Book sale yields a family treasure.

Byline: Karen McCowan The Register-Guard

Volunteer Bucklin "Buck" Moon was straightening a display table at the Friends of the Eugene Public Library book sale Sunday when he noticed something surprising on the spine of a vintage hardcover:

A name. His own.

Moon, a Eugene writer and library volunteer, had stumbled across the last book published 45 years ago by his late father, Bucklin Moon Sr. The younger Moon hadn't known that the book, "A Doubleday Anthology," existed.

His serendipitous discovery has provided welcome new insight into the father he had lost to McCarthyism at age 6.

The elder Moon had already launched a successful career as a literary editor when he published his first novel in 1943. Although Moon was white, his books brought mainstream literary attention to the lives and plight of African-Americans.

"The Darker Brother," a 1943 Book-of-the-Month Club alternate selection, was the story of a young black man who leaves Florida to seek a better life in Harlem.

Two years later, Moon was the first white person to publish an anthology of writing by and about black Americans, "A Primer for White Folks," according to the Winter Park Public Library. The library maintains an archive of his work.

He then wrote his own nonfiction book about racism, "The High Cost of Prejudice," followed by his final novel. That book, "Without Magnolias," won a $2,500 George Washington Carver Award as the best book of 1949 by or about blacks.

Bucklin Sr. had moved from Doubleday to a similar editing position at Colliers when Sen. Joseph McCarthy and his House Committee on Un-American Activities began its anti-Communist witch-hunts.

"Because he'd been active in the Civil Rights movement and was a member of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) he got blacklisted," Buck Moon said. "All he was was a well-meaning sort of Democrat - a New Dealer."

After his father was branded a Communist sympathizer, however, Colliers fired him in 1953.

"No one else in the U.S. would hire him," Buck Moon said. "He'd lived in France before, so he tried to go there and work, but the government revoked his passport. He lost his livelihood, and our whole family kind of fell apart."

Buck Moon was only six years old when his parents divorced and he moved with his mother to Connecticut. He remembers traveling by train to New York for weekend visits with his father.

"My mother would turn me over to the conductor in New Haven and I'd get off at Grand Central Station and there he'd be, waiting for me," Moon recalled this week. "Can you imagine doing that with a child today? But I could always spot him because he was so tall - 6 foot 4 or 5."

But the relationship deteriorated after his father fell into a deep depression, eventually attempting suicide.

Though the pair reconnected before Moon Sr.'s death 20 years ago, they were never close. Buck Moon had no idea until his Sunday discovery that his father had revived his publishing career a decade after his blacklisting to edit a final book.

The assignment itself was testament to his father's enduring reputation as an editor. Doubleday had chosen him to edit an anthology of the best works in its first 60 years of publishing. Bucklin Moon faced an overwhelming array of worthy material, eventually settling on excerpts from such varied works as Daphne du Maurier's "Rebecca," Irving Stone's "Clarence Darrow for the Defense " and Dwight Eisenhower's "Crusade in Europe," as well as entire short stories such as Joseph Conrad's "Youth."

For Buck Moon, however, the real treasure was hearing his father's candid, funny literary voice, as revealed in his three-page introduction.

"He wrote that he didn't quite know how to do such a job, writing that he was `faced with the rather chilling problem of a man turned loose in Fort Knox and told he could take out as much as he could carry in his pockets at one time,' '' Moon said.

What Moon's son heard in those words was the triumphant reassertion of a once-muzzled voice.

"What I realized is that, first of all, he writes really well," Buck Moon said. "Second, he was clear and simple. And he was so conscientious about getting the feel of a novel and being fair to the author."

His father concluded the introduction by expressing hope that readers of the anthology will "go back and discover the joys of the books themselves in their entirety."

And then he adds something that might have been written directly to his son, discovering the book 45 years later:

"I am a lover and a respecter of the written word and there can never be anything quite like the whole story."

WANT TO READ MORE?

The Winter Park (Fla.) Public Library, which maintains an archive of Bucklin R. Moon's manuscripts, has posted an online biography of his life, work and blacklisting.

www.wppl.org/wphistory/BucklinMoon