POPPAW’S ROCKING CHAIR

 

From Linda Lee Greene Author/Artist

 

That Christmas Weekend of 1952, there was a radio somewhere in the farmhouse of my maternal grandparents, tucked away, gathering dust. It hadn’t been turned on much since World War II when the family was anxious about the fate of their eldest soldier-son in battle with the Germans. By 1952, television had taken the place of radio in most homes, but such a “newfangled machine” hadn’t yet found its place in the farmhouse. The local newspaper held on as my grandparent’s major source of information, and by way of it, they knew that Harry S. Truman would hand over the keys to the White House to Dwight D. Eisenhower the following month; that Elizabeth II had succeeded her deceased father to Great Britain’s Royal Crown; and that war was on yet again, but in a faraway place known as Korea. That Christmas Weekend while my parents and my little brother and I were at the farm, the bulky and black rotary-dial telephone that sat on the stand by the front door of our own house eighty-five miles north of the farmhouse, could ring off the hook for all we knew. No answering machine or voice mail would alert us to missed calls upon our return home. Such conveniences were as yet to come into existence. Like the television, the telephone was another “newfangled machine” that Poppaw scoffed at and Mommaw wanted but wouldn’t get until several years later.

          Christmas was like any other day on the farm: the cows still needed rounded up and fed and milked; the hogs still needed slopped; the chickens still needed fed and their eggs gathered; and the outdoors dogs and cats still needed attended to, as well. That morning Poppaw was agitated over a fox that was menacing the chickens. His .22 in his broad and brawny farmer’s hands, he had slogged across the nearby soupy fields in hunt of the fox, but the wily creature had outsmarted Poppaw again.

          Discarding his muddy boots at the back door and propping his rifle in a corner of the entryway, Poppaw traipsed in his stocking feet to the coffee pot on the kitchen counter. He poured a cup of the steaming brew, lightened it with the heavy cream skimmed from the milk of his best milk cow, loaded it with sugar, and chugged it. And then he trudged to his rocking chair in the front room and draped his coat on its back. Poppaw always kept his coat within arm’s reach and his footwear at the back door, because there was no telling what awful things could happen out on the farm. One of the horses could lose its footing on an icy bank of the creek and plunge in to freezing ice-capped water way over its head—especially Old Roger. “That horse ain’t got the sense he was born with no more. He’s jist gitting too old and simple,” Poppaw often complained. Or that crafty fox could get into more devilment. He could sneak back in the henhouse and send the chickens scurrying and flopping and squawking into the farmhouse yard and up on the porch just as soon as Poppaw was out of the way.

Poppaw’s rocking chair was perpetually pulled up as close as possible to the chugging wood-burning stove. The farmhouse was abuzz with the voices of Poppaw and Mommaw’s several visiting adult children and their spouses and their children. I was in hog-heaven because being with my grandparents, my uncles and aunts and cousins was my favorite thing. I was champing at the bit to get Christmas morning underway. In my hands, as always, was my mother’s camera with which I would memorialize my family’s Christmas in black and white images. After what seemed an eternity to my fidgety cousins and me, Poppaw lowered his Abe Lincoln frame to his creaky rocking chair. It was our signal to begin our Christmas celebration.

My mother had stewed over what to get Poppaw for Christmas as she had done every Christmas of my nine years of life at that point. And as usual, she settled on two flannel shirts, two pairs of wool socks, and a couple packs of Mail Pouch chewing tobacco. Just about everyone else had decided on flannel shirts, wool socks and chewing tobacco for Poppaw too, and by the end of the hour, Poppaw had enough of them for an army. I snapped the photo of Poppaw opening the first of our gifts to him, and now I share it with you. Happy Holidays to you and yours. May it be as happy as ours was on that Christmas of 1952.

Oh, and Poppaw! I hope yours is a rocking good 125^th birthday up there in Heaven today.©

                                                                        

***

Several years ago, I wrote a novel about Poppaw and Mommaw, their kids, and extended family titled GUARDIANS AND OTHER ANGELS. The novel is a blend of fiction and nonfiction and includes transcriptions of actual letters the members of the family wrote to one another over the years and provide a poignant glimpse into the lives of a particular strata of American people during the twentieth century. Among the catalog of my books, GUARDIANS AND OTHER ANGELS is my favorite. The act of writing it brought me home again after decades of rootlessness and alienation from my authentic self. It is a novel written from my heart more than any before then or afterwards. If you feel inspired to read the book, it is available for purchase at  http://goo.gl/imUwKO.

                                                                         

#Christmas, #1952, #HarrySTruman, #DwightDEisenhower, #QueenElizabethII, #WorldWarII, #Americana, #FamilySaga, #GuardiansAndOtherAngels, #LindaLeeGreene, #Author/Artist

 

AHEAD BY A NOSE

 

From Linda Lee Greene Author/Artist

Way back when I was a kid of Columbus, Ohio’s inner-city, narrow ribbons of patchwork concrete ran between the old, asbestos-clad Victorian houses and row upon row of brick townhouses, dwellings comprising neighborhoods much like those found throughout Colonial American cities. In one of the townhouses lived my friend Janey and her mother, Helen. Helen was the only single, working mother on our block, a status that rendered her a curiosity among the stay-at-home-mothers. There was never any mention of the whereabouts or even of the existence of Janey’s father. At some point, one of the local busybodies decreed that he must have been a casualty of World War II, for after all, most of the neighborhood kids were born while the fathers fought in that conflict. The explanation took hold and held, but we never really knew the true story behind the mystery of Janey’s missing father.

Actual fatherlessness was an almost unknown factor among our circle of family and friends in those days. Whether birth fathers or surrogates, fathers were at minimum often obscure figures in the background of our daily lives. In my and my sibling’s case, our dad worked nights and while he was at work, we slept, and while he slept, we were at school. He was nearly a specter-like presence among us on weekends, for most Saturdays and Sundays he was preoccupied with repairing his car, replacing a busted faucet or other chore required to keep a family and its household whole and functioning. But our dad, like the dads of other kids we knew, was there—somewhere—when the chips were down. Janey was the exception.

Janey was the exception in other ways, as well. She was the only kid I knew who sassed her mother. That kind of thing just didn’t happen in my tiny 1950s world. I stood in shocked horror of Janey’s aggression toward her mother, a kind of hostility I didn’t feel toward my mother, and if such a thing ever popped into my head, I ejected it for fear of hurting my mother’s feelings and/or losing her love. That Janey took such risks with her mother was astonishing to me. I didn’t like Janey’s behavior, but at the same time, I felt a kind of unwelcome admiration of her pluck. Guts like hers could take a person places, and that fact gave her a pass in my mind. It set her up as the wild-child of our play group and a fascinating character I was content to embrace despite her bad behavior.  

At bottom, the thorn that pricked the clashes between Janey and Helen was that Janey sucked her thumb. Janey and I were both six years old and in the first grade of the same school as well as neighbors when we met. She sucked her thumb then and still sucked her thumb when at the age of fifteen we said our last “goodbye” on the day my family moved out of the neighborhood. Throughout the years I knew them, Helen had coated Janey’s thumb with iodine and other bitter substances, had wrapped her thumb in tape or her whole hand in gauze, all to no avail. Janey persisted in her baby-mode despite the fact that her mouth and teeth were altered by the practice, and the thumb she sucked was stunted. It never developed to a size larger than a toddler’s. Other than the pint-sized thumb, the most notable mark of the thumb sucking ritual was on her nose. As Janey sucked her thumb, she hooked the index finger of the same hand across her nose, and the constant pressure from that finger carved an inwardly curving ridge in the bridge of her nose. Her ski-jump nose made Richard Nixon’s look half-baked. I can’t help but wonder if Tricky Dick sucked his thumb on the sly.

I am not here to disparage Janey. I have infinite sympathy for her, for surely her thumb was the pacifier she used to cope with the challenges that came with the absence of a competent father-figure somewhere in the catacombs of her days, and exaggerated by the enormous stresses of an overworked, single mother. Helen’s anxiety over Janey’s thumb sucking addiction was understandable for there was no getting around the huge impediment her thumb sucking presented to her future success and happiness. But even so, I just bet there is room for optimism about Janey’s chances in life, for you never know where an oddly-shaped nose might point you. Look at Meryl Streep and Barbra Streisand. Janey’s strong and nervy, ramrod-straight backbone set against the flimsy bent of her nose tells me that while she might have remained a strange character in the eyes of many, she was also wily enough to stay ahead of the game—if only by a nose.©*

 

*The above is a work of fiction based on a composite of actual events as they exist in its author’s fuzzy memory bank.

 

***

           Linda Lee Greene’s award-winning novel

 

CRADLE OF THE SERPENT

 

“5 Stars…A woman’s search for the truth behind her husband’s infidelity unearths dark secrets and monstrous circumstances, chilling exposures that in the end illuminate her path to a new and better life…told from varying viewpoints in varying states of existence and so becomes quite unique and utterly fascinating."

 

Purchase Link: goo.gl/i3UkAV

 

#VictorianHouses, #Townhouses, #ColonialAmercanDwellings, #WorldWarII, #FathersDay, #ThumbSucking, #FathersAndDaughters, #MothersAndDaughters, #SingleWorkingMothers, #RichardNIxon, #LindaLeeGreene, #CradleOfTheSerpent

A SOLDIER GOES HOME FOR CHRISTMAS

From Linda Lee Greene, Author/Artist

Christmas Eve of 1941 in the mess hall of Ft. Knox, Kentucky Training Center was nothing like home for the young US Army recruits, but they decorated a tree and wolfed-down a traditional dinner of turkey, pie, cake, and all the trimmings. Early that morning, Buck Private Bob Gaffin had rummaged through the contents of the locker he had been assigned, trying to decide what to pack in anticipation of receiving a four-day pass. Jammed into the locker were bed clothes, overcoat, raincoat, two wool uniforms, two suntan shirts and tie, three wool suits, underwear, two pairs of shoes, one pair of overshoes, six pairs of socks, one combat suit, one pair of gloves, and toiletries, not to mention one tent, one first-aid kit, one shell belt, one mess kit, and more to come. This unsophisticated farm-boy, who owned far far fewer personal articles than this enormous cache, felt he had hit the jackpot. In a letter to his family he expressed a profound sense of stewardship for all the materiel issued to him by the military. I sure have to be careful with it, he wrote. In the end, he packed his haversack lightly—just enough to get him through a long weekend at his parent’s farm in tiny Peebles, Ohio. Stuffed inside were the clothes he had worn the day he was inducted into the Army at Ft. Thomas, Kentucky a month before. His mother and sisters would wash and iron them, brush his wool coat and hunting cap, wrap his scruffy old brogans in newspaper, and store them away for him in the locker at the foot of the bed at home he shared with his sixteen-year-old brother, Bussy. Bob was anxious to see his frail brother, ill with a serious bronchial condition he had developed at the age of ten.    

Although Bob told his family he had borrowed the money, in truth he had sold the stationery, the towel set, and other Christmas gifts he had received from his family and girlfriend. In that way he raised the money required of him by the Army to get a four-day pass. There was also enough to buy a bus ticket from Ft. Knox to Peebles and back, and he went home for Christmas, surprising his family.

                                                                         

            As his brother, Bussy’s new fighting rooster, Ranger, named after the Lone Ranger, Bussy’s favorite radio character, coaxed the sun to rising with his ringing five-note greeting, and the cows bawled in the field as if in welcome to him, the gravel on the road leading to his parent’s farm crunched beneath Bob’s boots. At that hour, only his mother would be up; his father and his many brothers and sisters would still be sleeping. He adjusted the haversack slung over the shoulder of his new wool overcoat and bent down to straighten the creases in the immaculate wool trousers of his spiffy new uniform.

His mother had been right in her latest letter to him: it was bleak in Southern Ohio. There was an eerie mist hovering over the land, a fuzzy band of fog like a shimmering boa hugging the neck of the earth. As far as the eye could reach, dense bare trees, their feet cloaked in the mist, seemed lonely and unsupported, their jagged and raw heads, unprotected, piercing the top of the mist. The silver conditions of the morning seemed to mirror a shift in Bob’s soul. It was an aloneness he was coming to know all too well, one in which clear colors and details formerly sharp and contrasting were fading to gray and merging, were transforming everything often to unrecognizable states. It was a wary feeling of exposure to a bizarre new life in which not only his surroundings but he was becoming unfamiliar to himself.

It had been difficult for him to articulate the issues that were needling him, and part of the problem was directly tied to the impossibility of finding that voice in the environment where he was being trained to be a killing machine. Although in the beginning he had spoken with such bravado about being ready to go to any lengths to protect his country and family, as well as Dot, the girl he loved, as the reality of the fighting approached, methods of killing and maiming and destroying that nobody on the outside of it could possibly anticipate or comprehend, his sense of purpose was becoming blurred, like that foggy landscape.

Bob had innocently played with the idea that he had a kind of affinity with the ways and means of war, for as a backcountry boy he was familiar with the natural cycles of birth and death of the animals on the farm, surrounding forests, and countryside. He had euthanized sick animals, shot hogs in the head in preparation for slaughter, and he knew guns, the feel of them in his hands, their kick against his shoulder, the real damage they did to animate and inanimate objects alike. Guns had long been a hobby for him, actually. In his creative mind, he had even begun to design guns. As a matter of fact, in his spare time at the training camp in Ft. Knox, he had made rudimentary sketches of a canny little gun he planned to someday fashion out of a Zippo cigarette lighter. 

Hunting had been nearly a daily activity for him since his adolescence, and he was learning that his experience in that regard gave him a decided advantage over many of the other boys at Ft. Knox, town and city boys whose experience with guns extended no further than toy guns, or perhaps B. B. guns, boys who had never held real guns in their hands, or tracked down living prey in their sights, and once positioned in the crosshairs, squeezing the trigger and killing that prey. But that nagging voice inside of him was urging him to pay attention to the fact that killing an animal was a whole other matter than bringing a human being to its death. Despite the fact of his believing in the necessity of the war, for after all Japan had attacked the United States, and Germany had aggressed against his country as well, his being away from Ft. Knox for only a few hours now helped him to see that he was wrestling with that very moral dilemma, the first and most serious moral dilemma of his life.

            His was a tender society that believed in goodwill toward all people. He had been taught that “Thou Shalt Not Kill” his fellow man and it constituted a basic tenet of his very soul. How am I going to kill another human being? he worried as he sauntered in his usual loping fashion toward the farmhouse. He decided to find time to talk to his favorite preacher, Harley Ward about it before he returned to camp. Perhaps that man of God could help to lift the mantle of confusion weighing so heavily on Bob’s soul. 

            Barely glowing from a moisture-streaked window in the kitchen of the farmhouse was a sole low light. In the thick mist, a plume of white smoke billowed delicately, charging the air with the scent of wood smoke, a scent of home. Sparks in the smoke twinkled like stardust shooting from the chimney at the top of the peaked roof. As he neared the back of the farmhouse, he took note of its slick moisture-sodden clapboards. It was a house weeping from the melting icicles along its eves, weeping like those damp and lonely trees, weeping like the boggy fields, as if in an act of complicity, they collectively wept, as if the whole of nature and his home grieved an inapprehensible and ill-omened fortune lying in wait for him, his family, his girl, his country, lying in wait like the hidden land mines he would encounter on the beaches of Southern, Italy in the not too distant future. Shuddering like a threatened animal in the few minutes that passed, he worked at shaking off his paranoia as he entered the perpetually unlocked back door that opened to the kitchen. 

At the cook stove, her back to him, his mother stood in the arc of light from a kerosene lamp, her body noticeably weary as she bent to her duties of stoking her cook stove with her poker.  At the sound of his footfalls that she knew so well, but dared not believe were real, and visibly shaking with fear that they would prove to be products of her imagination, she turned to him. Her empty hand flew to her mouth to stifle her cry, and tears spilled from her eyes.

The changes in his mother in just a few weeks took Bob’s breath away. It was as if the changes in him were manifestly reflected in her, as if by some means of osmosis beyond the natural connection between parent and child, his experiences and fears and bewilderments also were hers, only exaggerated and accelerated. She seemed already to have endured what he was facing; she seemed to have already passed through, and had been permanently altered by, the ravages of war: the superhuman demands on one’s body and heart and mind and conscience; the depleted stores of psychological reserves—the lifetime of recurring night terrors. In her rote movements as she had bent to stoke her stove, in her turning to him, and in her covering of her quivering mouth, a rigid choking anxiety afflicted her.

He lowered his bag to the linoleum-clad floor while concurrently she dropped her poker with a crash. That emptying of their hands was the prelude to the opening of their arms. As she swayed weakly in his embrace, Bob’s dilemma was erased from his mind. In that moment, his conscience split into two expedient parts, and in a reversal of roles, he became her personal protector. He knew then that to keep his mother safe, he would kill their enemies, and without hesitation, if not with relish—he would kill with the automatic precision of the professional soldier he was learning to be, and as grievous as they might be, he would live with whatever consequences his choice quickened in him…©

 

The above is an excerpt from multi-award-winning and Amazon best-selling author, Linda Lee Greene’s novel of historical fiction titled, GUARDIANS AND OTHER ANGELS. An ambitious and thorough exploration of two families whose experiences are funneled through the pivotal early to middle decades of the twentieth century, this seamless blend of fiction and nonfiction renders an authentic slice of Americana at its most personal and profound. Based on actual events and oral history, and featuring transcriptions of dozens of authentic private letters written by the story’s principle characters, Greene delivers an insider’s view of the hearts and minds and day to day events of a singular group of people counted among history’s greatest generation. Powerful in its sweeping journalistic impact and at the same time tender in its novelistic prose, this highly rated book contributes greatly to the preservation efforts of the era it interprets.

 

The novel is available for purchase in eBook and paperback through Amazon.

Purchase Link of the book: http://goo.gl/imUwKO

Image: GAFFIN FARM IN WINTER, acrylic painting by Linda Lee Greene

#ChristmasEve, #Ft.KnoxKentucky, #ArmyTrainingCenter, #WorldWarII, #PeeblesOhio, #GuardiansAndOtherAngels, #LindaLeeGreene

A LESSON FROM HISTORY

 

British author Carol Browne explains the Battle of Dunkirk and why Britons still hold that spirit.

The Dunkirk Spirit – a Lesson from History

By Carol Browne

Let me begin by setting the scene …

It’s the summer of 1940 and on the beaches around Dunkirk in France hundreds of thousands of British troops are trapped with no hope of escape. Behind them was the vastly superior German army with its engines of war; before them was the cruel sea; above them was the relentless strafing of enemy aircraft.

Despite overwhelming odds, the men of the British Expeditionary Force and their Belgian and French allies had fought to defend their positions but, with all escape routes blocked, a desperate retreat to the beaches and harbour at Dunkirk was the only option left.

Now all these men want is to get to England—to home and safety. They have put their faith in the navy. Operation Dynamo has been set in motion to evacuate them, even though the transport ships and destroyers can only expect to have enough time to rescue about 30,000 troops. But soon, repeated attacks from the enemy’s aircraft have blocked the harbour with sinking ships. The soldiers must be evacuated from the beaches. How is this possible in such shallow water?

What happens next will leave a permanent impression upon the British psyche, for when the call goes out that small boats are needed to rescue the troops, a motley fleet of plucky ‘little ships’ will chug its way across the Channel to bring the warriors home. They are motor boats, trawlers, paddle steamers, fishing smacks, lifeboats, barges, and other shallow-draught vessels. The majority of them are privately owned. Many will be taken across by naval personnel, but an equal number will be crewed by their owners and other civilians eager to stand by their country during its darkest hour.

Braving the combined onslaughts of the German army and air force, these civilians will risk their lives again and again to take troops from the beaches and ferry them to the destroyers waiting out in deeper water. Some of these boats will take thousands of men all the way back to England. Thanks to their efforts, a total catastrophe will be averted. It will be described by Winston Churchill as a “miracle of deliverance” and what takes place at Dunkirk from May 27^th to June 4^th, 1940, will live in the hearts and minds of the British people for many generations to come. At a time when Great Britain faces certain invasion, recovering over a third of a million troops has turned defeat into victory. The phrase, “The Dunkirk Spirit” is born.

***

“The Dunkirk Spirit.” This is a phrase I have heard many times during my life. If you are British, it needs no explanation and yet as the event that created it moves further back in time, I feared that new generations would have no knowledge of it and an important part of my country’s heritage would be lost. I was delighted, therefore, when a new movie about Dunkirk was released in 2017. Not only will people much younger than me now know about “The Dunkirk Spirit,” but so will people of other countries, and a valuable historical lesson will continue to inspire us all.

What is the lesson? During current uncertain and divisive times, it resonates as much as ever. It shows us what we can achieve when we cooperate.  It demonstrates how brave and selfless ordinary folk can be. We are all capable of far more than we know and when individuals work together for the common good, the tide will turn, and even in the most hopeless and desperate of situations, defeat can be transformed into victory. Because “The Dunkirk Spirit” is the human spirit at its best and nothing can stand in its way.

***

The book “Being Krystyna” by Carol Browne recounts another true story of survival in World War II.

 

In 2012 when young Polish immigrant Agnieszka visits fellow countrywoman Krystyna in a Peterborough care home for the first time, she thinks it a simple act of kindness. However, the meeting proves to be the beginning of a life-changing experience.

Krystyna’s stories about the past are not memories of the good old days but recollections of war-ravaged Europe: The Warsaw Ghetto, Pawiak Prison, Ravensbrück Concentration Camp, and a death march to freedom.

The losses and ordeals Krystyna suffered and what she had to do to survive are horrors Agnieszka must confront when she volunteers to be Krystyna’s biographer.

Will Agnieszka be able to keep her promise to tell her story? And, in this harrowing memoir of survival, what is the message for us today?

Buy Links
Dilliebooks - Amazon UK - Amazon US

#WorldWarII, #Dunkirk, #OperationDynamo, #WinstonChurchill, #AMiracleofDeliverance, #CarolBrowne, #BeingKrystyna

 

MARCH 29th: A BITTERSWEET DATE

 

 

From Linda Lee Greene, Author/Artist

 

My mother was born on a March 29th, and ninety-one years later, my father died on a March 29th. My daughter, who is a registered nurse and hospice administrator, and therefore well-versed in the dying patterns of people, predicted my ailing father’s date of death. She was certain he would hold on to life until March 29th of that year. She explained that people nearing the final moment of their life cycle often wait until they reach what to them is a meaningful date to take their last breath. In my father’s case, it was my mother’s birthday, his wife of close to fifty years. She had died twenty-two years before then.

            My parents were country folks, both of them born and raised in the untamed foothills of the Appalachian Mountains of Southern Ohio. Barefoot, innocent, natural, and free, in their early adolescence and a decade before they had me, they courted side by side on the swing located on the cavernous front porch of my grandparent’s farmhouse. The beautiful young girl, her red hair aflame in the sun, and the gorgeous boy, his yellow hair a glowing nimbus enfolding his head, spooned and riding bare-back on Old Smoky, stole into private nooks for kisses in the surrounding thick forests, and then slipped out of their clothes for a dip in the creek, the daredevil boy swinging and howling like Tarzan from a thick grapevine and cannon-balling into the deep water. Refreshed and eager for the hunt, they scavenged for arrowheads that were the plentiful artifacts of the Shawnee who had inhabited the land for thousands of years before white people. Summer evenings brought a gathering on the porch of young boys and girls of the area, guitars ringing and voices singing out in rhapsody of just being alive and in love. Later they scampered like colts in the pitch black night catching lightning bugs in jars, and then passed them on to their younger siblings, offerings the youngsters took to bed and under the covers giggled at the wonder of their blinking insect-nightlights. And then, a hand in hand stroll out to the spacious yard, the girl and the boy watched the stars rise from the gentle Appalachian peaks that on all sides enclosed their distinct world.

Franklin D. Roosevelt took possession of the White House the same year the girl and the boy found each other in the porch swing. All around them the Great Depression raged on, but the distinguished president’s reassuring radio-messages restored confidence in their future, a future that begot marriage, a worldwide war, and my birth while my father was off training to fight in the conflict. In the aftermath of the war, my parents, my little brother, and I beat it to the big city for better employment for my father. Time marched on rapidly, as it is wont to do, and my two kid sisters rounded out our family.

On this bittersweet March 29th, I celebrate the 98^th birthday of my mother while I mourn my father’s passing on the March 29th of seven years ago. Both of them are in heaven, or some other realm of the beyond. Maybe there is a porch swing there, too, and Old Smoky out in the yard, ready and waiting to carry them on his bare back, to follow the Path discovered by the ginger-headed girl and the tow-topped boy so long ago, the Path that leads them forever on and on and on…..©

 

Photo: 4 year-old Linda Lee Greene and her parents

 

***

 

Multi-award-winning author Linda Lee Greene’s GUARDIANS AND OTHER ANGELS, is an ambitious and a thorough exploration of two families whose experiences are funneled through the pivotal early to middle decades of the twentieth century. This seamless blend of fiction and nonfiction renders an authentic slice of Americana at its most personal and profound. Based on actual events and oral history of her parents and extended family, and featuring transcriptions of dozens of authentic private letters written by the story’s principle characters, Greene delivers an insider’s view of the hearts and minds and day to day events of a singular group of people counted among history’s greatest generation. Powerful in its sweeping journalistic impact and at the same time tender in its novelistic prose, this extraordinary book contributes greatly to the preservation efforts of the era it interprets.

 

“5 stars…Wonderfully Written! This was a thoroughly enjoyable book. I loved the Americana. It reached out and touched my heart, mind and soul. It provided tremendous insight into what many American families endured during the first half of the 20th century. It captures you and draws you in. This is most certainly a five-star novel.”

 

Purchase Link: http://goo.gl/imUwKO

 

#March29, #Appalachia, #AppalachianMountains, #Ohio, #PorchSwing, #Shawnee, #Americana,  #FranklinDRoosevelt, #GreatDepression, #WorldWarII, #GuardiansandOtherAngels, #LindaLeeGreene

 

 

 

 

ABOUT AUTHOR MARINA OSIPOVA

                                                From Linda Lee Greene, Author & Artist

 

ORDER No. 227 FROM STALIN WITH LOVE by multi-award winning author Marina Osipova, is 51 pages of historical fiction based on true events as experienced by her grandfather during the Great Patriotic War, which is the term used for World War II in Russia. While the European Theater of World War II is one of my favorite literary genres about which to read and write, my interest in the Soviet Union’s involvement in the war has only been a glancing one. Osipova’s work brims with intimate views of the Eastern Front of the war in a way that stirs the reader’s desire to learn more about it. The “golds” and “silvers” and “bests” in historical fiction Osipova has won don’t take just a minute to digest. Readers will need to set aside some real time to devote to the experience. Her work reaches out across the world and touches us, and for that time, she lends herself to us, and she stays with us until we see what she sees, the way she sees it, and why. And when we do, we are the better for it.

By the time of its disbandment, Order No. 227 had collected 427,910 Soviet prisoners in penal military units. They were commanded to fight at any cost in defending their motherland against Nazi Germany. Eighty percent of the Soviet prisoners did not survive the battles. In the main, ORDER No. 227 FROM STALIN WITH LOVE is a fictional account of thirteen of those men.

At the end of her short volume, Osipova explains to the reader that time was of the essence in archiving the story. Her motivation was to write it for her mother before it was too late to do so. It was released only a few months before the world shut down because of the coronavirus pandemic. I don’t know if Osipova was able to venture from her home in Austria to Moscow to place the book in her mother’s hands before the travel ban was enacted. I hope so; and if not back then, then sometime soon.©

                                                                                    

Purchase Link: https://www.amazon.com/Order-No-227-Stalin-Marina-Osipova-ebook/dp/B07V5K8DH4

 

#MarinaOsipova, #OrderNo.227, #Austria, #Russia, #SovietUnion, #ThePatrioticWar, #WorldWarII, #Stalin, #EasternFront. #Russo-German

~THE SECRET OF THE GRAND HÔTEL DU LAC~ KATHRYN GAUCI’S LATEST NOVEL

Turn to the first page and your eyes land on the opening line: ‘The silence was eternal.’ Four deceptively subtle words—deceptive for the reason that a breath later, you are impaled on them, hooked on them until the final word of the last page of this novel—this THE SECRET OF THE GRAND HÔTEL DU LAC by Kathryn Gauci, this author who builds so intentionally on the premise of those four words page after page and never loses the thread, not one time, not even a little bit.   

            Gauci’s bailiwick is historical fiction often centered on heroes and heroines of         World War I and World War II, as well as the interwar years, a Tussaud’s gallery of characters, so lifelike, so believable, so fleshed out that even nose to nose with them, you swear they are real. You end up asking yourself what devices this author uses to sculpt such three-dimensional characters out of a two-dimensional medium. The talent hails from a pool of some private source—a codified chamber of raw stuff ripe for shaping not responsive to just anyone. Only a few know the password, and Gauci is an honored, an awarded member of that select group.

            Don’t let me make it sound a simple task, this chiseling, carving, molding, this blood, sweat, and tears of novel making. Pay close attention and you will get a notion of the enormous effort involved in it, the hours of research, the day upon day of pecking on a keyboard, the meals foregone, the companionship postponed until those final two words are spelled out: the THE END! The thing is though, that closing the last page of one of Gauci’s books leaves you wanting another one and another one.

THE SECRET OF THE GRAND HÔTEL DU LAC tells the story of Elizabeth Maxwell, code name Marie-Élise Lacroix, wartime spy for Britain operating in the months of the buildup of the World War II Allied invasion of Normandy. On a perilous mission to find and rescue missing comrades, one of whom is her husband, she is dropped by parachute in the thick of Nazi-Occupied France, a place overrun with Wehrmacht machines of war, patrolling German soldiers, the Gestapo, and the Milice Française, the Vichy regime’s armed and dangerous militia that held allegiance to Nazi Germany and fought against the French Resistance. The setting and backstory of the novel are thrilling and the suspense intense. I rate it a 5-star read and predict it will whet your appetite for Gauci’s entire body of work.

Gauci is a superb “passeur” (guide) through the mysteries of the Grand Hôtel du Lac and in resurrecting its “ghosts.” She tells us in the Postscript of her novel, “Like all stories, they fade over time. For me it was a powerful story and one that I could not let go. One thing is for sure, it was like walking through the countryside accompanied by ghosts, and I hope that in my own small way, I have brought the bravery of those ghosts alive again.” There are hints that she is brewing a new saga in her Melbourne, Australia studio of literary enchantments. Oh, goody, goody!© -From Linda Lee Greene, Author & Artist

 

Purchase link to the novel: https://www.amazon.com/Secret-Grand-H%C3%B4tel-Lac-ebook/dp/B08PFDP89P/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3293AEX85PQYU&dchild=1&keywords=the+secret+of+the+grand+hotel+du+lac&qid=1607850514&sprefix=The+Secret+of+the+Grand%2Caps%2C393&sr=8-1

 

#TheSecretoftheGrandHôteldulac, #GrandHôteldulac, #KathrynGauci, #WorldWarI, #WorldWarII, #France, #Nazi, #Wehrmacht, #Gestapo, #MiliceFrançaise, #VichyRegime, #MelbourneAustralia, #LindaLeeGreene  

A PLACE AT THE TABLE

 

From Linda Lee Greene, Author & Artist

 

It was a foregone conclusion that eighteen year old Lee Greene of Peebles, Adams County, Ohio would be drafted, but like so many young couples living everywhere under the specter of World War II, his sweetheart Roma Gaffin and he got married anyway. The date was September 29, 1942. By Christmas of that same year they were pregnant for me. A few weeks before my birth, my father was drafted into the US Navy, with the expectation that following his training he would be shipped to somewhere in the Pacific Theater of the war. My mother stayed on at my grandparent’s farm in Peebles, and it was in a bedroom there that I was born, assisted into the world by Old Doc Ellison. My father first laid eyes on me a few weeks later—on the occasion of his return home after receiving an honorable medical discharge from the Navy.

There was little separation in my mind between my parents and my grandparents when I was a kid. Despite the fact that by the time of my toddlerhood, my parents, little brother, and I had settled in Columbus, Ohio, the farm and its inhabitants play central roles in the script of my childhood. We spent every weekend and holiday there, and my brother and I stayed at the farm during every summer until I was an adolescent. One of my most vibrant memories is of Lena, my grandmother, thick around the middle by then, her chestnut hair peppered with white, utilitarian apron tied around her waist, standing before her cook stove. With fresh peaches plucked from trees in the farm’s orchard or stash of canned goods in the cellar, and butter churned from the milk of resident cows, in her wood-filled cook stove, lacking the modern convenience of temperature control, my grandmother whipped up peach cobbler to rival any big city bakery. Breads, muffins, cakes, cookies, pies, cobblers—all the baked goods consumed by her large family were the products of her masterful hands. An abundance of her baked goods was the highlight of her high-holiday dinners. Memories of them helped me through the lonely Thanksgiving of 2020, and will continue to sustain me in the trying weeks of Covid-19 ahead.

I didn’t inherit my grandmother’s prowess in the kitchen but once in a while, I catch a glimpse of myself in a mirror, and I see fleeting fragments of her in me. I did inherit her affinity for storytelling. I hear her colorful depictions of local gossip so clearly in my mind’s ear. She was also a prolific writer of delightful and informative letters, the greater number of them penned during the Great Depression and World II. Many of them are transcribed in, and form the spine of, GUARDIANS AND OTHER ANGELS, my novel of historical fiction, based on the true story of three generations of my family. And of course, my formidable grandmother is a key figure of it. One review of the novel states: “5 stars…Wonderfully Written! This was a thoroughly enjoyable book. I loved the Americana. [It] reached out and touched my heart, mind and soul. [It] provided tremendous insight into what many American families endured during the first half of the 20th century. It captures you and draws you in. This is most certainly a five-star novel.”

 

Purchase link to GUARDIANS AND OTHER ANGELS: http://goo.gl/imUwKO

                                                                               

 

~LENA’S PEACH COBBLER~

Add 5 peeled, cored, and sliced peaches, 1 cup sugar and ¼ tsp salt to a saucepan and stir to combine. Cook on medium heat for just a few minutes—until the sugar is dissolved and juices are drawn from the peaches. Remove from heat and set aside. 

*(If using canned or glass jar peaches in an amount of about 1 quart, skip the above step) 

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Slice 6 tbs butter into pieces and add to a 9x13 inch baking dish. Place the pan in the oven while it preheats, to allow the butter to melt. Once melted, remove the pan from the oven.

1.      To make the batter, mix together 1 cup flour, 1 cup sugar, 2 tsp baking powder, and ¼ tsp salt. Stir in ¾ cup milk, just until combined. Pour the mixture into the pan, over the melted butter and smooth to an even layer. 

2.      Spoon the peaches and juice (or canned/glass jar peaches, if using) over the batter. Sprinkle ground cinnamon generously over the top.

3.      Bake for about 38-40 minutes. Serve warm topped with a scoop of ice cream, if desired.©

                                                            

#PeeblesOhio, #AdamsCountyOhio, #farm, #WorldWarII, #WWII, #USNavy, #GuardiansAndOtherAngels, #LindaLeeGreene

WORLD WAR II BLACKOUT IS FACTOR IN AIRPLANE CRASH CLAIMING THE LIFE OF ACTRESS, CAROLE LOMBARD

By Linda Lee Greene, Author & Artist

Boy, am I in trouble now! When Clark finds out that I insisted on gambling my life and that of my mother and the others in my entourage on this TWA DC-3 flight on a flip of a coin, he will never forgive me. And how will I get this past God? How will I justify to God that I wagered our precious lives in such a frivolous way to get what I wanted?

God’s fearsome voice, as I stand in front of Him to receive His judgement following the plane’s crash into Potosi Mountain, cuts my soul in two. “Just because you are Carole Lombard, famous movie star of Hollywood’s golden age, goddess of the silver screen whom every woman admires and envies—just because you are married to Clark Gable, the king of Hollywood, you had no right to act in such a flippant way. Yes, you are only 33, and some might chalk up your behavior to your youth, but I, your God, am not sure I am inclined to do so. But, as is My way, I grant you the chance to explain your motives and solicit my forgiveness.”

            What can I say to God? I can only tell the truth as I see it. “We had two choices of transportation from Las Vegas to Los Angeles, God. We could have traveled by train or airplane. But the train was scheduled to leave so much later than the airplane, and I was anxious to get back home.”

            “You are telling me that your desire to get home faster dictated your judgment—that your selfish desire overshadowed the fact that traveling by train is so much safer than doing so by airplane, especially in this age of World War II and your country is on high alert against Japanese bombers? Did you stop to consider that the airplane would have to fly blind in the mandatory blackout across America? Out of concern that the entire western USA is vulnerable to Japanese attack, the lighted beacon system for aircraft is turned off, and the only light on the ground by which the airplane traveled is at Arden, east of Potosi?”

            “The risk occurred to me, God. But it was a wee small voice in my mind compared to the urgent cry in my head to get home. Besides, wouldn’t the pilot have aborted the flight if there had been such danger?”

            “The pilot and his superiors bear guilt for this tragedy, too, Mrs. Gable. But that fact does not excuse your part in it.”

            “But God, you just do not understand. Clark and Lana Turner were shooting another film together and Clark was dewy-eyed over her again. I had to get back to Hollywood and put a stop to the whole thing.”

            “First of all, you did not know for sure that the allegation is true, and second, would arriving a few hours earlier really have made any difference if it is true?”

            “I was just so jealous. I wanted to get to Hollywood and scratch Lana Turner’s eyes out. I couldn’t stand the thought of their spending the night together. I had to get there. Nothing else mattered to me.”

            “Onboard with you were 15 soldiers from the Army Air Force Ferryman Command, warriors in your country’s fight against the Axis enemy. They were returning to the west coast after having delivered aircraft to a new bomber base. The wife of a soldier also lost her life in the airplane crash. Of course, I do not implicate you in those death.”

            “Doesn’t the fact that I was returning home from a tour across the nation in which I raised over two million dollars in War Bonds for the war effort count in my favor, I ask you, God? And it is well known that I have worked tirelessly in humanitarian causes, helping Hollywood’s down and out and advocating for women’s rights.”

            “I can foresee the headlines now, Mrs. Gable. There will be a seductive temptation on the part of the press to label you as a patriot who died in service to her country. I suppose that will have to be part of the mix that I will consider in milling over your case. However, I want you to know that I am not happy with you. Many of my wise children label what you are to face as ‘Karma’. You will not soon make amends for your recklessness. You movie stars are just so spoiled. If I thought it would do any good, I would turn you over my knees and spank you until you call ‘Uncle’. Go! Go! Leave me now. I command you to spend the next hours watching your poor husband’s suffering. See him down there in that saloon on the edge of the crash site swilling booze and smoking cigars in an effort to numb himself of the terrible outcome of this event? Look! Look now and see what you have done!”©

Image: Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, circa 1939

The above is a work of historical fiction by multi-award winning author Linda Lee Greene. It is based on true events. Greene’s eBooks and paperbacks are available for purchase through Amazon. Her latest novel, A CHANCE AT THE MOON is described below:

Amid the seductions of Las Vegas, Nevada and an idyllic coffee plantation on Hawai’i’s Big Island, a sextet of opposites converge within a shared fate: a glamorous movie-star courting distractions from her troubled past; her shell-shocked bodyguards clutching handholds out of their hardscrabble lives; a dropout Hawaiian nuclear physicist gambling his way back home; a Navajo rancher seeking cleansing for harming Mother Earth; and from its lofty perch, the Hawaiian’s guardian spirit conjured as his pet raven, conducting this symphony of soul odysseys.

Was it chance or destiny’s hand behind the movie-star and gambler’s curious encounter at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas? The cards fold, their hearts open, and a match strikes, flames that sizzle their hearts and souls. Can they have the moon and the stars, too? Or is she too dangerous? Is he? Can their love withstand betrayal? Can it endure murder?

While the cards at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas fail to distract them from their troubled pasts, on the side, the actress and the gambler play a game of ‘will they won’t they’ romance. Meanwhile, an otherworldly hand also has a big stake in the game. Unexpected secrets unfold brimming with dangerous consequences, and finally, a strange brand of salvation.

Amazon Buy Links:

https://www.amazon.com/CHANCE-AT-MOON-Betrayal-Murder-ebook/dp/B07Z44YN9X/  - EBOOK



https://www.amazon.com/CHANCE-AT-MOON-Betrayal-Murder/dp/169984402X/ - PAPERBACK