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Gene Caesar (1927-1986). American writer of outdoor fiction, American history and natural history. His biography of Jim Bridger, King of the Mountain Men, won the Western Heritage Award in 1961. In 1970, Caesar left his successful freelance career to serve the Michigan House of Representatives as a legislative analyst and later an education specialist to the Speaker of the House.

Life


Eugene Lee Caesar was born on December 10, 1927 in Saginaw, Michigan to Ernest Thor Caesar and Eunice Lee Caesar (nee Eunice Viola Lee), author of For This My Mother Wrapped Me Warm (D. Appleton-Century 1947) and many short stories for popular magazines such as Collier’s and the Women’s Home Companion. Gene was the second of three children: the eldest, Mildred P. Caesar, wrote fiction for young women’s magazines such as Mademoiselle and Seventeen; and the youngest, Allan E. Caesar, a lifetime musician, worked as a metallurgist for General Motors.

When the United States entered the World War II conflict, Caesar enlisted at the Office of Naval Officer Procurement. Under the V-5 program he attended Michigan Central College of Education, Case Institute of Technology and Illinois Institute of Technology. After his discharge in mid-1946, he spent a year at the University of Miami before returning to Michigan to write. (back jacket Mark of the Hunter)

As recounted on the back jacket of King of the Mountain Men:

"Gene Caesar’s working history began, in his own words, ‘as a pots-and-pans salesman for Macy’s in late 1946.’ He ‘ran through everything from serving as a United Auto Workers committeeman in a General Motors plant to playing in small hillbilly or Western orchestras, and ended as a jet-aircraft mechanic for Republic Aviation in 1954-55.’"

He married Judith May Hall in Ann Arbor, Michigan in December 1953. [Date needs verification]. Following the wedding, the couple moved to New York City where Judy studied dance at the Metropolitan Opera School, and Gene worked on the jet-aircraft engines while writing fiction at night. They later settled in Ann Arbor, where Judy opened a dance school and Gene wrote full-time. His daughter, Cheryl Lee, was born in 1959, followed by two sons: Craig Arthur in 1961 and Jeffrey Eugene in 1969.

In 1970, Gene left his freelance writing career to serve as a legislative analyst for the Michigan House of Representatives and, later, an education specialist for the Speaker of the House. He is honored for his public service in House Concurrent Resolution No. 653, which states:

"For nearly two decades, he toiled in the legislative process, directing his substantial wisdom and talents to the task of keeping legislators properly informed about current issues. His genius for this craft, especially as it pertained to all matters regarding education, was legendary and ranked him among state government’s most capable professionals [...]"

"Blessed with a keen, probing intellect, passion for life and nature, and need for precision and thoroughness, Gene Caesar was a man of contrasts who had a unique capacity for understanding the most complicated issue while opting for simplicity in his personal tastes. He lived by a code of conduct which stressed loyalty, responsibility and integrity. While he disdained the label of ‘expert’ as inappropriate for his necessary function in the legislative process, he was known best for his expertise in education issues, especially school finance [...]"

Gene Caesar died of a cerebral aneurysm on January 26, 1986 in Lansing, Michigan. He is survived by his daughter, Cheryl Lee Caesar, his sister-in-law Geraldine Caesar and numerous nieces and nephews.

Writings


The back cover of King of the Mountain Men cites 1955 as the year Caesar became a “highly successful freelance writer, regularly contributing feature stories and articles to such top magazines as Holiday, True, The Saturday Evening Post and Argosy.”

However, his first successful novel, Mark of the Hunter, dates from 1953. Its back jacket flap recounts how, for his breakthrough work, Caesar returned to Michigan to focus on his writing: “In fact, he went to the Michigan North-woods and faced himself with a typewriter in an empty cabin room with miles of forest as a wall against distractions.” It is billed as a

dynamic, contemporary novel [...] set against the natural background of Northern

Michigan’s wild hinterland. It tells us Marty Jevons’ search for a purpose in life and a

woman to love [...]

Marty is a young Marine veteran. The savage streak that most of us camouflage so

carefully is his reason for living [...] I need the kill. It isn’t hunting without it.” (front jacket

flap)

In fact, the apology for hunting became a regular trope in Caesar’s writing, both fiction and nonfiction. His often-anthologized essay, “Anatomy of the Hunter,” takes on some of the most frequent excuses given for recreational hunting -- excuses that he refers to as the “schools of evasion”: the Technical school, which pretends that the activity’s “interest lies solely in modern riflery” (174); the Nature Lover school, “interested in the sights and sounds and smells of the great outdoors” (175); the Game Gourmet school. Each of these he deconstructs and debunks: if accurate shooting is the attraction, why not practice on a rifle range? If it is communing with nature, why not simply go camping? As for the gourmet appeal of, say, a “spring-killed bear,” he finds it laughable: “boil out the bear taste, soak it in wine, and it will taste like wine, providing you can forget the decaying carcasses of winter-killed deer and moose on which bears feed in springtime when there are no garbage dumps to raid” (176).

Instead, he argues, “Hunting is simply the gratification of an age-old urge, a compulsion instilled in us through countless centuries when we had to kill for food, to defend our crops and herds and occasionally ourselves. This is not a compulsion to play with rifles, to commune with Nature or to feast on wild meat. It is a compulsion to pursue and kill animals” (176-177).

However, in other works, Caesar shows a sympathetic understanding of those who do not share in this compulsion. In another frequently-reprinted Boys’ Life piece, “The Long Hunt,” teenager Bob Borden is eager to accompany his new stepfather on his regular hunting trips, but is traumatized by his first rabbit hunt, when the prey fails to be killed immediately by the bullet. The rabbit is set upon by the hounds and begins screaming, until the stepfather can reach it and mercifully snap its neck. Following this, Bob finds himself unable to shoot any animal, but cannot bear to give up his time with his new father figure. He begins “pretending” to aim and shoot, but always deliberately missing, and succeeds in this ruse for several years until finally being caught out. His stepfather is puzzled but forgiving: “Darned if you ain’t a strange one! [...] Well … it takes all kinds, I guess” (35).

In The Wild Hunters: The Wolves, the Bears and the Big Cats (1957), Caesar turns his focus to animals as hunters, rather than hunted. This “exciting and suspenseful account of the wild predators of North America” (front flap) gives credit to Caesar’s hunting hound, a beagle: “This book is affectionately dedicated to Beauwood Rocky, A. K. C. H-389070, whose penetration of the mysteries of the wild, I’m certain, has been far deeper than my own.” The publishers argue that “[n]o one else is writing so vividly of animal life today,” and that the stories have “the dramatic impact of the writing of Jack London.” They conclude: “Together, the chapters make a rounded, up-to-date account of predator wild life in this country, a wild life which, Mr. Caesar believes, will be driven to extinction within a few decades unless the predators are preserved to save the ‘biotic checks and balances of nature.’” (back inside flap)

King of the Mountain Men: The Life of Jim Bridger (1961).

Of this award-winning piece of American history, Kirkus Reviews writes:

The story of the great mountain man Jim Bridger, of his travels beyond the Green River

into the virgin west, and of his trapper-guide friends Jed Smith, Kit Carson, Bill Sublette,

etc., is as colorful an epic as any in the history of our country. This attempt to retell it is a

worthy and highly readable one. From the day in 1822 when Bridger left with the Falstaff

Battalion up the Missouri, until he died, blind and broke, 60 years later, an unforgettable

era had come and gone. Here were the trappers, the Indian fights, the life and morality

of a truly wild west, the coming of Fremont and other civilizers, the Mormon insurrections, and finally the savage Indian wars of the 60's and 70's.

On the back cover, Caesar opines: “I fervently believe there is no more excuse for a biography to be dull reading than a novel -- less, in fact, for America’s past is more colorful and exciting than anything the human imagination could conjure up, and this is especially true of the lusty, fast-paced chronicle of the West.”

Continuing his pursuit of “colorful and exciting [...] fast-paced chronicle[s], Caesar composed Incredible Detective: The Biography of William J. Burns (1968). Of this historical work, Kirkus Reviews writes:

"This is the biography of William J. Burns whom The New York Times crowned "the greatest detective certainly, and perhaps the only really great detective, the only detective of genius whom the country has produced." He was a tailor turned detective, turned secret service man, turned head of the F.B.I. . . . J. Edgar's predecessor. He was thoroughly brilliant and infinitely painstaking as illustrated in his first official case when he discovered that an important election had been rigged in the insanity ward of a prison hospital by corrupt officials, a fastidious forger and a second-story safe-cracker. Later he broke a counterfeit case that had the Treasury Department completely buffaloed and subsequently proved that the ingenious entrepreneurs continued their operations in jail. He was personally sent into San Francisco by Teddy Roosevelt to clean up the town which he did, finally, after using a devastating appeal to a crook's sense of theatrics to get him to reverse his plea in a dramatic courtroom moment. He was responsible for Clarence Darrow's one humiliation; he tangled with the KKK during the Leo Frank Case. But, until now, his career has been shadowed by the scandal he did not foresee during the Harding Administration. Here it has been recorded with a sense of newspaper sensationalism but armchair detectives should snap it up."

Pulp fiction

Caesar was in fact willing to write sensational fiction when needed to support his family. Under the pseudonym of Johnny Laredo,  he wrote potboilers like Come And Get Me, blurbed as “Love And Violence In A City Jungle” (Pulp International), while as Anthony Sterling, he exposed the seamy (and steamy) underside of Ben Purnell, King of the Israelite House of David, and his “Virgin Love Cult” in Michigan’s Benton Harbor.

Themes

Caesar enjoyed debunking not only religious figures, such as Ben Purnell and Henry Ward Beecher (“The Strange Obsession of Preacher Beecher,” True, February 1965), but political/historical ones as well. In “The Cowardly Career of Paul Revere,” first published in True magazine, he takes apart the familiar ode by Longfellow to expose Revere as a wimp who remained on the sidelines when the Battles of Lexington and Concord began, and who was censured by the Massachusetts Militia for “disobedience of orders in several instances, neglect of duty, leaving a battle scene without orders, and unsoldierlike behavior tending to cowardice” (27) following the failed Penobscot Expedition. He takes on even America’s first president, in “George Washington: Hero Without a Halo” (True, March 1963), or America’s bootstrap hero (“The Private Hell of Holy Horatio,” True, May 1963). A deep dig into history will yield some real heroes -- the Bridger and Burns biographies demonstrate that -- but Caesar has no patience for the kind of heroism that is only a polite or poetic fiction.

A theme examined earlier -- Caesar’s defense of hunting --  may be linked to his own view of heroism. Many of his stories, for juveniles as well as adults -- feature ordinary people cast into struggles for survival that few of us experience anymore, in our comfortable industrialized world. A young man out snowshoeing falls in a ravine, loses his sunglasses, and must find his way back to civilization “snow-blind,” relying on his other senses (“Snow-blind”). Another is set adrift when the ice floe he is fishing from breaks away, separating him from his father and the other adults (“The Cruel Cold”). His epiphany recalls iconic scenes from Jack London:

But a heavy stupor closed down on him, and his awareness flickered and dimmed like a candle in the wind. For what may have been a few yards or a mile, his body went on by itself.
 * Then gradually -- as though, like the lungs, the mind had a second wind -- his  consciousness began to clear. Bit by bit he came awake, awake to the exciting realization that he was still alive and moving. It was as though he’d sunk beyond pain and exhaustion to reach some edge of life itself, some point beyond which life could not go without becoming infinite, without becoming death. He was moving because all that was alive had to contrast with all that could not live and move.  It is not surprising that he was asked to report on Outward Bound camps in the U.S., nor that he approved of the experience they offered. “I personally believe it’s not a bad thing for a boy to end up asking himself ‘Why me?’ in the wilderness (“Outward Bound: How to Build a Man the Hard Way,” True, July 1965). Or, as he noted in a subsequent article on the female Outward Bound camps, for a girl either (“Outward Bound!”, True, 1966).
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