‘Days Like Smoke’ The origin story of Hassler’s novels

Nearly 15 years have passed since Jon Hassler died, and while his novels and his nature as a wry and moving writer live in the memory of many Minnesota readers, the passage of time has made it easy to forget the impact of his work and the stature it held beyond the borders of his home state.

In his foreword to Hassler’s posthumously published memoir, “Days Like Smoke,” novelist Will Weaver explains that, after a series of bestsellers in the 1970s and 1980s, Hassler’s many fans included people in high places.

“Not long after Jon Hassler returned from a private lunch at the White House with Hillary Clinton, a group of friends gathered at a lake cabin in northern Minnesota,” Weaver writes, recalling a 1993 get-together.

“We did not know of his trip to the White House, nor that Mrs. Clinton was a big fan of ‘Staggerford’ and other of his novels — and he did not mention it.”

In his stories, Hassler was a modest, humble presence and a careful observer with an understated sense of humor. It seems, from Weaver’s telling, that Hassler was the same in life and among his friends.

On the pages of “Days Like Smoke,” published by Afton Press in late 2021, Hassler describes his origins as the child of a grocer in the small Minnesota towns of Staples and Plainview.

The memoir is a slim book of fewer than 150 pages, and it’s difficult to discern whether Hassler considered it the beginning of a longer work. But after all these years, the chance to read something new, so to speak, from Hassler is a gift, and its brevity doesn’t reduce the fondness his fans will feel for it.

Hassler published more than 20 books during his lifetime, including a dozen novels and several books of nonfiction, along with short story collections and children’s books. He was and remains best known for his 1977 debut, “Staggerford,” the tragicomic story of a small-town teacher during one defining week of his life in the classroom.

His subsequent novels included “The Love Hunter,” “A Green Journey,” and “North of Hope.” He was known for writing about people in small towns, and he was known for writing about teachers and priests and other people whose lives include significant responsibilities and negligible comforts.

In his 1987 novel “Grand Opening,” Hassler’s narrator is a pre-teen boy whose parents have purchased a grocery store in a small town much like Plainview. In “Days Like Smoke,” Hassler tells the true story that inspired the novel, and he explains how people he knew in Plainview inspired characters across his catalog of books.

“Although I would put off writing for another twenty years, I’ve always thought of the Red Owl Grocery Store in Plainview, Minnesota, as my training ground, for it was there that I acquired the latent qualities necessary to the novelist,” Hassler writes, “from my dear German father, endurance, patience, resilience and sound working habits, and from my dear Irish mother, the fun of picking individuals out of a crowd and the joy of finding precise words to describe them.”

“Days Like Smoke” begins as a fairly straightforward chronological account of Hassler’s early years. He was born in Minneapolis, but his story really begins with his young days in Staples, where his father managed a grocery store and the family scrimped by during the Depression years.

During World War II, they returned to Minneapolis, and his father found work in a plant that manufactured grease guns intended to service military vehicles.

After only a short time in the city, Hassler’s parents bought a struggling little store on a gravel street in Plainview, about 100 miles southeast of Minneapolis.

Clearly, the years Hassler and his parents spent there were not easy. His father worked long hours to keep the store on its feet, and his mother had to make her way in a community where she was a stranger.

And as an only child, Hassler experienced all of that without the buffer and aid of siblings. But he recalls with fondness his afternoons in the town’s movie theater, his nights on the gridiron as a member of the Plainview Gophers football team, and his unrequited love for his classmate Libby, who inspired a memorable character in “North of Hope.”

Whether you’ve read one or all or none of the books Hassler published during his lifetime, “Days Like Smoke” will provide you a brief but vivid encounter with a way of life that is lost and with a writer who was one of a kind.

Reading this powerful little memoir will likely compel you to discover or rediscover the books that made him famous and won him an invitation to a luncheon with Hillary.