Backstory with the American History Guys. He lives in Cleveland Heights, OH.
Balogh applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Not in My Backyard: How Citizen Activists Nationalized Local Politics in the Fight to Save Green Springs, and reported the following:
Page 99 of Not in My Back Yard passed the test with flying colors, even though the words covered only one third of that page. That’s because it’s the last page of chapter 9. The first short paragraph describes how the story’s petite protagonist, Rae Ely, returned home and was confronted by her husband and a former football player-turned realtor. They demanded that she sell the family home – she better sign the papers immediately if she knew what was good for her. “Unfortunately for them,” Rae concluded, “I had found my voice. They were a couple of years too late. And I did understand that the property was in my name.”Learn more about Not in My Backyard at the Yale University Press website.
As the second paragraph explains, Rae used her voice in a wide range of venues. Just a few years earlier, when the governor of Virginia announced that he planned to build a prison across the road, Rae asked her husband what he planned to do about it. Now thirty, gaining confidence in herself, her rights as a woman, and as a citizen, Rae was doing more telling than asking.
Readers who begin with these two paragraphs might easily grasp that Rae Ely, like millions of women in America in the 1970s, had begun to claim her rights at home and in the public arena. Readers might sense that protecting her home might propel Rae into public life. Readers could not know from these two paragraphs that Hiram Ely’s desire to sell the house was directly motivated by Rae’s emergence as the leader of the prison opposition. But they would not be surprised to learn that Rae’s public engagement strained the Elys relationship to the breaking point. As Hiram would soon tell Rae, “When I married you, I wanted a wife, not an environmentalist. A wife has enough to do to look after her husband’s needs and those of the family.”
Would readers know that Rae Ely eventually graduated from the University of Virginia School of Law even though she did not have an undergraduate degree? Would they suspect that after defeating a powerful governor in what became known as “Holton’s Vietnam,” she took on Fortune Five Hundred W.R. Grace & Co. that wanted to strip mine near her home? Could they possibly suspect that after battling for 25 years, Ely convinced Peter Grace to donate thousands of mineral-laden acres to the citizens’ group Rae led for decades? From two paragraphs, might they imagine that Ely founded the first National Historic Landmark that encompassed thousands of acres of rural America? No.
Nevertheless, reading page 99 might make readers wonder how Rae Ely found her voice, and what she accomplished by raising it at home and in public.
--Marshal Zeringue
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