I, Too, have a Hemingway Story

In the fall of 1956, my friend Karen Toothman and I met Ernest Hemingway at the bar of the Stockman’s Hotel in Elko, Nevada.  My friend’s father, Dick Toothman, managed the casino-hotel.  Hemingway was on his way to his home in Ketchum, Idaho.

High school freshmen, Karen and I were doing homework in her basement when the phone rang.  Her mother called down the stairs, “Karen, your father says Ernest Hemingway is at the bar.  If you girls want to meet him, come down right away.”

     Out of breath from running, we paused at the hotel entrance, reminding each other about the great interview we would write for the Sagebrush Saga, our high school newspaper and how impressed Miss Grise, our English teacher would be.

      I don’t remember what Karen asked him, but I still wince at my question.  “Mr. Hemingway, which do you write first, the story or the title?”

      Hemingway paused and said, “Well, sometimes I write the story first, and sometimes I write the title first.”

      We walked back to Karen’s house and were talking with her mother in the kitchen when Mr. Toothman came home unusually early.  It was also unusual when Karen’s reserved German father put his arm around his beautiful, petite Spanish wife, Esther, and said, “He said she reminds him of Ava.”

     Forty years later at our class reunion, I saw Karen again.  Obviously, we had aged.  I heard that at one point she had a drinking problem, but was in recovery.  I had not written the Great American anything.  As we reminisced, I said, “Karen, do you remember that your father was told by America’s greatest living author that you looked like one of the ten most beautiful women in the world--Ava Gardner?”

       “No,” she said.  “I just remember you asked Ernest Hemingway some really intelligent question about writing.”

Postscript:  Karen passed away only a few months before our fiftieth high school reunion.