Eureka: A Novel

Ever reliable and responsible, Otis Halstead is a father, a husband (one half of a “well-dressed couple of substance”), and the CEO of Kansas Central Fire and Casualty. He has never done anything out of the ordinary. Until now. The change in Otis starts with the acquisition of an antique toy fire truck, the exact model he had pined for at age ten but never received. Next comes a Daisy Red Ryder BB gun. But Otis’s real coup is the purchase of his one true childhood passion: a red 1952 Cushman Pacemaker motor scooter. For his baffled wife, Sally, this is the final straw. She insists that he see a shrink.

But when tragedy strikes uncomfortably close to home, Otis decides he wants out of his sensible, safe life in Eureka, Kansas. And so, a few weeks before his sixtieth birthday, Otis leaves town, heading west on old U.S. 56, a corporate CEO riding a forty-year-old motor scooter with a BB gun strapped to the side. One might say he was in for an adventure. Otis would say he was finally about to experience life.

Jim Lehrer is the anchor and executive editor of The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS and the author of numerous novels, nonfiction books, and plays. He was a 1999 recipient of a National Humanities Medal for his journalism and writing. He lives in Washington, D.C.