The Flamingo Rising

A big, touching, hilarious debut novel about loving, feuding, fireworks--and your average extraordinary family whose home is the largest drive-in movie theatre in the world.

It's the 1960s in Jacksonville, Florida (where the sixties are still the fifties), and some of America's last sweet moments of innocence are unfolding out on the coastal highway at the Flamingo Drive-In Theatre, owned and operated by the Lee family.

Patriarch Hubert Lee has a spirit and ego to match the size of his drive-in: "The symbol of human power and aspiration, the stairway to heaven,"  he says, describing the gigantic screen tower. But his ego is at its most unforgiving in his dealings with Turner West. Turner owns the funeral home on land adjacent to the Flamingo and wants to put a cemetery on property that Hubert owns and will never, ever, under any circumstances sell!--his gleeful stubbornness spiking an already intense rivalry between them. So when Hubert's teenage son, Abe, develops his first full-blown adolescent crush, it makes perfect, devilish sense that the object of his desire should be Grace West, Turner's only daughter.

Abe Lee--earnest, devoted to his family, keenly and happily observant--is the perfect narrator for this beguiling tale. Especially since his star-crossed love for Grace becomes common knowledge, and he's suddenly the focus of everyone's attention. That is, when their attention isn't focused on something else: the often ballistic flare-ups between the feuding fathers; the shenanigans of the two young, seductive female Flamingo employees; the calm radiance of Abe's mother (behind which the secrets of her heart are well hidden); Abe's sister, Louise, blossoming with alarming speed into a stunning, willful young woman; the preternatural wisdom of Pete Maws, the retired railroad worker who pulls his caboose onto the Flamingo grounds one day and stays; Judge Lester, breathtakingly graceful when he's towing the Flamingo's banner behind his small plane, breathtakingly clumsy when his feet are on the ground; the canine rantings of an insane, beloved dog named Frank; the annual Fourth of July pyrotechnic extravaganzas that the Flamingo is famous for, and with which the Lees and their magnificent enterprise will find a permanent--not to mention brilliantly lit--place in local lore.

As Abe moves from adolescence toward adulthood--his love for Grace and his understanding of his family and his role in it maturing along with him--he leads us on a deliriously spirited tour of the hearts and minds, the dreams and desires, the foibles and eccentricities, of the whole Flamingo set. Along the way, we are reminded of who we were--and how we came to be who we are--with deep tenderness and insight, and glorious good cheer.

Larry Baker lives with his wife and children in Iowa City, where he teaches literature and history. Currently serving his second term on the City Council of Iowa City, he is seeking reelection this fall. He can be reached at bakerl@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu.


I was raised an Army/Air Force brat. Traveled with my family all over the country and then overseas. I was introduced to my father when I was three or four.  He was sitting up in my mother's bed, sheet pulled up to the bottom of his shirtless chest, a pair of binoculars hanging from around his neck, in a room with the curtains closed. If my writing shows some character's ambivalent feelings toward his father, it is probably me using fiction as therapy.

I was married when I was eighteen. It was the Sixties. If a girl told you that she was pregnant, the expected thing to do was marry her, at least in Texas, when the girl's father was the Chief of Police. I was divorced five years later.  My ex-wife then called me to ask me to take custody of our son so she could marry a Jordanian multi-millionaire who "was all the man you  never were, Larry." I happened to be living with a young woman at the time who informed me that her being a step-mother at age  twenty was not in her contract, so I was soon a bachelor father.

Started working at a drive-in. Made a career of it. During my drive-in career I was robbed four times, shot at once, stabbed once, arrested for collusion to transport pornographic materials across state lines, beat up by a motorcycle gang in Tulsa, found a dead woman in the toilet, was attacked by an irate father who accused me of embarrassing his daughter at a Friday night full house, interrupted countless couples who were having sex in their car or van, established the unofficial obscenity standards for the state of Oklahoma by showing Deep Throat without getting arrested, caused a thirteen car pile-up on an interstate highway by showering the highway with windblown fireworks, and then there were all those episodes that I can't even put in print.

I met my present wife in graduate school. I had just recently sold my last theater, the Hollywood, in Norman, Oklahoma, and was known in the English Department only as "that guy who showed that Marilyn Chambers movie."  Even before it was a cliche, I was politically incorrect. She and I literally first met outside the bathroom at a party given by the other graduate students. It  was 1978, but it might as well have been 1968.  In the front room was a line of people passing around a joint, a line which included several nursing mothers.  Unlike Clinton, everyone was inhaling, even the babes in arms. Waiting outside the bathroom, I looked at her short hair and asked her if she was a lesbian.  She asked me if I was a pornographer. It was love.

A few months later she took me to Nashville to meet her family. I was Southern, but I had never really met Southern Gothic before. My new brother-in-law, Bobby Russell, was the writer of "Honey--Little Green Apples--The Night The Lights Went Out In Georgia" and other country hits, as well as a man who worshipped Elvis and kept Nazi memorabilia in all his bathrooms, as well as hanging Nazi flags in the barn where he used to watch his prize race horses procreate. Vicky Lawrence was one of his wives.  She created the characters for Carol Burnett's skit called Mama's Family. I heard those lines long before they were on television. Scary.

I moved to Iowa City to finish my PhD in English, after a nasty year in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Those people still insist that the North lost.  Once in Iowa City, I got mad at a local developer who was tearing down old houses to build apartments. I ran for City Council, lost, got appointed to the Zoning Commission and then ran for office again in 1983, winning with 65% of the vote. A four year term, and then, after adopting kids, I moved to Florida, was miserable, fell in love with the ocean (I do not swim), moved back to Iowa City and ran for Council again in 1993 and won with 55% of the vote.

Right now I work part-time at WaldenBooks, teach three classes at a local community college (history and literature), and my being an elected official of the America's most educated community (according to the US Census Bureau), and home of the Writer's Workshop, will be the acid test of whether irony and politics can survive together.

I am working on my second novel tentatively titled The Education of Nancy Flynn, all about sex, teaching, and politics.