocaust
(from 2006)
https://www.fantasticfiction.com/a/chester-aaron/
(book covers)
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22chester+aaron%22+books&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjig4-Sv8TkAhXI1FkKHZBFBKYQ_AUIFCgD&biw=1198&bih=934
(more covers)
https://www.google.com/search?source=hp&ei=16l2Xc-wOeXm_QbnspCwDA&q=chester+aaron+kirkus&oq=chester+aaron+kirkus&gs_l=psy-ab.3...1655.5437..5630...0.0..0.102.1494.19j1......0....1..gws-wiz.......0i131j0j0i10j0i22i30j33i299j33i160.PKcHd-sXYxU&ved=0ahUKEwiP-OzIvsTkAhVlc98KHWcZBMYQ4dUDCAc&uact=5
(Kirkus reviews)
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/59346.Chester_Aaron
(reader reviews)
https://www.facebook.com/kingofgarlic/
https://www.sonomacountygazette.com/cms/pages/sonoma-county-news-article-564.html
(2012 interview about the over-radiation of African Americans)
https://www.google.com/search?biw=1198&bih=934&tbm=vid&ei=KKp2Xf-WNq2O5wLHgLrQDg&q=%22chester+aaron%22&oq=%22chester+aaron%22&gs_l=psy-ab.3..0i8i30k1l4.4263.5046.0.5835.2.2.0.0.0.0.78.152.2.2.0....0...1c.1.64.psy-ab..0.2.152....0.r3PDxBfVnVM
(videos - about his farming)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0365083/?ref_=nm_flmg_wr_1
(about the TV special "Cougar!" 1984)
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/rec.arts.books.childrens/IoSVuJ05sNk/tNCRFGIsNvUJ;context-place=forum/rec.arts.books.childrens
(birthday post from 2013, with booklist, synopses, and a long, shocking interview from 2006)
Excerpt:
From Contemporary Authors:
Aaron's parents, Jews from Poland and Russia, emigrated from eastern Europe at the turn of the twentieth century to settle in the Pennsylvania mining town of North Butler (south of Pittsburgh) where they operated a small grocery store. Aaron's five brothers and one sister were nearly adults when he was born in 1923...
Realizing that many of his students were ignorant of the Nazi concentration camps, he knew the time had come to write about the Holocaust. In 1982's Gideon, which Naomi Lewis labeled a "powerful and important book" in St. James Guide to Children's Writers, a brave fourteen-year-old boy survives the Warsaw Ghetto and later the death camp at Treblinka through his own resourcefulness. A contributor to Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books praised the novel as a "moving and terrible story, written with craft and conviction."
Since publishing Gideon, Aaron has written several other well-received novels for younger readers. In Out of Sight, out of Mind, twin teen psychics find themselves orphaned and their efforts to present a talk on world peace thwarted by an aggressive foreign government. Lackawanna finds six homeless orphans bonding together as a family during the Great Depression of the 1930s, their sense of invulnerability shattered when one of them becomes lost while jumping a freight train. An American Ghost draws readers back to 1850, as young Albie and his home are washed down river during a flood, his only companion a female cougar seeking shelter so she can give birth to her cubs. Noting the "lasting quality" of these novels, Lewis praised Aaron's work for young readers as containing "an unquenchable spark of optimism, a hopeful energy, [that is] always to be found in the central youthful characters."
(end of excerpts)
From a brief bio, self-told:
"After I left the army I went to universities (UCLA and UC Berkeley and San Francisco State) and received a Masters Degree. For the next 20 years I worked as an x-ray technician in various Bay Area hospitals and became very political, helping organizing unions and writing about the practice (then prevalent in US hospitals) of over-radiating African Americans, young and old. I was fired. After 2 years walking the streets and living off my wife I stumbled into teaching at Saint Mary's College in Moraga, California."...
Lenona.
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