The Energizer Diarist Keeps Going 24 Years, Writes Every 5 Minutes

DAYTON, Columbia County - Robert Shields doesn't want you to get the wrong idea.

He hasn't produced the world's longest diary in a bid for immortality, or even to aid future historians.

"You might say I'm a nut," said Shields, 77, a short, balding former minister and school teacher who has recorded his life in five-minute increments since 1972. "We are driven by compulsions we don't know."

Stored in 81 cardboard boxes, and running to more than 37.5 million words, the diary records every event in Shields' life since Richard Nixon defeated George McGovern for president 24 years ago.

Every expense. Every trip. Every thing you can't print in a family newspaper.

"I'm completely uninhibited," Shields said cheerfully.

The Guinness Book of World Records lists Edward Robb Ellis of New York City as having the longest-kept diary, covering 68 years. But Ellis' is a standard journal of stories and observations, and at around 20 million words, far shorter than Shields' chronicle.

No one has ever claimed a bulkier memoir than Shields.

Its scope is breathtaking. If some police officer asked Shields where he was at 6:47 p.m. on the evening of Sept. 23, 1979, Shields could find the answer.

Taped to the pages recording his travels, financial transactions and philosophical ruminations are pennies he's found on the sidewalk, nose hairs, grocery-store receipts, meat labels and the complete text of "Jasmine Nights," an erotic novel Shields ghost-wrote.

Shields keeps three typewriters going in the study of his home in this tidy little farming town 120 miles south of Spokane, in the rolling hills of Washington's Palouse region.

He scribbles notes constantly and spends about four hours each day transcribing them into the diary.

He uses IBM memory typewriters, which store his words on magnetic cards. They stopped making the typewriters years ago, but Shields picks them up at rummage sales. He prints the diary on heavy, custom-cut paper that has two holes punched in one end, binding the pages between heavy covers. Volumes piling up on sunporch

The volumes are packed in boxes that used to hold bananas, cherries or encyclopedias. The taped boxes are wrapped in plastic and then stored on shelves on his back sunporch. No fancy security.

"We trust to God," he said, noting that recent flooding inundated much of Dayton but spared the Shields house.

In the 1980s, Shields donated his life savings, about $100,000, to Washington State University in exchange for the school's promise to store his diary after he dies.

"I paid them to take it," he said. "I don't know what they are going to do with it."

Doesn't plan to stop

Shields says he has no plans to stop the chronicle: "I'll just do it until I run out."

He was raised in Seymour, Ind., site of a 19th-century train robbery that Shields says was the nation's first. He spent six years writing a book about the robbery that became the basis for "Love Me Tender," Elvis Presley's first movie. Shields said he made $100 on the deal.

He has also ghost-written autobiographies and penned Civil War romances, fiction and non-fiction. For a decade, he ran a company that prepared manuscripts for publication by vanity presses.

He attended the University of Kentucky, Harvard Divinity School and several other colleges and seminaries. He was a minister for 15 years in Indiana, New Hampshire, Iowa and South Dakota, preaching to several Protestant denominations.

He moved to central Washington State in the 1960s to teach English at Kennewick High School. He moved to Dayton in 1969 and taught for 10 years before retiring to run the manuscript business, later sold.

He performed weddings and funerals until he suffered a stroke in 1991. The stroke also affected his diary production, which dropped to 1 million words a year from 3 million.

Shields is married to Grace Hotson Shields, 67, whom he describes as "the oldest living carrier of the Walla Walla Union-Bulletin."

They have three daughters.