Brewster Author’s Memoir Explores A Dark Past

Author Caroline Shannon Davenport of Brewster has released a memoir of her childhood called “Terror at the Sound of a Whistle: A Memoir” (Running Wild Press, 2024).

 The book won a Literary Titan Book Award in 2024.

 Davenport was a grown woman when she had her Proustian moment that brought back her childhood. Instead of Marcel Proust’s famous madeleine cookie, Davenport’s impetus was “a piercing sound of a train whistle.”

 What that experience brought back were memories of her childhood in the late 1940s and 1950s in a Victorian Addams Family-style house next to a train track in Toledo, Ohio. The house was “horror-movie dark,” a “ghost house.”

 The outward circumstances of young Caroline’s life were bizarre. While she lived on the top floor of the house with her parents Merle and Margie, a second family consisting of Big Jim, who constantly sported dark glasses, his wife Pauline and their son, Jimmy, lived on the second floor. On the first floor the adults ran an illegal, after-hours gambling casino and supper club that the children were rarely allowed to enter. It had a polished dance floor and a bar under a big mirror. Red and blue neon lights illuminated the room. There was a roulette wheel and slot machines. 

 “Somebody was killed there before our dads got it. Later, somebody died in it again,” Davenport writes.

Sometimes young Caroline accompanied Merle when he made his monthly trip to the police station to pay off the cops, waiting outside a private office and eating candy from the office bowl. If the police planned a raid, they notified the family in advance.

 Caroline’s closest friend was Jimmy, who was her senior by about a month. “Jimmy and I cleaved together to form an unbreakable bond,” she writes.

 Surrounding the house were small cabins that the adults rented out to assorted oddballs — “drifters and sometimes troubled tenants.”

 “Yes, it is a strange cast of characters from a long-ago time, but very relevant to what is going on today,” Davenport said in a recent email interview. She originally tried to work her recollections into a novel, but her agent told her it would be a stronger story as a memoir. She hesitated, though, as too many of the characters were still alive and might be hurt. But when she learned of a 2012 book called “Illegal Gambling Clubs of Toledo” that featured the house where she grew up and even a photo of her father, she knew it was time to write her family’s story.

 While you might imagine that Davenport would harshly judge her parents’ life in crime, she instead points to “moral uncertainty, as exhibited by many of my memoir’s characters who are neither good nor bad.” This “leaves motives and actions open to interpretation.”

 When young Caroline asked her dad why the club was illegal, he had a ready answer. He said “laws weren’t always fair, sometimes they only benefitted certain people. You had to either have connections or money a lot of times.”

 An ominous air hangs over the family’s story, even at its most innocent moments. Part of what makes this setting so creepy is the proximity of the train track. Because an intersection was right by the house, the train blew its whistle when it reached that spot. The children were forbidden to cross the track on their own, but of course cross it they did, with the result that they were almost killed on the track.

 Shortly before Caroline entered the fifth grade, Toledo hired a new, anti-graft police chief. At this point she and her parents moved to an apartment above a legal restaurant that they ran. Readers of a certain age will take some nostalgic pleasure in watching Caroline and her mother choose her junior high wardrobe from a Vogue pattern book. Still, in the background, the oddball cast of characters who are getting shot, divorced and running around on their wives seem drawn from 1950s pulp fiction. Bo Bo went “to the slammer.”

 “We are creatures of our own history and our past,” Davenport says. “It is said that you can’t go home again. I say you never leave. I do so believe the memories of our early years are often hidden in the recesses of our minds, whether we choose to call them out. The good and the bad. They affect us.”

 It would be a spoiler to mention the terrible and shocking event that happens toward the end of the memoir, which ends in 1960, when Davenport was 15.

 In an epilogue, Davenport explores the myriad ways that her eccentric upbringing affected her adult relationships.

 Davenport has just completed a coming-of-age novel. She is also the author of short stories collected in published anthologies from Running Wild Press and in children’s books.

 “I hope this memoir will help others delve into their own locked-away doors and uncover all that might be helpful in their here and now,” Davenport says.

 “Terror at the Sound of a Whistle” is available through online booksellers.