Author Tom Robbins Remembers Richmond

 Tibetan PeachBy Peter Galuszka

Cult author Tom Robbins has always been a fun read, be it his novels “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues” or “Still Life With Woodpecker” or his remarks in interviews.

Now in his 80s, the acid-dropping and whimsical iconoclast who is an icon of the 1950s through ’70s has written a memoir of sorts called “Tibetan Peach Pie,” and it is also entertaining. But what is of special interest is how he pays attention to Richmond.

Many think, correctly, that Richmond is the stuffy capital of the “Clown Show,” the self-important legislature, and snobby, WASPy types overly impressed by their pedigrees and their privileged positions. Robbins, however, turns these views on their heads, noting that Richmond has always had an artistic rebel streak.

In the late 1950s and 1960s, he was part of it in a big way. Born in the mountains of North Carolina, Robbins moved to the Virginia Tidewater as a child and ended up in Richmond. He went to button-down Washington & Lee, then a school for nice Southern boys, where he wrote sports stories for newspaper editor Tom Wolfe (THE Tom Wolfe although then he had numerals after his name). A stint in the Air Force later, he went on to the Richmond Professional Institute, now VCU.

As I write in a recent Style story: Robbins greatly admires RPI, which he says “isn’t widely known, though it was Harvard, Stanford, Oxford, and the Sorbonne rolled into one for aspiring artists in the southeastern U.S.; and in many ways was the ideal school for incipient bohemians looking for a friendly academic environment in which to pack those tender roots.”

He’s mesmerized with the alleys of the Fan District, writing that they “become all the more interesting after nightfall, when they softly resonate with stray disembodied fragments of music (live or recorded), intellectual discourse, dog-bark, couple-squabble, and woo-pitch, not to mention the even less tangible secrets that seem to sweep from the shadowed crannies. …”

Striking a deeper chord, he worked senior year at night on the copy desk of the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Despite the TD’s innate conservatism, he says that it actually had high journalistic standards. I felt the same way when I was a reporter there for a couple of years in the 1980s although I had similar feelings about its stuffiness. Back in his time, Robbins writes that the big dictionary used by editors was so out of date that it described “uranium” as a “worthless mineral.”

Like many Southern papers of that era, including one I worked on in the early 1970s in North Carolina, there was an unwritten rule not to run pictures of blacks that might make them look good. They were slotted for crime news. Photos in sections for the “colored” were acceptable.

Robbins sympathized with the civil rights movement that was in full swing circa 1960. He spent some time at a Unitarian Church working for integration. Fellow TD copy editors called him a “nigger lover.”

He also got in repeated trouble when he chose to place photographs of black artists such as Louis Armstrong and Pearl Bailey in a gossip column by Earl Wilson that he edited. Summoned by his editor, Robbins was warned that readers had complained that they “couldn’t finish their breakfast” after seeing the photo of Bailey. Readers had lit up the telephones to complain.

It was time to move and he did, to Seattle where he spent most of his literary career. One final strike, though. On one of his last nights at the desk, he ran a photo of Sammy Davis Junior, an African-American entertainer married to a blonde woman. Still, he regards Richmond and the TD fondly.

It’s a fun book for a beach trip.