Bruce Lindsay: The Christmas List of Richard Lindsay

Bruce Lindsay spent nearly four decades on television reporting on many of history's defining moments.  Now it's his turn to answer a few questions as our guest at The Book Drop Mic. Join us as we discuss his beautiful new book: The Christmas List of Richard Lindsay.

Buy Bruce's new book:
https://shadowmountain.com/product/the-christmas-list-of-richard-lindsay/

Learn more about Bruce:
https://shadowmountain.com/author-book/bruce-lindsay/

Learn more about Jason:
http://www.jasonfwright.com

About the book:
Based on a true story of a boy who helps bring Christmas to his family despite the hard times of the early 1930s.

Young Richard wonders if Christmas will come this year. Money was tight for most families during the Great Depression, and the Lindsay family was well-acquainted with hardship. When Richard asks his widowed mother about Christmas, she reassures him that their family has everything they need. Without a Christmas turkey, they will have the fat red rooster from the chicken coop.

“What about the rest of Christmas?” Richard asks. “Where will that come from?”

His resourceful mother invites him to write down the names of people he loves, and asks, “How could you share Christmas with them?”

Richard has an idea. He has exactly one dollar in coins that he’d saved from neighborhood jobs. He will buy everyone on his list a five- or ten-cent present from the corner store.

With his Christmas list in hand, he chooses a handkerchief for Grandma Emma, a tin of marshmallows for his brother, hair clips for his big sisters, and crayons for little Grace. He finds bookmarks for his teachers and his uncles. He even picks out a red jawbreaker for his best friend, Heber. But what should he buy his mother? On Christmas morning, Richard is excited to see the joy on the face of each person on his list, especially his mother’s.

The beautifully illustrated picture book by award-winning illustrator Dan Burr brings to 
life this meaningful story about the joy of giving and bringing happiness to the people you love at Christmastime.

This podcast is brought to you by InkVeins, your source for book publicity, promo, press releases and more. Text 540-212-4095 for more information.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

Hello there, world. Welcome to the Book Drop, mike, brought to you by Ink Veins, your source for book publicity, promo and press releases. This is, of course, your host, jason Wright. And listen, if you have followed me, you know that I love Christmas books. I have loved reading Christmas books my entire life. I have loved listening to just the perfect Christmas story whether it's the original Christmas story or any just beautiful Christmas story during the holidays, since I was very, very young and I've written a few Christmas books myself. But I particularly love children's picture books wrapped around this holiday. So when I heard about the book that we are discussing today, I was giddy. I'm so excited, honored to welcome to the Book Drop Mike, bruce, lindsay, hey, bruce.

Speaker 2: 0:51

Hey, jason, thank you very much it is.

Speaker 1: 0:54

we were just saying before we started recording. We're on Zoom so I get to look at you and it's like I'm looking at my television when I lived back in Pleasant Grove all those years ago. How is retirement treating you, bruce Lindsay?

Speaker 2: 1:08

I highly recommend it. I mean not for you immediately, but life is good. Every day is good, jason, it's a delight to be able to have a little extra time to do things. Actually, that's the reason I got involved in this book. I had a little extra time, something that had been knocking around in my mind for years, and so it's liberating. Thank you, life is good.

Speaker 1: 1:27

Good Well, you deserve to feel that way. By golly, you spent. How many years were you on television? Tell us a little bit about that 37, I think it's the correct count.

Speaker 2: 1:39

That's enough.

Speaker 1: 1:41

Was that all in KSL?

Speaker 2: 1:43

No, no, that was mostly KSL. I spent a couple of years in Los Angeles, a little time in Las Vegas just getting started out, but yeah, pretty much Salt Lake City was the most of the time.

Speaker 1: 1:54

Well, certainly we have a lot of listeners out west who will recognize you by the thumbnail that we'll put up for this episode. Recognize your handsome face and your voice, of course, rings so familiar in my ears from years of watching you on the news. Tell us a little bit about who Bruce Lindsay really is. How did you end up number one on camera? And then what was the deciding factor? To say you know what? This has been an incredible run. I think I'm ready to step away and do some other things.

Speaker 2: 2:32

Okay, to your first question. It just rings a bell that I hadn't put together before, jason. But actually the reason I wound up on camera is a Christmas story. I have put that together until this very moment.

Speaker 2: 2:42

When I was in grade school I think I was in second or third grade there was in the school newspaper Plymouth School News. We had the Christmas edition of the Plymouth School News. That's as a second grader I offered my first Christmas story that I wrote. It was pretty much a retelling of the nativity and it was a pretty stark, as I couldn't spell beautiful. But there was a girl who was a couple of years ahead of me. In fact I remember her name but out of respect on a podcast I'll keep it to myself. She was older and wiser by a couple of years.

Speaker 2: 3:16

Not a lot of children listen to the podcast. I can go ahead and talk about some sensitive issues, okay. So her story was why I know there is a Santa Claus and she knew there was a Santa Claus because the night on Christmas Eve her parents were away and she went through the entire house, the closets that sell her, everywhere, and she scoured the place and there was no evidence of any of Santa's swag that was going to show up, but there it was the next day, so she knew there was a Santa Claus. Well, I had an inquiry mind even in the second grade, and I had that appeal to the scientific method let's go give it the test. And so I found myself home alone and did the same experiment she did, and I had a very different result, jason. I found everything.

Speaker 1: 4:05

Oh no.

Speaker 2: 4:07

But what I found was my greatest wish, my fondest wish, my most memorable Christmas gift from Santa. It was an eight millimeter wind-up brownie movie camera with film. You know what film was? I mean film, it predates you. But that just really geeked me out and I became the neighborhood chronicler of inconsequential stuff on my wind-up movie camera and that progressed into a hobby and later bought a better camera and a sound projector and learned how to edit film not video, but film tell stories.

Speaker 2: 4:42

So by the time I was in high school for a number of reasons, including the fact that broadcast journalism didn't seem to entail a lot of math, I just felt words and pictures and telling stories with pictures. So it was kind of a natural. And television news was in its almost its adolescence, it was just coming of age and I was very enamored with that. So it was a natural fit and it was a good fit for me. It played to my strengths and kind of helped me minimize my weaknesses and so I felt like it was a good fit. That's kind of how it happened as a result of that Christmas present and that terrible, wonderful discovery.

Speaker 1: 5:24

I love that. How old do you think you would have been then, did you?

Speaker 2: 5:27

say I would have been eight, or nine.

Speaker 1: 5:29

Okay, well, so about the same time I was living in Chicago, illinois. We had been there a couple of years. I would have been well, I couldn't have been nine because we'd moved to Charlottesville, virginia, by then. So I was seven or eight. But I had a similar experience where I got up in the middle of the night on Christmas Eve and I found a bicycle for me it was obviously for me and not one of my siblings and I could not believe that Santa had brought me this same bike that I had been asking for, not something similar, but the same cheap bike I had been asking for and so I was too afraid to get on it. But I pushed it down the hallway of our little ranch home and back down toward the tree, and my sister told me the next day that when we got up she thought something was amiss.

Speaker 1: 6:29

The bike had been moved. I guess I had moved some stuff out of the way. But I did not become as a result of that a professional racer or ever, or bronze or anything. I don't have quite the same kind of anchor experience there, but I do love that. I can just picture you back then again for those of you listening who are not as old as we are, where we actually had these things that were called actual cameras with real film inside, and I remember being at BYU years ago and watching an actual film that some students had done being edited and just spliced and cut, and spliced and cut and literal pieces of film falling to the floor and learning what that meant the scenes that end up on the cutting room floor. Boy, things have changed just a little bit, huh.

Speaker 2: 7:18

They have. You only had one chance on that edit. I mean when you tore the film with your bare hands using the sprocket hole. It's the start it was. It was done. That was your edit right.

Speaker 1: 7:27

That was it. Yeah, that was it. So okay, so now we get to, so you retire about a decade ago.

Speaker 2: 7:36

About a decade ago, yeah.

Speaker 1: 7:38

And you're doing what you're doing some consulting, some writing, some speaking.

Speaker 2: 7:44

Well, I thought of doing all of that and I had well, I had certain notice that I was retiring about a year. I wanted to give the station notice. After 37 years, you know you owe them a little notice and you work on contracts and five year contracts. And so we had a very friendly, amicable discussion that this has been a great run for me and I'll be 62. And I think that'd be great time for me to move on and do something else. But so that was all prearranged. Then I was invited with my wife and our son to do some church service out of the country for three years, and so that was an abrupt transition and post that there was some reacclamation into civilian life and digital consulting, found out that the world kind of moved on in terms of the digital world and we made a little contribution there. And then we've enjoyed our grandchildren, we travel, we, you know, write once in a while and life has been good, and so that's kind of my story.

Speaker 1: 8:54

So then, how do we get to the day when you sit either with your wife or your family, or perhaps you had a connection already with with Shadow Mountain, with the publisher and this, this notion of the Christmas list of Richard Lindsay comes to mind this, this brand new children's picture book, which, of course, will have links to where folks can find it in the show notes.

Speaker 2: 9:18

Well, actually it started long before that, probably, jason, a good 25 years ago, because the kernel for this story is a series of events that really happened but I was familiar with, I heard about many, many, many times and, of course, in my life, and at least 25 years ago, I looked on my computer files it was about 25 years ago I once started gathering string and trying to write some, you know, rough draft of a Christmas story, and it never really had time to focus on it or publish it, nor did I really know what it was I wanted to say, but it was two years ago, roughly a little more than that. I was sitting where I'm sitting now. I'm in a vacation home and we're sitting in this chair and I really want to do. I really want to put this together. There's something I want to say, and I discovered the message that I really wanted to share. So I wrote a draft in another viewer. You're a writer, you know how this works. You don't just write it and hand it in right, you go over and over and over and over and got into where I thought well, so I'm willing to share this with somebody else. And so I wrote my first ever submission letter to publishers and I sent it off, sent it to Shadow Mountain, and their website didn't have any connections. Their website said give us six weeks or whatever it was here. And six weeks went by and 12 weeks went by and months went by. Well, we'll keep sending this to some others. And then, out of the blue, I got a phone call. It had been I don't know five or six months. They said we're really interested in your book. I'd like to think about publishing it a year from Christmas. So it took a while but the best part is in the interim. They signed up Dan Burr to be the illustrator and more than half of a wonderful illustrator Christmas book is the illustrations. Last week my wife and I had the privilege of going to Idaho and meeting with Dan for the first time. With MediMonzum We'd done a lot of you know back and forth, consulting and through the art director, but what a gifted artist.

Speaker 2: 11:25

And the purpose of a children's Christmas book, in my humble opinion now, being a grand dad, you know is to sit down with a child next to you or in your arms of you know it's a close enough child and read a Christmas book aloud. And this was the favorite tradition in the Lindsay home for years and years and years and we have stacks of Christmas picture books. We got one, you know, every year in world. So that's a lot of picture books, and on an open stairway that comes up from our kitchen my wife stacks these and on between the bollisters up all the steps as part of the ringing out Christmas. I love that, and whether the children are home or grandchildren are home, even now, to me it just means the world to sit down with some really good. There's some stinkers, but there's some really, really good Christmas books that are just a delight to take a few minutes and to share.

Speaker 2: 12:17

But I wrote this specifically to be read aloud and there are elements that make that possible and make that desirable. As a news writer, our training was to be accessible in our news company, not to use great big Paulus, a lot of big words. You know we don't say dumb it down, but just make it accessible. And so aren't any great big words in this story and it took me a long time to boil that down. I see Shadow Mountain said this is suitable for four to eight, which I hope it's not off. Putting that that means that means you know, at a reading level you can absorb that. But there are levels of meaning, I think, in this book that grow over time. To somebody even as old as you, jason can say oh, there's an insight, that's a, that's a gem, that's something that I can take away for Christmas. And let's face it, christmas brings out the inner child in all of us, unless we are evidence or Scrooge. And then even he came around. So I, like you, I love picture books for Christmas.

Speaker 1: 13:23

Yeah, well said and I could not agree more. The perfect children's book it's. It's got to convey, read aloud. You just have, you have to be able to sit on their bed or by the fire or in the living room or wherever you are, and read it and have that, have that child glued to the illustrations and just just sort of listening. I, I do love. I love a good read aloud. So the illustrations in the book by neighbor are phenomenal. I noticed, my wife and I both noticed as we read through it. The illustrations pull you in as if you are there and that's really really hard to do in a children's picture book and, as you said, not not all of them do it really well. We're being polite, some are not as great as others, but this is so. It's the colors, the setting, the lighting, even on the illustrations it pulls you in and you feel like you are the silent participant to the scenes as they unfold.

Speaker 2: 14:29

I was delighted at what he did Another kind of a gem. Some Easter eggs he hid in there for me. I sent down a lot of visual material to say, since this is based on a series of real events and real people, some photographs, pictures, photographs from this. This is a story from 90 years ago. This Christmas it sounds like a long time ago, yeah, 1933. And so it shows real places that are no longer. I'm old enough to remember them, but they're gone now and I've had a lot of really interesting reaction the last few weeks since the books been published people I didn't know who are from the same area it's. Oh, I recognize that school, oh, I recognize the store. Dan just did a wonderful job capturing not only a time period but the actual ethos of where these real events took place.

Speaker 1: 15:24

Yeah, the art is beautiful. I wonder when you wrote this and you submitted it and you waited those long, long weeks to hear back? I don't know exactly what that is like, but did you allow yourself to imagine how special that would be to walk into a bookstore which I'm sure you've now done and to physically see the book on a shelf, on a Christmas table or under the new arrivals? I mean, did you allow yourself to imagine what that might actually feel like?

Speaker 2: 15:58

Actually I haven't been in the bookstore yet to see it, but I've had others have said this.

Speaker 1: 16:02

You better get into the bookstore Berthunze.

Speaker 2: 16:05

Really no, but I'll tell you this. When I received my first copy of the book, I had that experience. I guess that you're alluding to that. It's like, oh my word, this is a fulfillment of not only time and work but a lot of emotional investment. You look at it, it's kind of like a newborn baby. What part looks like me and what part looks like her? What did the artist contribute? It's a wonderful thing. It's pretty heady experience. I guess that's why you keep writing books, huh.

Speaker 1: 16:36

It is. It is a heady experience and it is why I keep writing and it never gets old. I just opened a couple of weeks ago and saw my Christmas book with Jenny Oaks Baker, which, if you go back to the show notes folks, you can find the episode of Jenny and I discussing that. I had the same experience I think that's book 18 or 19 and opening the box with my wife and pulling it out and seeing it for the first time. It is a heady experience For you, I'll say, and I remember another writer explaining this to me when my first book came out and asking me how does it feel to know that, yes, your family will buy it and read it and your friends will buy it and read it, and maybe folks from your congregation will buy it and read it and you know them and you've been in their home and you maybe even know where the book will sit on their bookshelf or on their mantel.

Speaker 1: 17:21

But you don't know all of the people, thousands of people around the country, maybe even around the world, who you'll never meet. You don't know their names and they only know you because they got an Amazon recommendation or a Barnes and Noble recommendation or whatever recommendation, they picked the book up and they took it home. Now it means something to them and in this case, as a children's Christmas book, it means something extra special to them and for years this book will become for that family in Idaho or California or New York or Canada, a part of their tradition. And you don't even know who they are and you'll never meet them and you'll never get to thank them. And that for me, knowing that there would be thousands of people with something I created that would become a part of them, we'll talk about a heady feeling for sure.

Speaker 2: 18:08

Well, it's rewarding and you hope that it gives a contribution, because if you had a good book and there are lots of good books and you've had a child, and you've had a Christmas tree or a fire and you've read the story, a story you know how wonderful that is. So, yeah, it's good.

Speaker 1: 18:24

So before we ask you what's next, I just have to ask the elevator pitch. You know what the elevator pitch is. You've been in the business a long time, so you've got somebody in the elevator.

Speaker 2: 18:33

I always worked on the first floor. But go ahead, we'll try, all right.

Speaker 1: 18:38

Well, you've been called up to the boss's office for 30 seconds. What is the? And again, all of this will be in the show notes, but what is the 30 second pitch for this book? What is it really about at its core?

Speaker 2: 18:51

Okay. At its core, this book is not about the hardship, although there's hardship At its core. This book is not about any special present, although there are presents. At its core, this book is about an amazing Christmas gift that I hope people will celebrate and that is the gift that's hiding in plain sight and that is the gift of people to love and that, for the character in the book and, I hope, for the reader, is a very satisfying discovery that Christmas is filled with joy, not because many of you give or you get, but look around you at the people you're blessed with to love.

Speaker 1: 19:38

Amen, amen and amen. There's our soundbite for the interview. That's perfect. It's hard sometimes to talk about our own books, in particular, to do it in that little elevator pitch, but that makes me want to end this interview abruptly and go home and reread it again. You're so right. It's about the love, the love that we give, the love that we share, the love that we're not just willing to give but to receive. Very well said. Before we say goodbye, tell us what's next. I mean, you've got one under your belt. Are there more books to come? What sort of things do you see in your future?

Speaker 2: 20:17

Well, a dozen or 15 years ago I produced another book which was kind of an anthology of short stories said in a delightful town that's barely fictitious out west here. It was based on hometown newspapers. I was a fan of those hometown weekly newspapers People who went on a trip and who had so-and-so for Sunday dinner and who went to the doctor and what for, if they'll tell you. It was a little expose of the story behind the stories in all those hometown newspapers. It was a very lighthearted thing. I had a lot of fun with that. In the last 15 years most of those hometown weekly newspapers have not done well in the digital age. I'm feeling it's time to revisit partly growth and see how things are going in the absence of the newspaper. That's, in the back of my mind, something I'm doing with.

Speaker 1: 21:17

I like that. I like that Well between spending time with your family and your faith and those grandkids I'm sure you love very much. I, for one, hope that you do find time to revisit that. I'd love to have you back on the show sometime and let's talk about whatever the next project is. Folks, go pick this book up, buy a copy for yourself. Buy a copy, or 10, or 20, or 30 for your neighbors, people you go to church with, people that you miss, or two and love. Don't just give the book but, more importantly, give a little bit of yourself, give a little bit of love for Christmas. Thank you, bruce, you're the best. Thanks for being on the show.

Speaker 2: 21:57

Thank you, jason. I'm very grateful. Merry Christmas to you when it comes around. Bye, bye, bye.