Ex Libris Ayatollah Khomeini : What’s a Book by a Man From Mount Washington Doing in Revolutionary Iran?

One of the books I have written is somewhere in Iran.

That is much more gratifying than finding out, as I recently did, that a book that I had autographed for Herb Caen, the San Francisco Chronicle columnist, was on a shelf somewhere in the Los Angeles County public library system.

How a copy of one of my books found its way to Iran is more easily explained than how one signed to Herb Caen wound up in a public library, but it is also more romantic.

I have the story from Richard F. Vincent, an oil engineer now retired in Santa Paula, who went to live and work in Ahwaz, Iran, in 1976.

When he packed, he recalls, he threw in Jim Murray’s “The Best of Jim Murray” and an early book of mine.

At the last minute, Vincent’s wife decided not to go. “It was a good thing, too,” he says, “because of the way they treated women over there.”

At Ahwaz, Vincent was manager of operations for an international oil consortium building two large turbo-expander gas plants whose purpose was to process gas for transmission to the Soviet Union through four-foot pipelines.

When the Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolution came, they had one of the gas

plants half finished and had it filled with gas pressurized to 5,000 pounds per square inch.

They didn’t know whether to leave it at that pressure, inviting a disastrous accident, or to lower it to a safer level. They finally lowered it to 50 pounds and bugged out.

Vincent went to Scotland to another job.

“I ungracefully fled with one suitcase, leaving an automobile and a flat full of furniture and books.”

He and the other foreign oilmen hardly knew what was happening. “TV got closer to it than we did.”

Three years later in Aberdeen, he received a telex from Iran saying that some of his household goods had been found and were being shipped to him overland from a Tehran warehouse through Turkey and across Europe.

“The shipment eventually arrived, and I opened the battered boxes to see what had been recovered. One case contained an old tuxedo, a case of Guinness stout, a bottle of Iranian vodka, six bottles of Chateau Sadash (an inferior Iranian red wine from the Caspian region) and Jim Murray’s book. Your book was missing.”

Well, at least Jim Murray’s book had traveled in high spirits.

“Since that day in Aberdeen in 1982 to this day,” Vincent says, “I have wondered why they kept your book. Being a confessed romantic, I have made several scenarios that are all logical.”

I suppose a man who has lived in Iran for three years can imagine something logical about the Khomeini regime, but I haven’t asked him what his scenarios are.

I have my own.

It is obvious that the Iranians wouldn’t have understood Jim Murray’s book, wonderful as it is, because it is mostly about American sports, which must be incomprehensible in Iran. My French daughter-in-law has been in this country for 15 years now and she still doesn’t know what baseball is all about.

But my book is about an ordinary American family, living in Los Angeles, and even though my wife did the plumbing in those days and had to share a bathroom with three males, she was a free, outspoken woman--a little early on the scene for the full blessings of liberation, perhaps, but certainly not in any demeaning way restricted.

It must have been a scandal for the Iranians to read that sort of heresy. I like to think that my book became a text for sermons on the degenerate American way of life, or that it was translated into Persian and became an underground sensation among Iranian women.

If so, it achieved a success in Iran that it did not achieve here.

Vincent says he had 12 young Iranians on his team. “They had been educated either at Oklahoma University or at Manchester University in England, but they defended the treatment of women in their country.

“One argued that women had it worse in England. He said he roomed with a family in Manchester, and every Saturday night the man came home drunk and beat up his wife. He said they didn’t do that in Iran.”

Did the Iranians ever finish the two gas tanks and the pipeline?

“I doubt it,” he says. “Every now and then we get a feeler from them, asking where we kept our files, or where we left this or that. I have an idea they’re still trying.”

Why had he taken a tuxedo, especially since his wife wasn’t going along?

“Most of the employees of the company were British,” he explains. “You know how they are about dress. I was told in my instructions that I’d better take a dinner jacket.”

Bless the British. Wherever they are, they still dress for dinner.

Maybe that’s why there will always be an England.