A Life’s Work Robert Shield’s Diary Chronicles Every Minute Of Every Day Of The Last 20 Plus Years Of His Life

In more than 20 years of obsessively accounting for every minute of the day in numbingly mundane detail, diarist Robert W. Shields has typed what he estimates to be more than 36 million words.

People who hear about it invariably respond with five of their own.

Is the man a nutcake? The question doesn’t bother the retired minister and high school English teacher. “I don’t mind a ribbing,” he says.

The truth is that “Call me Bob” Shields - a 77-year-old Dayton, Wash. resident with pale white skin and hearing aids in both ears - enjoys attention. And he’s getting a lot of it lately.

National Public Radio reporter David Isay included Shields in his recent book, “Holding On,” a look at eccentrics, dreamers and visionaries. And an excerpt focusing on “the world’s longest diary” appeared in last month’s Harper’s magazine.

Since then, the 10 phones in Shields’ house have been ringing. One day it’s the Washington Post. The next it’s a radio station in Australia.

Shields, who is about 5-foot-2 and looks like Bub from “My Three Sons,” has even made the National Enquirer. Screamed the tabloid: “HE EVEN WRITES DOWN WHEN HE GOES TO THE POTTY!”

Still, it’s not hard to find people in Dayton who have never heard about Shields’ diary. And he swears that that’s OK with him. He didn’t start it with the idea of someday becoming famous for a few minutes, he insists.

So why DID he decide back in the early ‘70s to keep track of his day in five-minute sections? “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know why any of us do anything. That’s the truth.”

He spends about four hours a day at the typewriter in his cramped study, with classical music in the background. The rest of the time, he’s taking notes about his admittedly pedestrian activities.

“I don’t think it has happened unless I’ve written it down,” he said.

Shields can sound a bit like the out-of-it Larry “Bud” Melman character of David Letterman fame, such as when reading his poetry aloud until his audience all but begs him to quit. He has a puckish demeanor and loves to recite highlights of his resume almost as much as he enjoys showing off his blue 1959 Ford Fairlane.

And, in fact, the man behind the white picket fence on Oak Street has not led a totally boring life. He wrote a book that wound up being turned into the first Elvis movie, “Love Me Tender.” And he once was a winner in the Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest for the best intentionally horrid first sentence of a would-be gothic novel.

But that’s not the sort of stuff that fills his diary. This is: 6:35-6:40 I was at the keyboard of my IBM Wheelwriter making entries for my diary.

6:40-6:50 I went into Grace’s bedroom and found her reading at her work table. I climbed into bed and conversed with her awhile. She did not come to bed. I said I was convinced that the Campbell cream of chicken soup did not agree with me.

And on and on and on and on and on and on.

He has filled 80 back-wrenching boxes with the intensely observed story of his last couple of decades. “Every minute accounted for,” he likes to say.

It has been called a life, single-spaced.

He chronicles what he recalls of his dreams. And he has come up with nearly three dozen ways to describe urinating.

What if he has a ribald thought about Joan Lunden during taping of an interview about the diary for “Good Morning America”?

“If I really think about it, I put it in,” he said. “I don’t censor anything. It’s uninhibited. No restrictions. No holds barred.”

Edward Ellis, a New Yorker who is thought to be the keeper of the world’s longest diary - in terms of the number of years (68) it has been kept - has dismissed Dayton’s volume-of-words king as a “compulsive.”

Takes one to know one, says Shields.

Yes, but what does his wife, Grace, president of the Dayton Garden Club, think of the diary?

“She does her thing and I do my thing,” said Shields. “I don’t interfere with her and she doesn’t interfere with me.”

And his grown daughters?

“They think it’s something I don’t want to be cured of,” he said.

Though Shields has been interviewed enough to have honed some of his answers, he hasn’t come up with a consistent take on the diary’s potential value to others.

One minute he’s dismissing the likelihood that anybody would ever actually read his paper monster. Then, a bit later, he’s touting its possible appeal to researchers in the future:

“It can be of psychological value, sociological value, historical value and just as a cross-section of a person’s mind and life.”

Shields, who struggles with money problems, has turned over his life’s savings to Washington State University in exchange for the school’s promise to house the diary after he dies.

He has been known to tape his own nostril hairs to pages of the diary. “For DNA purposes.”

He says the diary doesn’t control him. He says he could quit.

But he won’t, even though a minor stroke a few years ago slowed his typing speed.

“I guess anybody would call it an obsession,” he said. “I’m doing something that nobody else ever did in the history of the world.”

7:10-7:15 I picked up Grace at Front and Richmond Streets from her paper route.

7:15-7:25 I scrambled three eggs with butter, salt and milk.

7:25-8:30 I read the Tri-City Herald, published in Kennewick, Washington 99336. The Tri-City Herald this morning weighed 2 lbs. as contrasted with the Walla Walla Union-Bulletin, which weighed 2 lbs. this morning.

“Some people would say ‘Well, he’s a nut,”’ said Shields, seemingly unfazed by the prospect. “Maybe I am.”

He’d rather be called an eccentric.

Asked if he worries about a fire or another stroke, Shields smiled like someone about to reveal a secret. “I don’t worry about anything,” he said. “Everything is in the hands of God.”

He insists he’s not really competing for the title of the world’s longest diary. But one suspects he would take it hard if somebody in Arizona or Georgia turned up with a 40-million word diary.

That’s not likely, though. Lots of people start diaries. Few keep them up.

“A girl once told me she kept a diary until her sister found it,” he said.

For Robert Shields, being discovered isn’t a worry.

Being forgotten is.

But he believes that words last. And so he’s cranking out more than anybody.

11:15-11:50 I finished drinking the cocoa and thumbed the rest of Newsweek.

11:50-11:55 I drained my waterpipes.

11:55-12:00 I washed out the cocoa saucepan and spoon, and the two-cup glass mug.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 color photos