SHENANDOAH — Novelist and screenwriter Darryl Ponicsan will return to his native Shenandoah today and enjoy the hometown’s 150th anniversary celebration and be honored for his many accomplishments at several venues.
Ponicsan, 78, made his first major mark in the literary world with his novel “The Last Detail,” which became a film starting Jack Nicholson. Another novel, “Cinderella Liberty,” also became a movie starring James Caan and for which he wrote the screenplay.
He and his wife, Cee Cee, divide their time between his homes in Palm Springs, California, and Sonoma in northern California in the heart of the wine country. Ponicsan has a son and daughter and two grandchildren.
Ponicsan was born on May 26, 1938, to Frank G. and Anne Kuleck Ponicsan. His father was a small auto parts store owner (K&K) in Shenandoah. He lived on East Coal Street about a block and a half from Main Street. He had one brother, Ronald, who died in 1975. Ponicsan attended Muhlenberg College, graduating in 1959 with a bachelor’s degree in English, and Cornell University in 1965 with a master’s degree.
“My memory of Shenandoah is that it was a boom town,” Ponicsan said. “There were 30,000 people there and Main Street was full of prosperous small stores. We had three five-and-ten cents stores, which were Newberry’s, Kresge’s and Woolworth. We had three movie houses, dance halls, three shops just devoted to jewelry, a ladies hat shop. It was a great, prosperous town in those days. It was a bustling town. There were always people walking the street and always something to do.”
Ponicsan went to elementary school in Shenandoah, but the family moved to Ringtown about 1948 and he graduated in 1955 from Ringtown High School. Ponicsan said after the move, he remembers spending much time in Shenandoah with friends.
When he graduated from Muhlenberg, he worked as a teacher in upstate New York as he attended Cornell. He eventually went full time to Cornell, and joined the Navy on the eve of the Cuban Missile Crisis blockade. The missile crisis began Oct. 16, 1962.
“It was a very hairy time in our history. We thought we were approaching the end of the world,” Ponicsan said. “I was practically at sea all of the time as part of an amphibious squadron. I was on the USS Monrovia (a Crescent City class attack transport). We were carrying Marines down to the Caribbean, and then we would come back and carry them to the Mediterranean. We were gone for a long period of time. Once in the Navy, I got an early out to go back to graduate school and got my master’s degree, and immediately after that I got in my car and drove to Los Angeles.”
When in California, he worked as a social worker for Los Angeles County, and as a high school English teacher for three years until 1969. A year later, his first novel, “The Last Detail,” was published.
Shenandoah provided much inspiration in developing his interest in writing when he was young.
“The thing about Shenandoah as a writer was that it was a terrific place to write about because it was a natural theater,” Ponicsan said. “Every day there was drama and comedy and a revolving cast of really colorful characters. I mean, you can’t make this stuff up. During that time we had no distractions like television, no video games, no Internet. You fell on your own resources as children and you developed an imagination. Whether I realized it or not at that early age, that was really the seed that was planted growing up in a town like Shenandoah with mine disasters and all the funny things that happened. I often wonder how I could have become anything else but a writer.”
When he attended college, Ponicsan began some critical reading about writing and started seriously writing at about 18.
“They were short stories and I tried to get them published,” he said. “It was 12 years later that I finally sold a novel. It’s one of those situations where I was an overnight success, but nobody knew about the 12 years before that.”
Actually, his first short story was published in a literary magazine called “Trace” while he was in the Navy.
“I got a check for $20 and I thought, ‛Wow, I’m a professional writer,’ ” he said with a laugh. “And that was it until I wrote ‛The Last Detail.’ That was my whole publishing history to that point. Even through the long trail of rejection slips, whenever you get somebody who says that they really like it but can’t use it, but tell you to send your next work, that really keeps you going.”
“The Last Detail” comes from one of Ponicsan’s experiences in the Navy. He left his ship in Norfolk for surgery, which did not happen, but when he learned that, his ship had sailed.
“That gave me the basis for ‛Cinderella Liberty’ with my time in the hospital,” he said. “But I had to get back to my ship, so they put me on the USS Intrepid, which is now a museum in New York. They sent me to the Mediterranean on the Intrepid for me to meet up with my ship. On the Intrepid I wound up being the assistant to the career guidance officer, who was just a first-class seaman. He was a crusty old salt, and we would sit around in this tiny office and swap sea stories. He told me about the time he had to escort a prisoner at Portsmouth. I just got a tingle in my body that this is a good story. I did it as a short story, then reworked it. Bear in mind that this was at least seven to eight years before it reached the length of a short novel. Then immediately it was a great success.”
Ponicsan said Columbia Pictures bought the rights to the novel and everything happened after that, including his decision to quit teaching.
“As soon as the novel sold to the films, I quit my teaching job and devoted my full time to writing,” Ponicsan said. “It’s always risky to that. There are writers who sell their first novel and never were able to do anything after that. I took the risk and it paid off.”
Ponicsan said it took three years for the movie to be completed due to issues of language and the lack of cooperation from the Navy.
“It broke new ground. It’s hard to believe now, but in those days the language was so salty that it actually held up production,” he said.
After his first novel was “Goldengrove” about a high school teacher, then “Andoshen, Pa.,” followed by “Cinderella Liberty.”
He explained that the delays in the production of “The Last Detail” were not encountered with “Cinderella Liberty” when it was picked up as a movie, and both films were released on the same weekend in 1973.
“I had two major motion pictures released on the same weekend, so for awhile I was the hottest writer in Hollywood,” he said. “It was just a weird thing how that worked out. They came to me with projects and adaptations of other books.”
Ponicsan said there is a little piece of Coal Region in all of his books.
“I think there is something of a Coal Region character in every book I’ve written,” he said. “There is something in a character that comes out of having lived in the Coal Region. It’s just there.”
And if each of his novels has a character with some Coal Region personality, his third novel, “Andoshen, Pa.,” has plenty of those characters with it based on people in his hometown. The book is “Dedicated to Ann and Frank Ponicsan (Mom & Pop),” and was published in 1973.
With the similarity between “Andoshen” and “Shenandoah,” locals were able to surmise that their hometown was the subject. Ponicsan was asked about the reaction to it from Shenandoah people.
“It was very funny because when the book came out, my parents got an advanced copy. They honestly thought they’d have to move out of town,” Ponicsan said. “They were so rattled by it. I told them that people would love this because it’s done with love and not done with any type of malice. I thought they (Shenandoah people) would like it and they did. The residents of Shenandoah at that time got a real kick out of seeing that portrayal.”
Ponicsan found out how much the book was liked in 1976 during the celebration of the national bicentennial.
“Back in 1976 they honored me there as the ‛Man of the Year’ and they changed the name of the town for one day and gave me the key to the city,” Ponicsan remembered. “My parents were proud then, but they had misgivings when the book came out.”
Ponicsan said he was never approached by anyone to tell him they identified with one of the characters.
“If that every happened, that message never got back to me,” he said. “By the way, when you write a novel, somebody will say ‛That was me.’ In the case of Andoshen, nobody ever did that. At least I never heard of it.”
The idea for Andoshen began with a series of short vignettes that led to the novel.
“Long before I wrote that book, I was there when a coal breaker collapsed and I thought for a long time that it would be a good center for a good story and that everything would hang on that,” Ponicsan said. “I started writing these vignettes about Shenandoah that turned into short stories, and then I started putting them together with several different characters. It reflects my memory of Shenandoah — drama and comedy.”
When asked about the writing of the mystery novels under the name “Anne Argula,” Ponicsan said it was just something that happened. His first novel under the Argula name is “Homicide My Own.”
“That was a complete fluke,” he said. “I am not a mystery writer and I don’t intend to do any more mysteries. I had this wacky idea of reincarnation and I thought what if you realized you were a murderer in a previous life or had been murdered in a previous life, and wouldn’t it be interesting if a cop winds up trying to solve his own murder in a previous life. That’s a terrific idea. And at that point I was pretty much finished with screenplays, so I’ll do it as a novel and a mystery, but I’m not versed in mysteries. I don’t know the genre. When the book came, it got very good reviews and that it was more and less than a mystery. I got nominated for an Edgar Allan Poe Award, which is like an Oscar. Random House came to me and asked for me to do two more novels. They gave me a contract for the two, and then I did the fourth novel.”
As for the name change, Ponicsan said the novel’s main character who narrates the novel is a female detective, and it just made sense to use a female name as the author.
“It’s going to be better received if people think a woman wrote it, so I took a woman’s name,” he said. “It was some time before anyone discovered it was me. I did have a lot of fun with that. I gave her much of my background, like she (the detective) came from Shenandoah and I gave her some of that coal speak, which is absolutely unique and don’t find it anywhere else. People were delighted and confused at the same time by the way she spoke.”
Poniscan will have a busy time during his visit:
• This evening — Dinner at the Lyric Restaurant, then go to Mug Night at the nearby Polish American Fire Company No. 4.
• Thursday — At 1 p.m., there will be a talk and book signing at the Greater Shenandoah Area Historical Society, 201 S. Main St. Ponicsan is scheduled to give a talk about growing up in Shenandoah and what the town and area was like in the 1950s.
At 6 p.m., a presentation to Ponicsan will be made during Upper Schuylkill Marching Band sesquicentennial concert.
The venue changes to Pottsville at 8 p.m. at the Schuylkill County Council for the Arts, when Ponicsan will be inducted into the SCCA Hall of Fame, and will include a cocktail party with music.
• Friday — Ponicsan will be honored at 4 p.m. with a plaque at the Shenandoah Area Free Public Library, 25 W. Washington St., followed by a library party at a library officer’s home.
• Saturday — Ponicsan will attend the annual Heritage Day and Parade of Nations. The parade will begin at 10 a.m., with Heritage Day activities to be held on North Main Street. There are no activities in Girard Park this year.