Briny Breezes author Lee Godby published his auto-biography at the ripe old age of 100. Photos by Tim Stepien/The Coastal Star
By Ron Hayes
A word of advice.
If you should meet Lee Godby, please do not congratulate him on having lived 100 years.
“I’m 100 and a half,” he will correct you — with a smile. “I was born on June 25, 1925, so that makes me 100 and a half. Every half counts when you’re 100.”
In addition to being 100 and a half, Godby has the honor of having published his autobiography at 100. Last year, before the half.
Age aside, he is not alone. In Briny Breezes, a town of 532, Godby is one of about 15 residents, children of residents, and grandchildren of residents, who have written books on display in this little town’s little library.
Here you’ll find a history of the town itself, mysteries, children’s books, World War II memoirs, and a celebration of dance.
Also, the story of one’s man triumph over prostate cancer called Bend Over and Say AHH!
“I figured I’d better get it down while my mind is still sharp,” Lee Godby said, sitting with his wife, Josefina, by the shelf where his book Ensley is waiting to be read.
Ensley is his given name, Ensley Godby, but he goes by Lee.
“I hated the name for a long time,” he recalled, “but then I thought, I’ve never heard of another Ensley in the world, so I thought it must be unique. Now I don’t hate the name anymore.”
Ensley the book began when Ensley the author started writing about his father, a steam engineer who ran a power plant up home in Canada, back in the days before electricity.
“I had written quite a bit when I saw an ad for LifeBook Memoirs,” he said.
An international company, LifeBook Memoirs works with aspiring memoirists to create their autobiographies, from the first word to the finished volume. The service is not cheap. According to the company’s website, Godby’s volume cost $18,000.
“They sent a really fantastic lady, and I started talking and she started recording,” recalled Godby, a year-round Briny Breezes resident.
Every Friday for three months, a freelance interviewer named Lauren O’Farrell interviewed Godby for 90 minutes. Her interviews were then forwarded to a ghostwriter, who returned written drafts for him to review, criticize, correct and expand on.
He told O’Farrell about growing up in Mountain Park, Alberta; about earning a master’s degree in electrical engineering; about his summer job with the Eldorado Mining & Refining Co., when he used a Geiger counter to look for uranium under the earth.
“At breakfast one day,” he remembered, “an old guy named Ed Cody announced that the atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima, and I realized why we were doing what we were doing.”
He told O’Farrell about his time in Ottawa, working with the government’s National Research Council, using magnetometers to look for submarines.
He told her about his four children, Gavin, Scott, Mark, and Howard, all in their 70s except for Howard, the baby at 69. His six grandchildren, his six great-grandchildren.
He told her about his four wives, and how he met Josefina in 2013, when his son Scott introduced them.
“I liked that his name has ‘God’ in it,” Josefina says.
They married in 2017.
“It’s not just the final product,” O’Farrell says, “but the interaction between the subject and the interviewer and the writer. Working with Mr. Godby was amazing. He’s an incredible person who’s lived an incredible life. We had a great time working together.”
Ensley is an impressively produced, hardcover volume filled with photographs, many in color, and a century of memories.
The author was more than satisfied.
“I got 40 copies,” he said, “and I’ve ordered some more.”
Ron Vaughn, author of three books.
Working on his fourth book
None of Lee Godby’s fellow writers is 100 and a half, yet.
Ron Vaughn is a mere 84. His nickname is Butch, and it’s the title of his autobiography.
“It’s about growing up in a rural community outside Flint, Michigan, until the age of 11,” he says. “I never got in any real hard trouble, but I was always in mischief.”
A part-time Briny Breezes resident since 2000, Vaughn still spends most of the year up North, but between here and there he has found time to write Butch, as well as a crime novel and a medical memoir.
Skeeter Jones, the novel, is loosely based on a true story.
“A guy I knew had a son on drugs, and he took a shotgun and shot the pusher’s head off,” Vaughn explains. “I had Skeeter go on the run after shooting the pusher, but what really happened is, he put the gun down on the bar and said, ‘Call the police.’”
Which brings us to Bend Over and Say AHH!
“It’s rated G,” Vaughn quickly notes. “About my experience with prostate cancer four years ago. I was lucky, they caught it in the first stage. Twenty-eight treatments and so far, so good. There’s nothing to it if it’s caught early.”
The title is funny, but the message is serious. Get tested, and you can live long enough to be writing your fourth book.
“It’s another true story, about a young couple who tried to rob a gas station back in 1976,” he explains. “The gun went off and killed a guy in a paint shop across the street. The wife was pardoned after 26 years, but the guy’s still in prison.
“I’ve been working on it about six months, and I like this one even better.”
Andrea Olsen with her book The Place of Dance.
Dancing, writing and beach
Most books by Briny authors are self-published, but not all.
Andrea Olsen’s The Place of Dance is available from Wesleyan University Press, along with her three previous books.
“The Place of Dance is about the role of dance in culture,” she says, “and how place influences dance.”
Briny Breezes has influenced Olsen’s dance for a very long time.
“We first visited Briny when I was 5 in 1953,” she explains. “We towed a long green trailer down from Decatur, Illinois, and then bought two lots in 1958. I’m 77 now, so I’ve been in Briny for 72 years.”
For 32 of her 77 years, Olsen taught dance and environmental studies at Middlebury College in Vermont, and she still leads workshops. Over her lifetime, dance has taken her to Paris, Denmark, New Zealand — and of course, Briny Breezes.
“I dance on the beach every morning at 9 a.m.,” she says, “and then I journal on the beach, writing about what happened the day before. Walking on the beach every day, you get used to the broad horizon, the seashells, the palm fronds, the breeze. Dancing outdoors changes how you move. In Briny, it’s the sense of being by the ocean and the rhythm of the waves.
“I wrote parts of all four books in the winters here.”
For the young ones
And there are children’s books.
Rosie’s Song, by Mary Kate Leming, The Coastal Star’s founder and editor emeritus, with illustrations by Deborah LaFogg Docherty, follows Rosie the sea star’s search for her brothers lost in a storm.
Sassyquatch: Yeti Or Not, Here I Come is inscribed, “This book was written by Lindsey Stansfield, daughter-in-law of Patricia Stansfield, K-28. For all the youngsters at Briny.”
Turtlee in Paris notes it was written by “Paris Stankewich, granddaughter of Stan and Carole Brunell.”
And other books:
From a Branch and a String by David Lindmark tells how his fishing guide service grew into a Christian ministry.
Suzanne Snyder-Carroll offers her “Joe The Plumber” mystery trilogy.
And of course, the writings of Dorothy McNeice, the town’s historian.
100 and then some
And now for the inevitable question before Lee Godby returns to his trailer: How do you get to be 100 and a half?
“The secret is having the right ancestors,” he says. “But I can’t prove that because most of mine died of tuberculosis. My father’s mother and father both died of TB, and my mother’s father died of TB. But my mother’s mother lived into her 90s.”
He never drank or smoked, and he never followed any strict diets. “I eat whatever she cooks,” he says, nodding at Josefina. “She’s my life.”
Being memorable
For You The War Is Over: A Flyboy’s Experience of World War II by Carl Weller is in the Briny Breezes library.
And so is Seagoing Veterinarian, by Harold “Doc” Burton, a memoir of his work delivering farm animals to Europe in the 1940s.
Both Weller and Burton have died, but their memories still live, on the shelves of that tiny, one-room library next to the shuffleboard courts in Briny Breezes.
At 100 and a half, Lee Godby spoke for all the town’s writers.
“Why does anybody write anything?” he asked. “The feeling of wanting to be immortal.
“I’m happy about that.”
A set of shelves in the Briny Breezes library celebrates the town’s authors.
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