Professor takes it on the chin for Gingrich
MONTREAT - When a woman walked up to Bill Forstchen one day and asked him to deliver a message to the co-author of his latest book, Forstchen amiably agreed.
"She pulled back and punched me right in the mouth," Forstchen says, making the motion. "Split my lip and knocked me right over."
Forstchen's friend and co-author is Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.
"You either love him or you hate him," Forstchen says.
He's moving a little slowly today because of fatigue, he says - he was up putting the finishing touches on the second in the series of three "what-if" Civil War novels he's writing with Gingrich. The first, "Gettysburg," supposes that Gen. Robert E. Lee had an epiphany three days before the battle, changed his plans and won. He and Gingrich have just completed the second book in the series, "Grant Comes East."
"Gettysburg is the greatest what-if of the Civil War," Forstchen says. "A lot of people thought that Newt and I were apologists for the Confederacy with that book, but that's not it at all. I won't say anything more than that, though, because I don't want to give away the ending."
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Forstchen grew up near Newark, N.J., and still tends to speak in the fast-moving suburban New York style. His lanky frame is folded into a cafeteria chair at Montreat College, where he is associate professor of history. A plate with two hot dogs and waffle fries sits in front of him. The hot dogs get cold as he talks about history, his relationship with Gingrich, his childhood in New Jersey and his travels.
Before his job here, he says he was somewhat of a professional student and world traveler. When he and his wife, Sharon, learned their daughter, Meghan was on the way 11 years ago, Forstchen decided it was time to settle down.
Forstchen still loves to travel and goes to Mongolia each summer on archeological expeditions. In fact, he's still smarting from his most recent trip. He took a tumble down a huge sand dune in the Gobi Desert, thinking all the way down that Gary Cooper must have felt like this in the 1939 movie, "Beau Geste," when he tumbled down a similar dune.
"I broke three ribs," he says. "And the nearest hospital was 400 miles away."
Forstchen waited until the end of his dig several days later to make the trip by Jeep along dirt roads. The trip made his injuries even worse.
"I love Mongolia," Forstchen says. "My next novel after this series will be set there."
Forstchen, who has written or co-written some 40 books, did hold at least one steady job before arriving at Montreat - he was a high school history teacher in Waterville, Maine. His first year there, Forstchen and his students made national news.
It all began with Forstchen's concept that he and Gingrich later would name "active history." Get the students to really understand how democracy works by having them participate in it.
For the experiment, Forstchen dubbed his students Young Citizens for Law and Order and sent them out into the streets with a petition.
"We asked people to sign a petition calling for the repeal of some laws that were allowing criminals to go free," Forstchen says. "The laws were the Bill of Rights, word for word."
Of the people approached, 83 percent signed the petition. Only 7 percent recognized the laws as the Bill of Rights. The morning after the local newspaper did a story on his class experiment, the national media were there with cameras and microphones.
"That's what happens when kids get out of high school without ever reading the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence," he says.
Forstchen believes his students should remember their classes, and student April Heyward, a junior, says his her freshman world civilizations class was certainly memorable.
"He's a good professor," she says. "He knows his subject and by the end, so do you."
Heyward plans to take another of Forstchen's classes next semester, when he's back from his sabbatical.
Forstchen tries to impart one old-fashioned idea to his students these days: civilized discourse.
"I think we as a society need to put the kid gloves back on a little bit and tolerate dissent and a difference of opinion," he says. "You can't have a working, healthy democracy without it."
