Some of the stories in the book are based on true stories, some are fiction, and some are variations on a true story. The story of the young soccer star from Artsakh is not true, but is based on a similar story about a young baseball player in the U.S. I think that we all liked that story and were a little disappointed that it wasn't true.
The publisher suggested that the book be submitted to the Midwest publishers association for a competition, and it won one of the awards.
He tries to write his stories such that they raise you up, and then maybe crash you down. He has received over 200 comments about the story of the father being brought to a nursing home.
The story about Shavarsh Karapetyan is one of the true stories. He was a world class competitive swimmer in Armenia in the early 1970s. In 1976 he was passing by a bus which ran off the road into a pond and settled under the water. He broke through a window and rescued 21 people from the bus. Most of those that he couldn't get out of the bus died. He was injured when breaking the window and never regained his top swimming form. In later years he also rescued people from a burning building. In 2018 Chuck helped organize a Special Olympics for SOAR children in Armenia and asked Shavarsh to be the Emcee of the event. He was a big hit.
Another true story is the one about the champion's ring on a college football star who became a prisoner of war in Japan in World War II. One guard took his ring away, but the POW camp commander gave it back. The commander had attended the game where the prisoner won it and remembered him and thought that he had put so much effort into winning it that he deserved to keep it.
Chuck already has 26 stories queued up for his next book. We are looking forward to it.
That's it for this month. See you next time.
Leroy
ACOM Book Club for October 2023
The ACOM Book Club met at the home of Andrea and Lowell Johnson on Saturday, October 28, 2023. Attendees were Andrea, Lowell, Margaret, Jim, Tom, Cynthia and me, with Francis, Peter and Chuck, the author, joining in through Zoom. The book under discussion for this month was "Tall Short Stories from the Mind of Garbo" by Chuck 'Garbo' Hajinian.
The meeting was a little bit different than usual because we let Chuck direct it for the most part. He started out by describing how he came to write the book.
He tends to write stories down when he thinks of them and had built a collection of stories that he thought were enough to fill a book. He looked for publishers and ended up going with Calumet in the Twin Cities. One point that he liked about them was that they were familiar with Armenia.