Utah Bar Journal

The book tells the story of young Andy Valdez and transports the reader to Salt Lake City as it was forty-five years ago, to the Liberty Park tennis courts in the 1960s, and to an old Chinese restaurant where Andy enjoyed Egg Foo Yong sandwiches for sixty-five cents. The descriptions of the places, people, and events are vivid to the reader and we feel like we are walking side-by-side with the protagonists or watching Andy swing a tennis racket.

No One Makes It Alone tells the story of Andy, a twelve-year-old newspaper boy laden with large saddle bags full of newspapers, standing on the corner of Main and 200 South hustling downtown businessmen to buy the afternoon paper. The boys would only earn a few cents per newspaper sold, and the more assertive ones would fare better. The story begins with Andy walking home with his brother on a dark and cold October evening after selling newspapers. Andy is happy to tell his brother that he has saved enough money to buy a new pair of pants because he was tired of wearing pants with patches. The brothers would walk through the “red light district,” past the bars and across the railroad tracks on the way home.

It was during one afternoon when Andy asked Jack Keller to buy a newspaper from him. Andy’s assertiveness impressed Jack enough to eventually offer the boy a job at his printing business in the basement of a downtown building. In addition to working at the shop, Jack also wanted the boy to play sports in order to get him off the streets and to teach the boy “how to behave, to follow rules, to get along with people.” The sport Jack wants him to play is tennis and Andy agrees, despite his perception that tennis is a “sissy sport.”

Lest we think Jack is a white knight, we learn that he was

painfully aware he had a great talent for treating people badly, especially those he cared for. It wasn’t that he really wanted to, or took pleasure in it, or that he was ignorant or oblivious to the fact that he was doing it. It was a come-and-go compulsion that blinded him to the feelings of others.

Despite this shortcoming, Jack demanded and expected discipline and hard work from Andy. Jack’s influence on Andy to learn tennis and excel at the sport carried the boy forward and upward on the court, and later, in life.

The key lessons of life that Andy learns come in a roach-infested basement and on the tennis courts at Liberty Park. We learn that Andy’s “world is pretty small,” but with Jack’s help, the boy’s vision and goals are expanding. Through a series of setbacks on the court, at home, and with Jack, the boy learns that in order to get ahead in life, no one makes it alone. This simple and profound principle goes beyond the story. It not only impressed the boy Andy, I suspect it is a driving principle behind the Village Project, a volunteer mentor program sponsored by the Third District Juvenile Court serving court-involved youth in Salt Lake County.

The book contains amusing and entertaining stories as well as some graphic and violent scenes the boy witnessed. But throughout, the book maintains an honesty to a time when Andy was a twelve-year-old boy who was meeting new people and going to new places as he played in tennis tournaments. Andy played like a young, brown John McEnroe when his opponents served racial slurs and insults along with tennis balls. His temper was quick, and had it not been for the place and time, the tennis match would have turned into a bare-knuckled boxing match. We read about how Jack realized the breakthrough that Andy, as the only non-white in the entire place, was entering into a world that, only a few months earlier, was completely unbeknownst to the boy.

The transformation from a mouthy newspaper boy to an amateur tennis player is both subtle and drastic. Subtle by the ways the change comes about, by the seemingly simple things Jack introduces into Andy’s life. The transformation is drastic by the path Andy is beginning to take and the lessons he is learning from a grumpy guy with whom he shares Egg Foo Yong sandwiches.