An Eagle Rocker's Take on 'The Richest Family in America'

In a writing career that spans decades, David Drum has co-authored books on such topics as veterans’ disability benefits, alternatives to hysterectomy, and everything your need to know about fibroids that you didn’t hear from your doctor. He has written numerous feature stories for publications ranging from the San Francisco Chronicle to Farm Journal. But like a lot of writers, Drum longed to be a novelist—and when the opportunity came along to do something markedly different from his usual repertoire, he jumped at it.

Drum’s debut novel, Introducing the Richest Family in America, took four years to complete—and Drum enjoyed every moment. “It was kind of a relief and fun to switch gears because writing fiction uses a different part of your brain,” he says. “In non-fiction, you have to adhere to the facts, package and organize them, make them readable and interesting, but you can’t veer away from the truth. In a novel, you’re inventing your own truth.”

Drum, who has lived in Eagle Rock since 1998, worked on his novel while juggling other writing projects as well as a teaching gig as an ESL instructor in South Central LA. His novel is playful and engaging—a high-society satire seen through the eyes of characters with such deliberately suggestive names as Commodore Cornelius Commode III, a tycoon patriarch, and a beautiful Chinese golfing champion called Long Drive Loo. The story revolves around the corporate and personal dramas of socialites in the old-moneyed world of Montecito, CA, which, as Drum describes it, is “more of an imaginary place than a real place, more like magic realism.” 

Yet the novel works remarkably well as social commentary. Machiavellian proverbs are scattered throughout the story, befitting the novel’s plot about wily schemes to relocate the Commode empire’s manufacturing operations overseas—masterminded by the tycoon patriarch’s ambitious and self-important heir apparent, Simon Butterknut. Another scion has an obsession with pricey pigs, yet another is a flamboyant society decorator, and another still an egregiously self-promoting plastic surgeon. 

Drum got the idea for the novel after a particularly memorable ESL class a few years ago. “One of my students was a Chinese medical doctor,” he recalls. “After class she asked for my phone number in halting English, and she called me for some time, more or less brashly propositioning me. Her approach was not at all flirtatious. The way she proposed a relationship was more like she was buying a couple of pounds of hamburger, cute and funny in a way, and so direct and practical it stuck in my mind.”

The student was the inspiration for Long Drive Loo, the character at the core of Drum’s story.

For Drum, even the title of the novel is indicative of where this country is, philosophically and culturally.  “In America, we really respect superlatives,” he says. “We are interested in the ideal of wealthy people. There is a detachment from reality—we have people who are mowing our lawns for us, watching our kids for us, fixing our plumbing for us, but we’re not really connected to what I would consider the real center of life.”

Drum initially thought he would write a novel about a wealthy family, but then, “thinking of superlatives, I thought, ‘why not do the richest?’” After a while, he adds, “it kind of wrote itself.”

Woven into the novel’s narrative are scenes that eerily evoke the recession-ravaged America that we’ve all been witnessing for the past several years. In a particularly memorable scene, a former investment banker is homeless on the streets of Santa Barbara, waiting for a handout.

“We are really in a place in the state of the world where there are huge shifts going on,” says Drum. “As jobs move overseas, sometimes people aren’t really prepared for that. It’s a little scary and off-putting and terribly unorganized.”

More pointedly, through his characters, Drum wanted to showcase some of humanity’s biggest flaws. “ I think the traditional American virtues of self-reliance, generosity, honesty and hard work are going by the wayside,” he says. “We're becoming a manipulative, selfish, narcissistic culture. The doctor and the lawyer characters in my book—and to some extent their wives—illustrate these values if you can call them that. The old billionaire is dimly aware of this on one level but can't see it in his own family.”

Drum’s novel was published last fall by Burning Books Press, his own imprint which, since 1984 has produced pricey hand-cut and individually-assembled limited edition artists books, including Elizabethan poetry.

The addition of his novel to this somewhat esoteric stable of books has, says Drum, “brought together two streams of my life—the kind of whimsical and creative one that is really less about selling and more about itself, as well as the more commercial books.” 

Introducing the Richest Family in America is available online, including as an Adobe e-book, and through special order at bookstores. Drum is toying with a possible sequel—and another health book.

Drum has learned a thing or two about versatility and flexibility in his long professional writing career. Born in Wichita, KS, he remembers being a voracious reader. “My mother loved to read novels and would always pass me the latest bestseller,” he says. “I read Peyton Place when I was a kid.” But Drum didn’t think much about becoming a writer until he took a creative writing class—and then took a few more.

“I kept doing really well in class and got a lot of encouragement,” he says. He applied to the creative writing program at the University of Iowa, still considered among the best in the country, where he spent two years in prose and poetry classes. When he finished, most of his co-students found great teaching jobs in other writing programs around the nation, but Drum wanted to do something different.

“I didn’t want to be a teacher at that time,” he says. “I wanted to write for money.” He got a job as a cub reporter in the San Joaquin Valley, learning as he went, and tackling everything from sports to features. He spent the next few years trying his hand at different things: working as a foreman on a turkey ranch in Orosi, CA (population 7,318), and as a copywriter in advertising agencies in Visalia, CA.  As a freelancer, he wrote for agricultural publications before branching out into mainstream magazines. In 1982, he moved to Los Angeles.

“I could have stayed in the San Joaquin Valley and done various things there, but the big city beckoned, the siren call of the lights, the action, the same things that draw 90 percent of people here.”

Drum moved around the city for many years, living in Venice, Santa Monica and Westwood. He was living in a condo in Los Feliz, the first place he bought, when he found his current home in Eagle Rock, where he has put down roots.

“Before I moved there, I took a couple of friends of mine who work in construction to evaluate it,” says Drum of his home in Eagle Rock. “One of my friends said that it was going to be just like living in Mayberry if I bought that house. In a way, it has been, because it’s a quiet, comfortable little community.”