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WORK TITLE: Tunnel to Hell
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1953
WEBSITE:
CITY: Lakewood
STATE: OH
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1953; married; children: two.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Photographer, writer, and graphic story writer with illustrator Gary Dumm.
AWARDS:Northeastern Ohio’s Cuyahoga Arts and Culture, Creative Workforce Fellowship Grant, for Tunnel To Hell.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Based in Cleveland, Ohio, Scott MacGregor has been a photographer and writer of graphic stories for more than thirty years with publications in numerous books and magazines. He collaborates with many illustrators, including Gary Dumm and Gregory Budgett. MacGregor is also the principal writer and publisher of the underground comic book, Dip Stories. A recipient of the 2012 Creative Workforce Fellowship Grant by Northeastern Ohio’s Cuyahoga Arts and Culture, MacGregor has published a photographic portfolio study of Ireland which is also in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art.
For their 2018 graphic novel Tunnel to Hell: The Lake Erie Tunnel Disasters—Tales of Heroism and Tragedy, MacGregor and Dumm turn to a real life topic, the 1916 building of the Lake Erie Tunnel to bring clean water to Cleveland. Due to abhorrent working conditions perpetrated by greedy politicians and industrialists, hundreds of workers, mostly Irish and German immigrants, are maimed and killed in cave ins and fires that ignited pockets of methane. Black inventor Benjamin Beltran devises an apparatus that lets men breathe through the toxic gas, but no one lets him distribute it to the workers because he is black. Sure enough, another fire erupts killing more men, but it evades poor Irish laborer Rodger Clarke, who was maimed in a previous fire yet still works in the tunnels. MacGregor chronicles the incessant racism, poverty, anti-immigrant sentiment, lack of concern for worker safety, and expendability of the working poor. MacGregor relates the issues of 1916 with social and political issues today.
A writer in Kirkus Reviews disliked Dumm’s characters drawn with bulging eyes and thick lines, yet noted that the earthy banter between laborers that leavens the weighty topic, adding that the book “Illuminates a neglected but relevant part of history and subtly draws parallels to today’s water infrastructure crises.” Commenting that the illustrations capture the stark nature of the lives of MacGregor’s characters, Beth Osborne noted on the Santa Fe Writers Project website: “MacGregor takes the story of twenty senseless deaths and funnels them through the lenses of classicism, racism, and the unrelenting pace of progress, which not only sheds light on the lives and deaths of these men, but calls our attention to how progress still treads on humankind, and how close we still stand to the mistakes of yesterday.” In an interview with Osborne, MacGregor said that a graphic novel was the best way to tell this story. “I faced the same challenge of any writer to create dialogue of genuine quality so that the characters endear themselves or are antagonistic (or both) to the reader.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, March 15, 2018, review of Tunnel to Hell: The Lake Erie Tunnel Disasters—Tales of Heroism and Tragedy.
ONLINE
Santa Fe Writers Project, https://sfwp.com/ (February 1, 2018 ), Beth Osborne, review of review of Tunnel to Hell, author interview.
US Review of Books, http://www.theusreview.com/ (July 27, 2018), Toby Berry, review of Tunnel to Hell.
Scott MacGregor -American- (1953- )
Scott MacGregor is an American photographer and writer from Cleveland,Ohio. His photographs and writings have been published in books and magazines and his portfolio includes one inclusion in the permanent collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art. He has been writing graphic tales for several decades in collaboration with Cleveland artists, most notably with artists Gary Dumm and Gregory Budgett.
MacGregor is the primary author of the underground comic "DIP Stories" and the graphic novel, “Tunnel To Hell” a work of historical fiction which tells the early 20th century story of the harrowing experiences suffered while building water tunnels under Lake Erie by Irish and European immigrants in his hometown of Cleveland.
Scott MacGregor is married with 2 grown children and lives in Lakewood, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland.
Visual truth in TUNNEL TO HELL by Scott MacGregor
by admin | Feb 1, 2018 | Interview, Publisher's Blog, SFWP Quarterly | 0 comments
When common humanity takes a back seat to greed
By Beth Osborne
Scott MacGregor’s graphic novel Tunnel to Hell is the story of the Waterworks Tunnel Disaster of 1916, as seen through the eyes of those who suffered as they attempted to work on and survive past the tunnels they dug 200 feet below Lake Erie. Tunnel to Hell is a story of desperation, greed, and industrial conquest. Illustrated by Gary Dumm, it follows characters who attempt to navigate a perilous race and class system rigged dangerously against them.
MacGregor has been writing and publishing graphic stories for over thirty years in collaboration with Dumm and other artists. He is the principal writer and publisher of the comic book Dip Stories. His photographic portfolio study of Ireland has been widely published and can be found in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art. In 2012, MacGregor was awarded the prestigious Creative Workforce Fellowship Grant by Northeastern Ohio’s Cuyahoga Arts and Culture as the result of his presentation of Tunnel to Hell, which is his first graphic novel. Read more about the book on Facebook and find it on Amazon.
In this interview, Beth Osborne, book reviewer for the SFWP Quarterly, asks MacGregor more about his work. Her review of Tunnel to Hell can be read here.
Scott MacGregor. Photo provided.
Beth Osborne: What made your decision to use the graphic novel format for this story?
Scott MacGregor: I honestly felt that it was the only way to tell this particular story, short of making a movie on the subject. Truth be told, it’s a format that I’m very comfortable with – not dissimilar to writing a screenplay. I faced the same challenge of any writer to create dialogue of genuine quality so that the characters endear themselves or are antagonistic (or both) to the reader.
In my view, you have less time to develop characters in a graphic novel than in a prose effort because your eyes don’t lie. What you see is what you get and when they are as well drawn as they are in Tunnel To Hell, the characters hit the panels as large as life and it was a daunting task to make the words and the visuals work together. Otherwise, you end up with a bad, very long “comic book.”
Osborne: For a story so steeped in gritty reality, the dream sequences were a beautiful choice. Could you talk more about these sequences and the bond between the characters Ben Beltran and Rodger Clarke?
MacGregor: Well, unintended predictability is venial sin for any storyteller. There comes a time in every tale when the writer has an opportunity to deviate into the unexpected to keep the reader off balance. I’m always looking for opportunities to take things sideways when the timing is right. The dream sequences were also strategic to the plot. Beltran and Clarke are drawn together by cause and effect but the challenge was to make it work in ways both intriguing and realistic.
In the early twentieth century when this story takes place, an era before our senses were dulled down by the proliferation of electronic noise, a tormented, God-fearing mind was wide open to mental suggestion from human telepathy, déjà vu, or “God’s will,” if you believe in such things. My characters certainly did. The insertion of the prophetic dream sequences created the opportunity to link those two disparate and sympathetic characters together, so that when Ben enters the tunnel for the last time, specifically in search of Clarke, the reader can keep hope alive that they’ll find each other somehow.
Osborne: With our current social climate, do you see parallels between the people in your story and people of today?
MacGregor: Great question and the answer is an emphatic yes. My goal was to tell a 100-year-old story based on real events that is comprised of societal base elements that have not yet decayed from our present world and, sadly, are still flourishing.
Tunnel To Hell is about government corruption for profit, the exploitation of immigrants and the working class for profit, pollution of the environment for profit, and I hope it will inspire thought and discussion on the absolute futility of racial hate and intolerance. At the end of the day, Tunnel To Hell is a cautionary tale about what happens when our common humanity takes a back seat to unconstrained greed. I find it disgraceful that movements have to continually be built just so that people of good will can shout truth to power. When Ben says, “History lives at the pleasure of a forgetful human race,” he speaks the truth. The world needs to listen to such truth tellers.
Osborne: What are you working on now?
MacGregor: Oddly enough, the story of “Tunnel To Hell” began its life as a single chapter in another graphic novel I was writing. The source material was so rich, however, that the chapter became its own book. I even had to condense and cut forty fully-illustrated pages from Tunnel To Hell because early feedback deemed it too long. Talk about pain. I guess we’ll save those lost pages for the “Director’s Cut” (ha-ha). I still have to finish that original story I was writing, which is another Cleveland tale.
Sometimes stories just fall into your lap and I have a whopper that I’m currently outlining derived from my own family history. It’s a story that will work either as a prose novel or another graphic exercise. It’s based on the life of my late uncle, a writer and poet himself, who suffered terribly while an American prisoner of war in Europe during the waning days of the Third Reich. After he recovered from his physical wounds, he self-treated his PTSD in 1946 by traveling to California where he became a charter member of the Anderson Creek Gang. The ACG was a group of Bohemians living in shacks right off the Big Sur highway. Their gang leader was none other than author Henry Miller and the story will include the comings and goings of other tag-along notables like painter Emil White, writer William Saroyan, and photographer Man Ray, among others. Their lifestyles and mores presaged the Beats by several years. I do believe there is a story in there somewhere!
But, as Henry Miller advised all writers, “one book at a time,” Tunnel To Hell was just released. It’s an earnest effort that I’m currently trying hard to promote.
Beth Osborne is a chocolate enthusiast living in Ithaca, New York. When she isn’t reading books, Beth can be found wandering in the mountains, baking bread, and training for triathlons. Before she was reading, Beth was a paleobotanist. However, a harrowing experience at a Costa Rican theme park convinced her to pursue a quieter life.
MacGregor, Scott: TUNNEL TO HELL
Kirkus Reviews. (Mar. 15, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
MacGregor, Scott TUNNEL TO HELL EOI Media Press Inc. (Indie Fiction) $29.99 10, 1 ISBN: 978-1-61984-780-4
In 1916 Cleveland, a risky tunnel construction project brings together a black inventor and laborers in this debut graphic novel.
Inventor Benjamin Beltran has just developed a helmet that allows people to breathe while surrounded by smoke, but no one will buy his product or let him run ads for it--because he's black. Worse, the press won't even cover his invention because, one journalist tells him, "our readers will never accept a negro as the 'hero' of a story." Meanwhile, public outrage builds as a young boy contracts typhoid from the contaminated water piped in from Lake Erie. The mayor urges his waterworks chief to hasten the progress on the tunnel being dug under the lake in search of purer water. The laborers--Irish, German, and more--are given a few extra dollars to dig when the tunnels are filled with dangerous, combustible methane. One of these workers is Rodger Clarke, an Irishman who remembers clearly an incident 10 years ago when a crib, a construction structure in the lake, went up in flames, killing many of his friends in the tunnel and somehow sparing him. Then, one July night, history repeats itself: Clarke is in the tunnel when a deposit of methane is suddenly released, suffocating men and setting the crib aflame--and only Beltran, with his new invention, stands a chance of saving them. In a preface, MacGregor positions his timely historical novel about contaminated water as an ode to the common man and a meditation on the injustices of history (and an attempt to correct the record). Largely, he succeeds, with vivid characters; an engrossing, well-paced narrative; and a knack for evoking the racism and classism of the time. Dumm's (co-illustrator: Masterful Marks: Cartoonists Who Changed the World, 2014) art tends toward the grotesque--the characters are all bulging eyes and thick lines, and it's often difficult to tell who exactly is speaking because many of the players look similar. But scenes and landscapes are deftly rendered." One of the narrative's highlights is the earthy banter between the laborers that leavens the weighty topics in the book: when an unpopular character is pulled from the tunnel alive, there are boos and shouts of "throw 'im back!"
Illuminates a neglected but relevant part of history and subtly draws parallels to today's water infrastructure crises.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"MacGregor, Scott: TUNNEL TO HELL." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A530650584/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=08383ea4. Accessed 7 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A530650584
Love and Labor in America
by admin | Feb 1, 2018 | Reviews, SFWP Quarterly | 0 comments
Tunnel to Hell: The Lake Erie Tunnel Disasters, by Scott MacGregor
Tunnel to Hell: The Lake Erie Tunnel Disasters – Tales of Heroism and Tragedy
Author: Scott MacGregor
Illustrator: Gary Dumm
EOI Media Press Inc., 2017
ISBN:1619847809
$19.99
I
n recent years, the graphic novel genre has begun to pull away from fantastical, Lycra-clad heroes, highlighting instead the unsung and extraordinarily ordinary. Enter Scott MacGregor’s Tunnel to Hell, a gritty tale exploring the blue-collar experience in 1916 Cleveland.
The story opens in Atlanta, Georgia, at the July 1916 American Fire Chief’s Convention. Ben steps out on a stage dressed as a Native American, despite actually being black. Ben quickly illustrates to the reader that it is better to have “Native” rather than “African” attached to your American. Once his disguise is found out, a brawl ensues, and in it MacGregor reveals that anyone viewed as Other – be you black and/or Irish and/or Catholic – isn’t safe.
This concept of safety, and its lack, permeates MacGregor’s entire narrative, as it follows Ben and Clarke through their struggle in race, religion, and class in early twentieth century Ohio. As we hurtle toward the story’s climax of the Waterworks Tunnel Disaster, we learn of the uniquely precarious environments each character is attempting to survive. Sharing top billing in the story with Ben is the character Clarke, an Irish immigrant who makes his living working in the tunnels. When we first meet him we know that he has injured his leg, and later learn that this injury came from a previous incident in the tunnels. An omen, it seems, for what’s to come.
MacGregor uses the juxtaposition of characters Ben and Clarke to provide for his readers an excellent societal backdrop for the times. Ben struggles to be heard and prove his worth in a time of violent racism where, as one character puts it, no one will “accept a negro as the hero.” By contrast, Clarke struggles in lower middle class, where his life and the lives of his peers are viewed as expendable by the rich and the powerful making decisions. As shaky infrastructure buckles underneath the pace of progress, the reader wonders if anyone will make it out of this story alive.
What is most shocking about MacGregor’s story is not the grim reality of how the Waterworks Tunnel Disaster of 1916 unfolded, but how the themes echo through a century and resonate today. These questions of race, of the wage gap, of the risks that our failure to tend to our infrastructure create, are questions that we still ask in earnest today. This story is not important simply because it is interesting and should be heard, but because a similar story could be told today; simply substitute the Irish Catholic immigrant narrative with any of the anti-immigrant sentiments that one needs only to turn on their television to hear.
The art of this graphic novel successfully captures the stark nature of the lives MacGregor fleshes out. Illustrator Gary Dumm uses simplicity in his panels to add another layer to the story. His illustrations are direct and without frills because the characters live simply, in poverty, in oppression. At times the panels feel crowded and bleed from one to another, providing for the reader the physical experience of being pushed out or being left behind, which are experiences the characters must work through every single day. In Tunnel to Hell, the illustrations inform the narrative, providing in pictures the nonverbal struggles each character must face.
As a disembodied narrator tells us at the close of the story:
“History lives at the pleasure of a forgetful human race. More often than not, the extraordinary achievements of simple ordinary men and women evade history altogether or barely survive within the decay of tattered memories.”
Despite the social, economic, and political strides one generation can make, it seems as though the generation to follow picks up at the starting line. No clearer is that made than in MacGregor’s choice to close his story with a surviving character speaking with his grandson. “Old people like me,” the character says, “We’re outa time and leavin’ behind a big job for the next generation to finish.” While it’s a hopeful note, it is important that the character shares this with a grandchild rather than with the preceding generation. Not only is it too late for “old people” like him, it is also too late for the parents, undoubtedly in their thirties or forties, who have also failed to move past the dangers and the prejudices of years past.
So many tragedies in history are left untold or relegated to footnotes in the wider narrative of history. MacGregor takes the story of twenty senseless deaths and funnels them through the lenses of classicism, racism, and the unrelenting pace of progress, which not only sheds light on the lives and deaths of these men, but calls our attention to how progress still treads on humankind, and how close we still stand to the mistakes of yesterday.
Beth Osborne is a chocolate enthusiast living in Ithaca, New York. When she isn’t reading books, Beth can be found wandering in the mountains, baking bread, and training for triathlons. Before she was reading, Beth was a paleobotanist. However, a harrowing experience at a Costa Rican theme park convinced her to pursue a quieter life.
Tunnel To Hell: The Lake Erie Tunnel Disasters: Tales of Heroism and Tragedy
by Scott MacGregor
illustrated by Gary Dumm
EOI Media Press Inc.
book review by Toby Berry
"Years of shared desperation, poverty and fear was gone. Only darkness and lonely calm awaited the souls swept away by the angels."
The enormity of this project is impressive in itself—a complete historical fiction novel in approximately 1,500 illustrated frames. But the depth of the history lesson and the writing eloquence are nothing short of prodigious. The book has two major plots: The tunneling under Lake Erie for fresh water, and the life of Garrett Augustus Morgan, Sr. Either story in itself could make an interesting graphic novel, but entwined, they add depth and sophistication to the novel. There is so much to learn while reading and "watching" a comic book.
The story of tunneling under Lake Erie to access clean water in the early 1900s is fairly unique and definitely intriguing. Arguably, few readers west of the Mississippi have even heard about this piece of US History. Garrett Morgan, known as Ben Beltran in this novel, isn't exactly a household name, either. But the theme of class warfare tackled in this work of fiction is not unique. Recent books, such as Deep Down Dark by Hector Tobar about the Chilean miners trapped underground in a collapsed mine comes to mind. US railroads built on the backs of Chinese immigrant laborers have been the subject of many books. In all cases, destitute humans agreed to do extremely dangerous work with the lure of money that they desperately needed. However, MacGregor writes it most directly "Gambling with life in order to remain employed was an unspoken job requirement for the sandhogs." MacGregor also composes it most eloquently, "The mere promise of a few extra dollars was enough incentive to tempt rational men down a shaft and into a tunnel where the specters of catastrophe and death, aided and abetted by city leaders' depraved indifference toward worker safety ..."
The Garret Morgan, Sr. story (aka the Ben Beltran story) is spun in skillfully. He was a dreamer, an inventor, and a brilliant visionary at the turn of the 20th century. He invented a helmet for firefighters to use to prevent smoke inhalation during the course of their duties, but most wouldn't take notice of his inventions because he was a black man. He even disguised himself as an Native American in order to seem more credible. The common plot thread is that he used his helmet to save lives in one of the Lake Erie Tunnel disasters.
Quality historical fiction requires action, adventure, and even an element of sophistication to avoid coming across like a history textbook. This is true even in graphic novel form, and MacGregor nails it: "Willy crashed his body through the flaming walls of the crib, turning his treacherous desertion into a 'fait accompli.'"
Gary Dumm's illustrations are masterful. Best known for his work on Harvey Pekar's American Splendor, Dumm writes in his dedication, "Scott MacGregor, who trusted me implicitly to collaborate artistically and lend shape and definition to his dream." Mission accomplished. In black and white frames, characters are made and described and differentiated from each other wordlessly. Each illustration comes to life so that reading this book is a bit like watching a movie. Putting historical fiction into graphic novel form is uncommon, maybe because it is so difficult. But, MacGregor’s work is a perfect example of the depth, eloquence, and continuity that is possible in a superb graphic novel.