Clyde Toland realized he had one more book in him. Toland has spent his life around the written word. An attorney for 48 years and avid historian, he’s also the author of the three-volume “Becoming Fred Funston” biography, whose final book, “Yankee Hero,” was published in 2022. Combined, the three books contain 850 pages.
“I didn’t want to be like the cobbler whose children have no shoes,” said Toland, 79, in a recent phone interview. “I wanted to leave my descendants with some idea of who I was. I have a bucket list of things to do before I leave this mortal coil, as they say, and this has been very much on the list.”
The promise, said Toland, was sealed on his 70th birthday. “I decided then I’d write my autobiography. That was in 2017. It took eight years to get it done because the Funston project was in the way occasionally. But I kept working on it whenever I had time and finished it last year.”
The result? “A Spyglass Look at the Past: Running, Rioting, and More,” released last month by Flint Hills Publishing of Topeka.
The 321-page book features 10 chapters, varying between first- and third-person accounts. Topics include Toland’s tour of Europe as a 17-year-old, running over 21 miles nonstop in 1971, and his time in graduate school. But they’re not all personal accounts. Other chapters detail the early life of Fred Funston, Charley Melvin’s actions during prohibition, and one that centers on a German woman’s 1938 letter.
About half of the book revolves around Toland’s childhood in Iola, a sign of the enduring affection Toland has for his hometown.
As Toland writes in the introduction, the book “is my homage to a town that I have always loved. And it is a homage to my parents for the way that they raised me.”
The title, notes Toland, comes from how a spyglass “focuses on an object faraway and brings it closer to the viewer. I decided it would be fun to focus on certain individuals from the past and use each as the lens to see a small piece of history.”
The book is available for purchase via Amazon. Later this month, Allen County Historical Society will also begin selling copies, including editions signed by the author.
WRITING his fourth book came easy to Toland.
“Funston was a good training exercise,” he said. “I knew I needed to explain how Allen County influenced Funston, and in this book I was trying to do the same thing for me. The advantage was that I had my memory, and my research, as my repository. In writing Funston, I had to dig and dig and dig. That’s what took so long.”
An extensive collection of newspaper clippings, yearbooks, and other primary sources let Toland relive chapters of his life, priming the pump for writing.
“It just kept flowing. At the beginning, I was writing it all by hand. But eventually I began to dictate it,” he said. “I’m blessed with the ability to visualize things in my mind. I always knew where I wanted the book to go — it was just a matter of doing the work to get to the end.”
Toland stresses that all ten chapters offer unique lessons to the reader.
“They’re all important in their own way,” Toland said. “In the book, I’m trying to educate the public and share knowledge about different parts of our history.”
But Toland also seems keenly aware of the importance of documenting history, of capturing slices of American life that are now gone.
