Remembering my hot date with the Queen

Five years ago this week when I flew to Amsterdam to say nice things about the Dutch intellectual Geert Mak, I had a great time and met Queen Maxima of the Netherlands.

Five years ago this week I went to Amsterdam to give a 3-minute tribute to Geert Mak for a Dutch TV program.

Mak, the brilliant newspaperman-turned-historian and Dutch household name, did what I did in 2010.

Exactly 50 years later, he retraced the 10,000-mile road trip John Steinbeck made in the fall of 1960 that became his iconic but highly fictionalized 'nonfiction' 1962 bestseller 'Travels With Charley.'

Mak's bestseller in Dutch and later many other languages was a real book -- with footnotes -- about the changes in America from 1960 to 2010.

When he realized I was traveling the Steinbeck Highway a few hundred miles and several days ahead of him, and that I was exposing the many fictions and fibs Steinbeck had inserted in 'TWC,' Mak generously included me and my findings in his book.

I surprised Mak at a big event honoring him for his career’s many accomplishments — sort of like the way they did in the old, old, old TV show, “This is Your Life.”

Oh, yeah. The lovely woman gazing fondly at me and Mak is the Queen of the Netherlands.

The great PG columnist Brian O'Neill, a friend and former colleague, wrote this perfect column about my adventures with Queen Maxima.

The only thing wrong with the column is that it keeps calling me 'Mr. Steigerwald.' Not his fault, though. The PG started calling people “Mr.” on the second reference — including a ‘Mr. Sting” and a “Mr. Prine” I think — long after I left in 2000 because it wanted, pathetically, to emulate/copy the snooty style of the New York Times.

Because the PG is now making people subscribe before they can read an article, here is Brian's column from Dec. 14, 2017:

Brian O'Neill:

Bill Steigerwald, Geert Mak and the Dutch queen

Once upon a time, an Uber driver met the queen of the Netherlands.

Mind you, Bill Steigerwald is much more than a ride for hire. The longtime Pittsburgh newspaperman wasn’t summoned to a posh hotel in the Netherlands last month because of his current semi-retirement forays in the gig economy.

Mr. Steigerwald received the invitation because of “Dogging Steinbeck.” https://clips.substack.com/p/travels-with-charley-turns-60-dogging

His 2013 book, which one fan called an “investigative travelogue,” described his cross-country trek along the same roads John Steinbeck traveled for his epic 1960 journey in “Travels With Charley,” albeit 50 years later.

Mr. Steigerwald didn’t have to go very far in those celebrated tire tracks before he discovered that Steinbeck had made a lot of stuff up. He said as much in the Post-Gazette in December 2010, and rattled the Nobel Prize winner’s fans.

But the research could not be denied. A couple of years later, a new edition of “Travels With Charley” came with the freshly crafted caveat that “it would be a mistake to take this travelogue too literally” because the author had invented “freely when it served his purposes.”

A celebrated Dutch writer, Geert Mak, had followed the Charley path as closely as a couple of hours behind Mr. Steigerwald. In his own 2014 book, “In America: Travels With John Steinbeck,” he credited Mr. Steigerwald for his investigative work.

So when Mr. Mak was honored with his nation’s Prince Bernhard Culture Fund Award — worth 150,000 euros, or about $176,000 — his American counterpart was brought over as a surprise guest on the Dutchman’s big night.

Not long after, my old softball teammate sent me a picture of himself standing with Queen Maxima of the Netherlands. I asked him to come alone for coffee, figuring she was busy.

Mr. Steigerwald, 70, has taken trains through the Andes, chased tornadoes in Oklahoma and hung on drug corners in the pursuit of stories, but giving a speech to a roomful of Dutch strangers at a nationally televised awards show was the most terrifying experience of his life, he said.

He’d borrowed what passed for a suit from his younger brother, Paul (a former television play-by-play announcer for the Penguins), found his own shirt and tie, and flew east on a Dutch foundation’s dime for a program that essentially was “This is your life, Geert Mak.’’

He and Mr. Mak had met once before, in May 2014, when the Dutchman left a writer’s conference in New York to fly to Pittsburgh and meet the man with whom he’d long traded trans-Atlantic emails.

It’s an unlikely friendship, with Mr. Steigerwald a libertarian and Mr. Mak a self-confessed “typical latte-drinking, Citroen-driving, half-socialist European journalist and historian.” But, as Mr. Steigerwald said in his speech, “In addition to being a renowned European journalist and historian,’’ Mr. Mak is “clearly a great guy, a regular guy.”

Queen Maxima stands about 5-foot-10 and “her dress was worth more than my house,” but she and everyone else treated him like an important writer, and he didn’t cross the ocean to argue.

Mr. Steigerwald has written a second book, “30 Days a Black Man,” an account of Pulitzer Prize-winning Post-Gazette reporter Ray Sprigle’s 1948 undercover trip in the Deep South.

With his only disguise a deep tan, a shaved head and a forged identity as an NAACP official, Mr. Sprigle traveled through Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi with the black civil rights pioneer John Wesley Dobbs, living as the 10 million black citizens of the Jim Crow states did every day.

The 21-part series Mr. Sprigle wrote upon his return shook much of the nation as readers confronted the lie that was “separate but equal.” He’d gone South seeking only a good story, but returned as something of a crusader, saying in a nationally broadcast radio debate “that it seems to me to require some effrontery to discuss when and how you are going to apply the Constitution of the United States to a segment of the population.’’

Both of Mr. Steigerwald’s books are well worth reading, but only one brought him before a queen. That was an odd first for a man entering his eighth decade, but he says, “I never wanted to peak too early.”

My 3-minute Tribute to Geert Mak

From the fine web site, SteinbeckNow.com, here’s what I said to Mak (and the Queen) ….

Text of Tribute to Geert Mak At Award Event in Holland

Bill Steigerwald (at left), the American journalist who wrote Dogging Steinbeck “to expose the truth about Travels with Charley,” accepted the invitation to address an audience in Holland that included Queen Máxima (right) when his friend Geert Mak (center), the Dutch journalist who wrote In America—Travels with John Steinbeck, was awarded the 2017 Prince Bernhard Cultural Prize. “My appearance at the ceremony for Geert Mak on November 27 in Amsterdam was a total surprise to Mak,” says Steigerwald. “It was like the old time TV show This is Your Life.” The text of the tribute to a friendship that started with Steinbeck is published here for the first time.—Ed.

Good afternoon. Thank you for inviting me.

Though Geert and I were born an ocean apart, and though he’s much smarter and far more accomplished than I’ll ever be, we have some things in common.

We’re both 70-year-old Baby Boomers.

We both started out life with lots of hair.

We both grew up to be journalists and writers.

And we both specialized in the kind of drive-by journalism that he used so masterfully in 2010 for what became his American history book, In America—Travels With John Steinbeck.

In America is a great mix of big-picture history, on-the-road journalism and progressive opinion. The Guardian newspaper called it “witty, personable and knowing”—and it is.

But perhaps the most impressive thing about it is that it reads like it was written by a lifelong  American, not a longtime citizen of Europe.

As a way to show how big America is and how much it had changed in the previous 50 years, Geert came up with idea to follow the same route around the United States that John Steinbeck took in 1960 for his famous road book Travels with Charley.

It was a really good idea—and I had thought of it too.

That’s why early on the morning of September 23, 2010, exactly 50 years after Steinbeck left on his iconic 10,000-mile road trip, Geert and I each drove to the great novelist’s former house on Long Island, New York.

We didn’t bump into each other at Steinbeck’s place.

I left to catch the ferry to New England an hour or so before Geert and his wife Mietsie arrived in their rented Jeep Liberty.

For nearly two months, from Maine to California and down to New Orleans, the Maks and I traveled to the same places and even interviewed some of the same people.

For the record, as we journalists like to say, the Maks traveled like adults.  They stayed in motels and drove responsibly.

I drove alone, as fast as a runaway teenager, often sleeping in my Toyota RAV4 in Walmart parking lots or beside the highway.

We never did meet on the road, but before Geert got out of New England he discovered that I was a day or so ahead of him.

He also saw I was posting a daily road blog on a newspaper website and slowly proving my case that Steinbeck had fictionalized large chunks of what was supposed to be a nonfiction travel book.

Geert, who already had his own suspicions about Steinbeck stretching the truth, realized he had to include me in his book.

Two years later, after a Dutch reader alerted me that my name was in In America, Geert and I were exchanging friendly transatlantic emails–in English.

We compared notes on Steinbeck and the road trip we shared.

I confessed to him that I was a lifelong libertarian, someone he’d call “a radical individualist.”

He confessed to me that he was “a typical latte-drinking, Citroën-driving, half-socialist European journalist and historian.”

Someday, we promised each other, we would meet in Holland over a Heineken and have a friendly debate about the two very different 2010 Americas we found along the same stretch of highway.
I never made it to Amsterdam–until now.

But in May of 2014, when Geert was in New York at a writers conference, he jumped on a plane and flew to Pittsburgh for three hours just to meet me and buy me lunch.

His visit was both an honor and a special treat.

He was even nicer in person than he was online. In addition to being a renowned European journalist and historian, he was clearly a great guy, a regular guy.

That’s a high compliment from an American, but I don’t think that’s news to many people in the Netherlands.

Hello, Geert. I’m a little bit over-dressed. But I’m here to buy you that beer.

(Then Geert Mak left his chair and hugged me in front of several hundred people.)