From the June 15, 2010 broadcast of public radio's Writer's Almanac as read by Garrison Keillor: It's the birthday of folksinger and writer Christian Bauman, born in Easton, Pennsylvania (1970). He's the author of three widely praised novels, all published within the past decade: The Ice Beneath You (2002), Voodoo Lounge (2005), and In Hoboken (2008).
Though his mom was a doctor and his stepdad a philosophy professor, the boy didn't do well at academics. He barely graduated from high school and never went to college. He became a teenage father and worked as a cook, a clerk, a copy writer, and in all sorts of manual labor jobs. He painted houses, he spent a Philadelphia winter perched on scaffolding working on windows of a tall old school building, and he later watered plants at a corporate office, where he'd time his entry into the executive dining room so that he could help himself to the end of the lunch buffet.
He was 21, impoverished, in debt, without health insurance, and his young daughter needed an operation he couldn't afford. He began to pay attention to Army recruitment commercials. He said he joined the Army "for the same reason most people join the Army." He said, "I was young and poor. I had a child to support and no real job prospects. I wanted to escape. But what clinched it was when I found out the Army would pay for the operation my daughter needed."
He trained at Fort Eustis, in Virginia, where he was the only newly enlisted guy getting The New Yorker magazine. When he was shipped off to Somalia in 1992, he brought his typewriter along.
