My New Children’s Novel: KEEP YOUR SONGS IN YOUR HEART

KEEP YOUR SONGS IN YOUR HEART by Yours Truly.

Have you wondered what I have been doing lately?  I am delighted to announce that my children’s novel, KEEP YOUR SONGS IN YOUR HEART, is now available on Amazon in both print and eBook formats!

The book opens in 1941.  Ruby Carol Rafferty is an ebullient 11-year-old who loves performing in school shows and idolizes the movie star Carole Lombard.   She is overjoyed to find out that her parents are planning to take her and her best friend, Emiko Fujiwara, on a special trip to Hollywood over the upcoming Christmas vacation.

But the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor, and suddenly Ruby’s happy life is turned completely upside-down.  Emiko’s father is arrested by the FBI as a possible “enemy alien,” even though she knows good and well that he isn’t one (and has no trouble letting the FBI agents who descend on her Emi’s home know how she feels on that matter, either).  America declares to war against Japan a day later.  Germany and Italy, Japan’s allies, respond by declaring war on America.  The Japanese Americans in Seattle are getting the worst of it with one restriction placed on them after another.  Ruby’s father wants to join the Army, and a new classmate, Vera, a refugee from Berlin, doesn’t know what happened to Mitzi, the cousin that may not escaped from Germany before the war started.

Can Ruby, Emi and Mitzi hold on to all the good things they are and keep a song in their hearts until the world comes back to its senses?

Parents and teachers out there, please take note: this old-fashioned story about a funny kid named Ruby and her two little best friends is well-researched – and it’s wholesome, too.  It can provide middle grade students with a lot of background information about the days following the attack on Pearl Harbor and the subsequent events that happened on the Seattle Home Front.  Here’s the link to the Amazon page, and enjoy!

KEEP YOUR SONGS IN YOUR HEART – Purchase Here

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The F.B.I. Closes the D.B. Cooper Case, But He’s Still Out There…

Sketch made from eyewitness descriptions of hijacker D.B. Cooper. have YOU seen this man?

I consider this a crying shame: the FBI is closing the D.B. Cooper hijacking case, and not because they caught him.  They didn’t.  They’re closing it because they failed to find him!  For shame, FBI!

Do you remember the story?  It happened on November 24, 1971.  A man calling himself “Dan Cooper” – the name was later misreported in the media as “D.B. Cooper,” and that’s how he became known – boarded a Northwest Orient Airlines plane in Portland, Oregon.  Cooper said he had a bomb onboard, and took all the passengers hostage and would ransom them for $200,000 – which was a lot of money in those days.  The plane landed at Seattle Airport.  The hostages were released, thankfully unharmed.  Then D.B. demanded another plane, two parachutes, the moolah, and a free flight to Mexico.

Somewhere over the state of Washington, he jumped from the plane and parachuted to freedom, complete with the money.  The powers that be at the time didn’t think he’d survive the drop.  Apparently, he did.  You might think  it doesn’t take a criminologist to figure out that he was almost certainly a member of some nation’s paratrooper division, but think again: he jumped out of the plane at night and over a Washington forest, the last place an experienced parachutist would have chosen to eject.  Later, bills that were to be part of the ransom money were found by the Columbia River, but Cooper wasn’t, not dead, not alive,  but hey, he’s got to be somewhere!

This inspired me to write the following limerick – okay, with a LOT of input from my mother and father – in Mr. Cohn’s fifth grade class at Victor Mravlag School 21 in Elizabeth, NJ:

“There once was a hijacker named Lord

who hijacked a plane while onboard.

He got all the loot,

And a big parachute,

But alas!  It had no rip cord!”

In my version, he didn’t get away with it, but now, he did!  They’re giving up the long hunt for D.B. Cooper!

Are we going to sit back and let that happen?  Take a look at those drawings.  Who knows?  He jumped from that plane in Washington State.  He obviously had a brain, enough so that he masterminded what is considered “the perfect crime,” so I doubt he would have stayed in the Washington or Northwest vicinity.  He’d be elderly now.  He sounded Midwestern.  Did he go back home?  Might he be living in relative obscurity in, say, the Ozarks?  Is he sipping Starbucks in Indiana?  Or did he go towards the ocean?  Is he that old man on the beach towel beside you at the seashore?  Look closely.  He might be your neighbor, your boss, or even your best friend…

Age-enhanced photo of D.B. Cooper. Look closely…have you seen this man?

 

Wanted poster, with full description. He had an olive complexion and sounded Midwestern…who was he?

Westward Bound!

English: Amtrak train on the Empire Builder route departs Chicago from Union Station Deutsch: Amtrak Zug fährt Chicago ab. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

They’re places I feel like I already know as well as the back of my own hand, though I haven’t been to either of them yet.I began researching Rose Hovick in 2008.  It took two and a half years of research, quite a bit of which could only be done on Saturdays, the only day when I could get to the Performing Arts Library to study the Gypsy Rose Lee Archive of personal papers, photos and documents, before my bok, MAMA ROSE’S TURN, could be written.  During the rest of the week I would go through records on Ancestry.com, newspaperarchive.com, and read lots of books about Seattle, where Rose lived from early childhood on, and Copalis Beach, Washington, where her little sister Belle “Betty” Thornton had a souvenir shop and motel.

I came to adore the history of Seattle.  I learned all about its founder, Arthur Denny, a staunch, religious man who was in favor (like my own family members) of prohibition and brought the first minister to the area to found a church – that almost nobody attended.  I read about Henry Yesler, who constructed a mill, and the fabulously notorious Doc Maynard, who was, among other things, the town’s first official drunk.  It would have been fun to see him interact with Arthur Denny.

I also came to love the stories of the North Beach area of Washington, where Betty lived.  Betty’s letters to Rose and Gypsy Rose Lee that can be found in the archive can be divided into two distinct sets.  She was caring for their mother, Anna, a shut-in, and had of necessity become something of a shut-in herself, living in a tiny house on Rutan Place in West Seattle.  At first her letters were filled with descriptions of her own, and her mother’s, litany of ailments, often graphic, very sad, and sometimes extremely hard to wade through.  Later, when she moved to Copalis Beach to set up her gift shop, they take a sparkling turn for the better.  Suddenly she writes of clam digs and fun times.

It’s funny, but when you research people who are long gone, and are reading one letter of theirs after another, in fact, hundreds of them, you start to root for them.  “Blast it,” I’d sit there and think as I read them, “won’t this poor Betty ever get a nice break?”  She was so trapped by her circumstances.  It seemed beyond unfair.  When I found the letters where she first started mentioning her new and happier life in Copalis Beach, I wanted to stand up and cheer.  Ah, now that would have certainly disrupted the quietude of the Special Collections Room at the Library!

I also learned of the community that inhabited the area known as the North Beach.  Dorothy Anderson, one of the first residents of Ocean City, lived in a tiny cabin that still stands and has been restored.  Another area resident, Norah Berg, moved to a cabin with her husband, whom she called “The Old Sarge.”  She wrote a book about the experience called Lady on the Beach.  It’s considered a classic and it’s a very fun read.  She mentioned how a lot of exceedingly poor people would move to these little cabins at the beach because it was possible to “eat like kings” there, thanks to the area’s abundance of easily caught seafood.  She wrote also of the same digs for clams that Betty enjoyed.

So it is with joyous anticipation that I say I am going to embark on a trip west on Sunday.  I’ll be riding the Amtrak across the country on the Lake Shore Limited to Chicago first, and then on the Empire Builder, which goes through some of the most spectacular scenery in the northern part of our country, including Glacier National Park.  I can hardly wait.  I have researched these two areas of Washington so thoroughly that I probably will know how to walk from one locale to another the minute I get there, and without benefit of having to look at a map.  I’ll be met by Kelly Calhoun and Jane Bennett of the Museum of the North Beach, who are hosting me for a book signing – at Dorothy Anderson’s restored little cabin in Seabrook, WA on November 30th.  We’ll be visiting Seattle too, seeing the Space Needle, taking the Underground Seattle tour of the town’s old days that, I’ve heard, features stories about Denny, Yesler, Maynard and more.  Later in the trip I’ll be stopping by for a visit with Karen White who now owns one of the Thompson family’s homes, the one on Rutan Place.  Another of their houses used to stand on ground that became the city’s most famous landmark: The Space Needle.   There will also be a stop up in Vancouver, where June Havoc was born, and where I’ll meet up with Rob Brandreth-Gibbs, whose grandmother was in Rose’s Hollywood Blondes act.  I’ll be met in each place by friends.

I may be going on vacation to places I’ve never been before, but after having looked all of these places up and studied them for so long, in a strange way, I feel like I’m “coming home.”  Maybe you’d have to be a researcher to understand.

Westward!

Pacific Beach, WA (Photo credit: MïK)

The Space Needle from Queen Anne. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)