Fame & Fortune: James Lee Burke Wealth of life experiences brings author big payoff
Page | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |

Bankrate: What was that like?

Burke: It was the other America, a place where all the inequities were very visible. It was all gangland turf. Today it's Blood and Crips territory, but back in those days it was the Choppers, the Aranas (or Spiders), the East L.A. Viscounts, the Purple Hearts, the Gladiators. They were rough kids. They didn't have the weapons they have today, but it was the same mind-set. We lived there; those were the guys we had to watch out for. The kids in those neighborhoods didn't have a chance; they just had jail written all over them. There was no way a kid on his own could survive; he had to gang up or he was shark meat.

Bankrate: You had kids at the time. Was it hard making ends meet then?

Burke: We had some very lean times. Pearl was going to Southern Cal. She taught at Manual Arts High School, which is written up as the worst school in America, and that was our neighborhood school. At 8 a.m., the security guards would chain lock the fences so the neighborhood would be safe from the kids until 3 in the afternoon. But oddly, much of what I would write later would come out of those experiences. I would transpose it to other places, to New Orleans or New Iberia. I knew great criminals. I was a caseworker for about 110 convicts, about 20 percent were felons and about 20 percent were mental cases.

Bankrate: How did you get from there to teaching college English?

Burke: I went into the Job Corps next. I worked for the United States Forest Service and the U.S. Job Corps. It was another great experience I'll always be proud of. I was in the Cumberland Mountains of Kentucky. I drove a truck all over the eastern United States, ferrying equipment, and I taught reading at the Job Corps center. It was a time of great idealism; Kennedy had introduced all of these educational programs and Lyndon Johnson had continued on with them. I was teaching boys from all over, a lot from Appalachia, a lot from the West Coast. It was kind of a volatile combo. The West Coast boys in particular would act contemptuously toward these mountain boys, call them Li'l Abner and stuff. Children went barefoot in the snow where we lived. Their clothes were made out of Purina feed sacks and they lived in dirt-floor cabins. The people were retarded from incest, they carried weapons, had no running water, burned kerosene lamps and their privies were built on the creek where they got their water and where they bathed. It was as primitive as human life gets.

Anyway, I was offered a job at the University of Montana over the phone in 1966 that I hadn't even applied for. Boy, it changed my life. It was one of those crossroads moments because we moved to Montana and it became a love affair, hooked for life. I had taught before at the University of Missouri and the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, so I was re-entering the field. And I taught nine years at a community college in Miami. All experiences that went into my work.

Bankrate:  Were you feeling financial pressure to get your books published?