In his first live TV appearance since publishing The Little Girl at the Bottom of the Picture: A Journey of Selfless Discovery, author Jeremy White visibly stuns anchors Liz Koh and Matt Williams on WAFB9 News at 9 with details from the powerful story about his wife, Edie, discovering her biological family in early 2018 and the beautifully insane adventure that ensued.
In the live segment aired in Baton Rouge on Thursday, February 8, Koh and Williams are physically taken aback as White retells how Edie was “sucker punched at work by Ancestry’s iPhone app with news that ‘John Hart is your father’ at 10:45 on a Tuesday morning. Good luck getting anything else done that day,” the author remarks. “Well, turns out, John Hart is going to have some books written about him. In fact,” White continues, “he is cited in two books about David Duke because of an incident that happened in 1969 at Free Speech Alley at LSU, involving a bloody knife.”
“I’ve got chills.” — Liz Koh
With a gesture to the photo on his book’s cover, White reveals, “Edie eventually solves a mystery that had been plaguing this Ukrainian American family outside of Chicago for 65 years.” After further rocking the anchors’ worlds by describing the large family as “gangster-adjacent,” the author elaborates, “This photo was taken on Mother’s Day in 1952 on a porch in East Chicago, Indiana, and not long after it was taken, someone in this photo effectively took the little girl out of the picture.” White says, “For 65 years, this family had no idea what happened to that little girl—their little cousin, their niece, their daughter, their granddaughter. Most of these people—nearly every one of them—went to their grave not knowing what happened to her. And not until someone altruistically submitted her DNA,” White alludes to his wife, “did some sleuthing, was the little girl brought back into the picture.”
“How is this even one book?!?” a floored Williams wonders.
“I know, I’ve got chills,” his co-anchor interjects. “There are so many storylines here, Jeremy!” Koh insists.
“It’s like a movie, like a bunch of movies!” — Matt Williams
The author then tells how, in lieu of an audiobook, listeners can hear him narrate the story one chapter at a time in The Little Girl Book Podcast. The namesake of the episode dropping the next day, White explains, “was impeached in 1974 at LSU in student government because he was an undercover agent for Baton Rouge Police.” When Williams asks, “Is this real?!?” White responds with news that the narc haunts John Hart’s nightmares to this day.
“It’s like a movie,” Williams tells Koh, “like a bunch of movies!”
“I know,” Koh agrees. “Well, if someone’s listening out there and thinking, ‘OK, I need to get the screenplay going,’ we know the guy to talk to.”
Jeremy White is a tenured cynic who penned this hopeful book. He founded South Louisiana’s premier satirical publication in 2004, eight years before relaunching the award-winning Red Shtick Magazine as its all-digital progeny, The Red Shtick. The passionate Cajun can often be heard on various popular radio shows as either a guest or a guest host. A longtime football official and Mardi Gras krewe captain, Jeremy earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering at LSU, where he and Edie met. They’ve been happily married since 1992 and live in Baton Rouge with their cat, Waffles.
White Lines Press published the ebook and 468-page hardcover editions of The Little Girl at the Bottom of the Picture on July 1, 2023. Signed editions are available at LittleGirlBook.com and through partnered indie bookstores around the country. For more information and resources, visit our media center. Inquiries should be sent to [email protected].
Viewers see the two college sweethearts walking around the LSU lakes as Meriwether introduces Jeremy. “He’s made a living making fun of things, putting the ‘sin’ in ‘cynic,'” Meriwether jokes. “He wasn’t always a big believer in miracles. He says, though, it’s a miracle of sorts where his life is now.” Accompanied by footage of the author typing on his laptop, Meriwether describes Jeremy as a former “part-time comic, part-time high school referee, full-time cynic” who “traded in all of that for the wonder of discovery, to write a book to try and answer a very simple—and yet terribly complicated—question: Who is the little girl at the bottom of this picture?”
Describing the black-and-white photo on his debut book’s front cover, White tells viewers, “That picture there is from Mother’s Day 1952. That is a porch in East Chicago, Indiana, and that is a very large, enthusiastic Ukrainian American family.” Fighting back tears, White explains how, for that family, the photo “had to suffice as the lasting image” of his titular character, “that little girl at the bottom of the picture, because she went away. She was taken away.” He continues, “For 65 years, they’ve been living with this. ‘What happened?’ You’ve got all those other children sitting on the steps behind her. These are women in their eighties,” he notes, who “had never seen their little cousin since that picture was taken.”