Available Titles, Now on Amazon Kindle
Massachusetts working class family relocates to Florida's Emerald Coast (Redneck Riviera) to escape the harsh New England winters.
​
They wind up converting their new Florida home to a Bed and Breakfast and their attempts to upgrade their redneck neighbors backfires with disastrous and hilarious consequences including a number of missing bodies that are secretly buried in a briarpatch alongside Dismal Hollow Creek.
The opening line of Richard Nixon’s memoir is, “I was born in a house my father built!” Well, my daddy also built us a house. Three of them. Three awful houses. But I didn’t get born in one, seeing as how I had already got born—in the Nutthouse!
​
Part one of this memoir is a coming-of-age story of a Mormon boy born into poverty in a home ruled by a pistol-toting, paranoid-schizophrenic father. Part two traces the young man’s misadventures after he and his blue-collar family follow Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath Trail (Route 66) from Arkansas to Southern California. It’s a feel-good glimpse of an ordinary man facing the ordinary challenges of an ordinary life. As you read, you may see yourself. And you will surely smile but may, occasionally, grimace.
Memoir story of a young Mormon man born and raised in Bible Belt Arkansas who is called to serve a 30-month mission to South America.
Like the missionaries from the play "The Book of Mormon" the young man has to not only deal with a foreign language, a different culture and customs and country in political turmoil but also how to live with a male companion that is with him 24-7, the dreaded but inevitable "Dear John" letter, and still maintain his spiritual image.
A failed regime change insurrection results in Izard County in the Florida Panhandle being done away with and annexed by peaceful neighboring Walton County. A number of the redneck insurrectionists flee to hoity-toity Destin, Florida, to avoid capture and incarceration.
Among the fugitives is a righteous young man and his illiterate parents. A subsequent encounter with a bear causes the boy, Squeaky Crawley, to get religion and become a teenage preacher and exorcist. Squeaky learns that the straight and narrow path to the promised land is difficult and not really worth it.
About fifty years ago I was a young struggling engineer working for a multi-national
architect/engineering firm in Pasadena. I had often dreamed of living and working overseas. An opportunity knocked.
My company needed someone to move to the Middle East. To Saudi Arabia. To the Rub' al Khali Desert, aka, the Empty Quarter, one of the most inhospitable deserts on Planet Earth. No one wanted to go. But I had a dream, so I went.
The five years that our growing family spent in the Muslim land of Ali Baba building a brand new city was the most trying, most frustrating, most fulfilling, most rewarding, happiest time in our lives.
“Growing Old Ain’t For Sissies!” Bette Davis said that. Maybe. But I can tell you for sure that Growing Up ain’t for sissies either.
Especially if you’re cross-eyed.
Especially if you’re puny-looking and cross-eyed.
Especially if you’re a puny, cross-eyed, penultimate white trash boy of five redneck children living in a tent in the steep hills of the John Barrow Addition outside the city limits of Little Rock, Arkansas.