Cornwall, Conn. resident Rinker Buck began his career in journalism at the Berkshire Eagle and was a longtime staff writer for the Hartford Courant before he began a 20-year career writing for the likes of Vanity Fair, New York, Life, and other well-known publications. His most recent book, 2015’s "The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey," is his third work of historical memoir/travelogue and has been on the New York Times bestseller list for 11 weeks. The author, who spends part of his time in Maine taking care of his 91-year-old mother, will be at The White Hart Inn in Salisbury today, September 17, at 7 p.m. and at Oblong Books in Rhinebeck this Saturday, September 19 at 7 p.m. I grew up in northern New Jersey, but in a sense I’m a Berkshire boy because my grandfather was a well-known engineer who worked for GE in Pittsfield, and his father was a stonemason who worked on the McKinley monument in Adams and the WWI monument on Mt. Greylock. So I grew up hearing a lot of stories about this area.
After studying politics and history at Bowdoin in the 1970s, I went traveling around on my motorcycle. One day I was coming down the Mohawk Trail and I stopped at the Howard Johnson’s that used to be in Williamstown. I’d seen an article about how The Berkshire Eagle had just won a Pulitzer Prize and was named “the greatest country newspaper in America" so I went to check out the office. By a concatenation of mistakes, I ran into the publisher who thought I was there for a job interview, got hired and worked there for three years. I started out in obituaries and weather, and it was a great learning experience because I was too ambitious and naïve to listen to what anyone told me to do. One of my first obits was the last living veteran of WWI; nobody knew much about him but I thought “this is a great opportunity" and basically wrote his obituary as a history of WWI, and people loved it. After a year, I was promoted to the politics section. Growing up with five brothers and five sisters calling me a “stupid creep" was great preparation for any angry politicians that would call me up; no amount of insults were going to throw me off.
I’ve always been a huge reader of history and I would have become an historian if I didn’t love writing so much. Everyone thinks The Oregon Trail trip was driven by a sense of adventure, but it was more driven by history. The real story was more compelling than the half-truths we’re taught in school. For instance, women played a huge part in the crossing, and the Indians were helpful to us until we started killing all the buffalo. We have a habit of heroification and we eliminate all the things about historic figures that don’t fit with that. I thought this would be a better way to tell the real story than just writing revisionist history.
