Reading and Writing

I do a lot of reading and a lot of writing. You may know that I am finishing a book of stories from the history of the Streator, Il fire department. It is called Dancing With The Devil. I got the title from the original Batman movie. It's a line the Joker uses a lot in the film : "Have you ever danced with the devil by the pale moonlight ?"  In order to learn more about fires, and firefighters and their equipment I will generally read anything that has to do with the subject. Most of the 35 books that I had found through the years, I gave to the SFD for their library at the station. Some of them I read a lot, some were only once. The story of the Ringling Bros Circus big top fire in 1944, in which over 160 people died, was a one timer. So was the book about the school fire in Chicago that killed 95 people in 1958. Another was the book about the theater fire in Chicago that killed over 600 people. Now, why do I search for these books for a long time, then read them only once ? Frankly, they scared the shit out of me. They are all brilliantly written, graphically detailed stories about events that took a lot of lives and taught a lot of hard lessons. Most of which were learned, some of which were not. For a small town, Streator has seen its fair share of tragic fires. The worst was the Williams Hardware Store explosion and fire in 1958 that took 6 lives, and a fire on Nov. 2, 1932 which killed 4 children on N. Vermillion St. Another fire, on August 29, 1929 took the lives of 2 Streator firemen when a wall collapsed and buried them in an alley. They are the only 2 men to die in the line of duty of the SFD. I tell their stories so that people will remember them. Even if its only for a little while. I believe that everybody should be remembered, even for a little while.  Now these stories scared me because I have a tendency to put myself in the story. I am a huge fan of Stephen King. He likes to do that, get his readers involved in the story then scare the hell out of them,playing on their emotions todraw them in. But if you write about history, most of the time your supposed to leave your emotions at the door. If you get emotional, even  little towards one side or the other, you wont tell the whole story, and to understand most events you have totell the whole tale, no matter what. Otherwise you become biased  to one side and the whole thing becomes slanted, and the truth gets lost. If you want people to remember, tell them the truth, and prove it with as many facts as you can get. People may not like it, but they will remember. Telling the stories that I tell is a nasty business sometimes. But that's what history is about for me.Looking under the bed to see what people dont normally see, or want you to see, and presenting things so people might actually learn about something they didn't know before. If I can get one person to say "Huh, well I've never heard about that before." Then I've done a good job.