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Whims of time take toll on lifelong writer

Editor’s note: This column originally published May 29, 2003

This is the kind of compelling human story Bill Granger was made to tell. Instead, Granger sits in the Illinois Veterans’ Home in Manteno, a prisoner of his memory.

A prolific author and gifted newspaper columnist whose career spanned the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times and Daily Herald, Granger was 58 when he was felled by a stroke in January of 2000.

“He never made it into the year 2000,” Lori Granger says of her husband. His physical self occupies a bed in the Veterans’ Home’s “special care unit” - a wing of the skilled nursing home that must be locked to keep patients from wandering away. Granger’s mind wanders aimlessly around in the past.

He sounds cogent, in the moment. But his moments are whims of time. Sometimes, Granger thinks it’s 1998, and he’s living in Chicago’s Streeterville neighborhood and writing a column for the Daily Herald. Other times, he’s convinced that he needs to get back to his childhood home, the apartment building at 41st and Berkeley on Chicago’s South Side, where he and his buddies played games in the alleys, and Sister Amanda at St. Ambrose Elementary School first encouraged him to write.

He’d be the only boy in his class to come home with a notebook filled with writing.

“Why did she make just you write?” his mother would ask accusingly. “Did you do something bad?”

Eventually, she grew to understand that writing was Granger’s reward, his passion, his life. He made money and a name by authoring 28 books, mostly mysteries and spy novels. But “newspapering” is how he made his living.

“I can’t think of a day without newspapering in it,” Granger says, sitting on his bed in the veterans’ home just north of Kankakee. He was a master of newspapering.

One day in the 1990s, Granger came into the Daily Herald to drop off his daily column only to discover that breaking news had rendered his theme obsolete minutes before his deadline.

“O.K. I’ll give you another one,” Granger grumbled in the direction of an editor. He plopped his frame before a keyboard and let his pudgy fingers fly. Twenty minutes later, he turned in a column that started with a current topic, wound through his childhood on the South Side, dragged along a couple of those nuns from his grade school, recapped an adventure and tied the whole thing up in a nice, tidy story.

Even in his current state, he remembers the exhilaration of how it feels to write.

“Boom! Boom! Boom!” Granger says, comparing writing a newspaper column to taking a shower. “It’s outside influences. The mat that’s supposed to keep your feet from slipping on the tile is pushing up on your feet. The water’s hitting you in the face. ‘All right, you son of a bitch, let’s go.’ And 45 seconds later, it’s over. That, to me, is the fun of journalism. You just drive 75 miles an hour and you’ll get there. Just go.”

With a 65 mph speed limit, Lori Granger can make her weekly pilgrimage from Chicago to Manteno in less than 90 minutes. Five minutes after she leaves, her husband might forget that she was there.

“It’s grim,” says Lori, who is a lawyer and has co-authored books with her husband. “It’s sad.”

When the stroke first happened, Granger joked about his memory loss.

“I can watch the same ‘Seinfeld’ episodes again and again, and laugh each time,” Granger cracked often in the weeks after his stroke.

He grasped the cruel irony that the stroke, which robbed him of his mind, has made him stronger physically by forcing him to forgo alcohol, cigarettes and fatty foods. (“I don’t want to talk about it too much for fear I’ll miss it,” Granger says softly, sighing purposely before confessing, “God, I loved drinking.”) He always seemed to be in the process of giving up one of those three - occasionally resulting in odd lunches of nothing but beer and cigarettes.

“I’m going to write a book -’The Accidental Buddhist,’ “ Granger quipped often in the months after his 2000 stroke. In addition to taking away alcohol and his other vices, the stroke made him “a nicer person,” Granger figured.

But his brain wouldn’t let him enjoy his newfound self. He’d sit at his typewriter to start his new book, and forget why he was there. An hour later, he’d have this wonderfully fresh idea to write a book called “The Accidental Buddhist.” It was as if he were the Bill Murray character in the movie “Groundhog Day,” forced to live the same moment over and over.

Sitting in his sparse but cozy room at the Veterans’ Home, Granger hears his book idea as if it’s the very first time.

“That’s very good,” he says, the chuckle escaping from his bushy beard, a chuckle that flirts with becoming one of his full-fledged belly laughs. “I’m glad you remembered that. I’d forgotten it.”

He remembers, always, how much he loves his wife, their only child, Alec, and their dog, Banner, an aging black whippet. Photographs of them (and those of his sisters and their families) decorate his room. But in his head at this moment, his son, now 26, is just starting high school.

Granger turns 62 on Sunday. The average age of the 268 other veterans at the Home is 76, says Barry Baron, adjutant for the Illinois Department of Veterans’ Affairs. Granger had to wait a year for a spot to open. There are more names on the waiting list than residents, Baron adds.

Government foots most of the bill, but veterans must pay costs according to their income, up to a maximum of $929 a month, which is still cheaper than many private nursing facilities, Baron says.

Fond of noting “I was drafted the year Kennedy was shot,” Granger served a stint in the Army, but did not see combat.

Talk about writing, and his eyes twinkle.

“Don’t put your heart and soul in it,” Granger says of the craft. “Keep your soul for yourself. Keep your heart for your wife’s pocket. If you want to live, live - and write about it later.”

His book, “November Man,” and the series built on that character, sold the most copies. But “Public Murders” was his favorite “because it was real and gritty,” says the man who once defined real and gritty.

“I think my characters are what I would be if I were clever. But I’m rarely as clever as the characters I write,” he says.

“What I tried to do with writing is figure out a way to make money writing, and to have fun.”

He calls writing “a noble effort.” But he no longer has the attention span to read, or even watch TV.

“I’ll flop on my bed and stare at the ceiling,” Granger says.

Ask him if he needs anything and he retorts, “A gun, so I can get out of here.”

But with a mind no longer able to keep track of the years, Granger is spared the agony of killing hours. He seems happy, polite, gregarious. He dismisses the locked doors of his unit as some beefed-up security measure to keep protesters away from the veterans. He hasn’t bothered making friends, he says, because he’s just here a few days for some tests.

“It’s not a home. This is just the joint where I’m living,” Granger insists. “I am O.K. to write. I know I am. I just had to get over being nuts. I’m going to write about this. I think it’s interesting. Everybody has a closed-up spirit where you close down, kind of fitted for a coffin before you go into the grave. This has given me time to think about everything.”

He points to his head.

“There are a million stories here,” he says. “That’s all it is. The stories are just crying to get out.”

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