Occidental College historian Thaddeus Russell is the author of A Renegade History of the United States and Out of the Jungle: Jimmy Hoffa and the Remaking of the American Working Class. Before making a case for reality television, he confessed to being a reformed pyromaniac in the green room … a few minutes before the fire alarm went off. (“I didn’t do it!” he swore.)
Q. How did you get into trouble as a child?
A. Many ways. When I was about nine years old, I almost burned down a building. I was a pyromaniac. I liked to set fires.
Q. Do you share any qualities with the renegades you’ve written about?
A. Not many. I live kind of a conventional lifestyle. Mostly, my ideas are not palatable to mainstream thinking, what you might call “the establishment.” But in terms of how I live-no, I’m a little boring. I stopped blowing things up and burning things.
Q. What’s your favorite drink?
A. I’m a bourbon man. Oh-and Coca-Cola.
Q. If you weren’t here tonight, where would we find you, and what would you be doing?
A. At home watching TV with my girlfriend of course.
Q. Ask yourself a question and then answer it.
A. [Laughs.] That’s a terrible question. Where would you like to live? Topanga. Kind of boring.
Q. What teacher or professor, if any, changed your life?
A. Al Denman, my philosophy professor at Antioch College in Ohio, who was an ordained minister, and whose ideas were really different from mine-and are very different from mine now. He was the first teacher in my life to pay attention to me and to take my ideas seriously.
Q. What’s the best book you’ve read recently?
A. I don’t read books. I use books.
Q. What does that mean?
A. I use them for research. I rarely, rarely read a book for pleasure, from cover to cover. The last book I read for pleasure was The Glass Castle. I do love memoirs, especially about horrible childhoods, to make me feel better about my own.
Q. Are you fond of clichés?
A. I love all clichés. I use them constantly. But I don’t advocate that others do so.
Q. What’s overrated?
A. Most Hollywood movies. Especially last year’s.
Q. Where do you think Jimmy Hoffa is buried?
A. I didn’t do that research, but the majority opinion is that he’s buried in a landfill somewhere near the George Washington Bridge. He was put into a steel drum, and then after they killed him, they filled it with acid to completely destroy all the evidence. It’s never been proven, but that’s the reigning theory.
*Photo by Aaron Salcido.