Parker M. Wilcox: Historical research to add details

The book I'm working on is set in the mid-1970s. I was in high school then, but I have found I've had to do quite a bit or research to make sure all the background details are correct. It is a piece of fiction, set in a made-up town, but its southeastern Massachusetts location is real enough. Louis Tiant and Bill Lee were pitching for the Red Sox; Carlton Fisk was catching; Yaz was at first base. The diet soda of choice was TaB. The summer blockbuster Jaws opened in theaters the day before my story begins. Most telephones were still rotary dial. One could still get food from Howdy Beefburgers and Burger Chef. Pong was a popular video game played on home television sets. Arcade games Space Invaders and Pac-Man had not been developed yet.

This particular entry is about one specific historical tidbit I dug up to add dimension to one of my main characters, Maggie Hathaway. She grew up in Wellington Notch, New Hampshire, where her mother taught dance and gymnastics at local summer camps. Maggie developed a love for musical theater. She played Marian Paroo the librarian in the 1964 Wellington Notch High School production of The Music Man. Later, in a summer stock group, Maggie was Annie Oakley in Annie Get Your Gun at the Grafton County Playhouse.

All of those details about Maggie were already in my manuscript a couple of weeks ago when, in an online mystery writers group I belong to, a Mystery Writers Question of the Day was: if our main characters won free concert tickets, who would they see? This question actually broke down into three parts in my mind. What kind of music do they like? Who were the popular performers in 1975? Which performers were specifically touring then, with appearances relatively close to either Wellington Notch, NH, or Baybury Shores, MA?

The internet being a wonderful place to research, I found a list of concerts that took place in Providence, RI, in the '70s, either at the Providence Civic Center of The Providence Performing Arts Center. There wasn't much of anything that either Maggie or my male main character would have been very interested in. It was much harder to search for 1970s concerts in Boston, because there are just so many venues and I was looking for historical accuracy. I did not want to say Maggie saw a particular concert when some stickler for history could point out that the person or group in question was on tour in Europe then.

Then, I got the idea that maybe there was a way to look up Boston Pops concerts in the '70s. The male character had until recently been dating a woman who plays trombone, so they might see the Pops. And Maggie liked Broadway musicals and sometimes the Pops concerts featured the tunes of Broadway composers or performances by Broadway stars. Sure enough, Google located a very comprehensive list of all the concerts of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, including the Boston Pops series. Scanning through the list of concerts, I found that on Friday, May 2, 1975, two months before by story begins and one month before Maggie moved from Wellington Notch to Baybury Shores, Ethel Merman was the special guest of the Boston Pops. For those of you who aren't Broadway savvy, Ethel Merman was the original Annie Oakley in Annie Get Your Gun, and one of the greatest Broadway actresses of all time. Maggie Hathaway most certainly would have taken a bus from Wellinton Notch to Boston to see that concert.

I decided that was a thing I wanted to have Maggie mention in the book. So I added it in a very appropriate place story.

May 2, 1975, Boston Pops program (click to enlarge)

But there's more. A few nights ago, wanting to double check the date of the Ethel Merman concert to make sure I had it right, I stumbled on an amazing internet find. Internet Archive had a complete scanned collection of the 1975 Boston Pops concert program books. (In my attic I have a couple of these booklets myself, because in high school I was a band kid and every spring we took a bus trip to a Pops concert.) Flipping through the digital copies page by page, I found it. The actual program for the May 2, 1975, appearance by Ethel Merman, including the list of songs she sang. It was the very concert Maggie Hathaway would have seen, were she not actually a fictional character I made up.

This whole rabbit's hole of research, which sucked up hours of my time on a couple of different nights, only amounts to a passing, two sentence long reference in my book. But I learned something about my character Maggie that adds depth and realism to her. I know more about her. That will help me as I continue writing about her. And when the book is published some detail freak like me asks, "Did Ethel Merman really sing with the Boston Pops in 1975?" Hah! It's true. You can look it up.