Bucksport man online with memoir of 1960s

BREAKING THE GAZE by David Betts, 200 pages, Riverhouse Publishers, $6.95 at www.firstprint.com, $9.95 on disc at area bookstores.

A Bucksport author says he beat Stephen King to the online publishing punch by six weeks. In fact, David Betts’ memoir of the 1960s can be purchased three ways: downloaded from the Internet; on a floppy disc at Bangor area bookstores; and the good old-fashioned way – printed on paper and bound.

Electronic self-publishing was not a great leap for Betts, who seems to be a natural entrepreneur. As he confesses in his book, “Breaking the Gaze,” the 52-year-old supported himself in 1967 selling LSD on Boston Common. The author’s regular job is manufacturing Grow A Tree kits, a business he launched several years ago.

Betts sent his short yet epic tale about his experiences coming of age in the tumultuous ’60s to six publishers. All responded with “a badly Xeroxed form letter,” he said. “I read all I could about pitching a book to publishers and talked to other authors. It seemed like and proved to be a daunting task. Since I already had a distribution network for the kits, I was confident I could publish it on my own.”

The author had to write the book from memory. He did not keep any diaries during those years. Betts said he wrote the book for young people now in their 20s, known as Generation Xers. He also wanted to write about the Vietnam War from a protester’s point of view.

“Volumes have been published about the Vietnam veterans’ experience,” reads the biographical blurb on the site where his book can be downloaded. “Little has been written about those who felt they were being just as patriotic when they refused to go to war. This book, a true account of how I had to live after deciding to obey my conscience, will fill the void. … It explains what created the hippie phenomenon and why a generation rose up against its government in protest.”

“Breaking the Gaze” begins with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, when Betts was a ninth-grader living in Rockaway, N.J. The youngest of four sons, he writes of a fairly idyllic childhood. The office of his dentist father, Dr. Robert L. Betts, (he later practiced in Eastport) was attached to their house.

Even as a young teen-ager, the author was aware of global tensions. His first reaction to the news of JFK’s death was terror. He thought the Russians were responsible and lamented the fact that his father had not installed a bomb shelter the way the neighbors had. The book ends with his decision to follow his parents to Maine in 1970.

Betts weaves together his attempts to avoid the draft as he drifts from one side of the country to the other, working, hanging out, turning on, occasionally making love and protesting. While the author does not have the journalistic or literary skills of Tom Wolfe, Betts does give the reader a sense of what it was like for an ordinary guy to live through those times. (Wolfe’s classic “Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” brilliantly captured what it was like for novelist Ken Kesey to drop out and turn on.)

While “Breaking the Gaze” is well worth reading, how to read for pleasure in the world of e-publishing still is evolving. Without one of those palm-sized electronic readers, there seem to be only two choices – sitting at the computer or printing the pages out on 81/2-by-11 paper and reading it. Both methods tend to rule out reading in bed.

Reading “Breaking the Gaze” off the glowing computer screen seemed cold and lacked the intimacy of cradling a book. Dog-earing a page proved impossible. Printing the pages seemed wasteful, especially since it was ritten by a guy who sells tree-growing kits. It also was kind of like reading a term paper.

Probably, these are more the fault of the reader than of the writer and in offering his memoir in three different forms, Betts is serving the habits of all his potential readers. Over time, palm readers may become the norm and the task of reading e-books will become more versatile.

Both Betts and King are on the cutting edge of a publishing revolution. True to the times they both grew up in, both are “byting” at the chance to become what the horror author called “Big Publishing’s worst nightmare.”

Anyone wondering where King got such an attitude, need only read “Breaking the Gaze.”