"The Geezer Squad" author and communications coach Bruce Benidt is such an elegant guy it may be difficult to imagine him as my writing coach.
That was back when he was a Star Tribune reporter. Once my writing coach, always my teacher. Sometimes when I can't get words to do what I want, he'll hear from me. "I don't think you need a coach anymore," he said.
But everybody can use help with their writing, right? "Yeah, myself included," he said. His latest book was edited by "a guy I used to teach with, John Gaterud, who taught me a lot. I call him in this acknowledgment 'a maniacal editor.' "
We got together at Jörg Pierach's Fast Horse marketing agency, where Benidt does some work. We discussed his third book, a mystery set partly in Minnesota and partly in Florida where he now lives with his wife, Lisa.
The book — available at amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, iuniverse.com and Once Upon a Crime bookstore — is about some '60s types trying to find out who's behind bad developers on a mission to hustle a little old lady out of her Lake Mille Lacs property when they're not misbehaving in Florida.
"The geezers get on the side of the little folk and teach them guerrilla theater tactics, ways to raise hell, kick ass and level the scales," Benidt said.
Q: Bad developers tangling with '60s types?
A: Friend of mine's younger girlfriend, who is probably 10 years younger than I am, at dinner one night said, "You of the '60s generation started something. Now you'd better finish it!" (He leans back as if blown away by her remarks.) [She was talking about] that rambunctious demonstration against the war, civil rights movement, women's rights; we really thought we could change the world. We followed [Eugene] McCarthy just like people follow Bernie [Sanders] now. Then I don't know what happened: marriages and car loans and divorces. The book is about guys from the '60s who thought they could change the world then, and now they're saying, "Whatever happened to that stuff?"
