{"id":1603,"date":"2003-07-01T19:58:17","date_gmt":"2003-07-01T23:58:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/uapress\/product\/import-placeholder-for-63\/"},"modified":"2022-12-05T12:49:34","modified_gmt":"2022-12-05T17:49:34","slug":"gum-dipped","status":"publish","type":"product","link":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/uapress\/product\/gum-dipped\/","title":{"rendered":"Gum-Dipped"},"content":{"rendered":"
READ A SAMPLE<\/a><\/div>\n

Gum-Dipped: A Daughter Remembers Rubber Town<\/i> tells the story of growing up in the rubber community of Firestone Park in Akron, Ohio\u2014the former Rubber Capital of the World. The book begins with the rededication of the bronze Harvey Firestone statue on August 3, 2000, at the Centennial celebration for the Firestone Tire & Rubber Company. The statue\u2014perched high on a hill at the entrance to Firestone Park, the residential community Harvey built for his workers in 1915\u2014was sacred to the author, Joyce Coyne Dyer, and her father, Tom Coyne, during the fifties, a time when the Coynes worshipped the company and thought themselves members of the Firestone family.<\/p>\n

Tom Coyne, a thirty-seven-year man with the company, dreamed of being manager of Firestone’s reclaim plant, but the script the company wrote for him turned out to be very different. It included demotions, a firing, illnesses from chemicals and despair, and the razing of the plant where he spent his life. After her father died and she found a large manila folder that documented his history with the company, the author realized how much she didn’t know about Tom Coyne. She sets out to find her father, and begins to understand how his hard history with the company led to despair and illness, but also to the strength he found later in his life to stare down trouble and never be fooled again\u2014even by Death.<\/p>\n

Preoccupied with plant safety and the annual safety slogan contest, Tom Coyne came to learn that safety is something invisible, on the inside. He had thought that moving to Firestone Park would keep his family safe\u2014the Park’s curvy streets, his little Tudor house, the Firestone name on everything (the school, the streets, the Clubhouse, the bank, his tires, his stove and radio). But Tom Coyne was safe only when he realized that the town that Harvey built was no more real\u2014and certainly no more safe\u2014than flimsy scenery flown in for a movie about a perfect kingdom.<\/p>\n

Joyce Coyne Dyer, who grew up in Firestone Park and whose family has worked for Firestone nearly from the day of its founding in 1900, discovers her own Firestone legacy as she thinks about her father. She tries not to turn away from the truth of his life\u2014or of her own. She looks at her father\u2014and the years they both grew up in Rubber Town\u2014with humor and irony, with love and regret.<\/p>\n

About the author<\/h3>\n
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Joyce Dyer is director of the Lindsay-Crane Center for Writing and Literature at Hiram College in Hiram, Ohio, and John S. Kenyon Professor of English. Dyer is the author of three other books,\u00a0The Awakening: A Novel of Beginnings, In a Tangled Wood: An Alzheimer\u2019s Journey,<\/i>\u00a0and\u00a0Gum-Dipped: A Daughter Remembers Rubber Town<\/i>, and the editor of\u00a0Bloodroot: Reflections on Place by Appalachian Women Writers<\/i>. She has published essays in magazines such as\u00a0North American Review, cream city review,<\/i>\u00a0and\u00a0High Plains Literary Review<\/i>. Dyer has won numerous awards for her writing, including the 1998 Appalachian Book of the Year Award and the 2009 David B. Saunders Award in Creative Nonfiction.<\/p>\n

Other books by Joyce Dyer<\/h3>\n