This series is appropriate for both young adults (ages 18+) and older readers alike. The history of the Panhandle serves as the backdrop of each book and is weaved into the character development and the story itself, so you are learning pieces of Texas Panhandle history while reading a fun and engaging book.
These books are family sagas and multigenerational – each story spanning across several generations from grandparents to parents to children and grandchildren. They tackle tough subjects like class differences, interracial relationships, PTSD, alcoholism, and family loss. Even with these tough topics, each book is still rich with humor, love, and personal growth. And one thing is known from the beginning – these stories all have a happy ending.
All in being an author
GLENRIO, book 9 of my series, “Once Upon a Time in the Texas Panhandle,” is a novel talking about warrior trauma, romance, and love. Yes, it is possible to escape the remembered horrors of war. Both the warriors who survive and the people waiting when they come home may be able to put the thousand pieces back together again—through unexpected romance and healing love.
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SUSANNA’S BALLAD, Volume 8 in my series, Once Upon a Time in the Texas Panhandle, tells the story of an abandoned child: Susanna. She was a “foundling,” an infant left on a porch by a destitute single mother, who hoped that whosoever found the tiny and sickly baby girl would have mercy, accept her as a gift, love her and raise her as their own. Susanna’s story is a “ballad,” because, as Webster’s says, it is “a slow or romantic dance song,” with a happy ending.
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As an OWG (Old White Guy) who grew up in the Texas Panhandle in the 1940s and 1950s—before the Civil Rights era, I find it hard to understand antiracism. I’ve always insisted that I’m not racist. But Black folks tell me, “That’s not enough. You have to be antiracist.” In part, I wrote my novel, Colleen and the Statue, to try to understand what Confederate statues mean to African Americans, and thereby understand racism and antiracism.
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My novel, Colleen and the Statue, is a love story. However, it also deals with the question, “Is there such a thing as ‘systemic racism,’ or are there only individual racists?” This is a heavy issue—very controversial at this time in American society. The Confederate soldier in my novel—is he only responsible for his actions as an individual who was fighting to preserve his family’s cotton plantation, or is he answerable as a soldier in an army whose ‘Cause’ was to preserve the Southern Way of Life that was based on slavery? A heavy issue indeed. … Bear with me.
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My novel, Colleen and the Statue, is a love story. However, it also answers the question, “What do we do about this Confederate statue?” That is, for this particular statue standing in Central Park of Mackenzie, Texas, my story gives a unique solution. Read the novel to know what it is. Personally, I think that each statue has its own story and we should judge it accordingly, asking: “Who put it up? Where was it put? What did it symbolize when it was erected? What does it symbolize now? Should we distinguish between the historical person and what that person’s statue stands for today?” I think this last question is the most important one.
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Colleen and the Statue is Volume 5 in my series, Once Upon a Time in the Texas Panhandle. At first I considered making the title, Colleen and the “Confederate” Statue. However, that would have limited what I wanted to ask to the controversy de jour: “Should statues of Confederate generals and personages be removed?” I wanted to address a larger question: “Should the deceased ‘Great Men’ of history who committed obvious atrocities be given one last chance to repent?”
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Imagine this: It is July 2020. A protest march is taking place in front of the arrival terminal of John Wayne Airport in Orange County, California. Dozens of protesters are marching up and down, loudly demanding the removal of the 9-foot bronze statue of “the Duke” from main lobby of the airport. They are university students—mostly African American. A staff writer with the Los Angeles Times is covering the demonstration. He notices that one of the protesters is a petite young Vietnamese woman, who is out of place among the boisterous Black demonstrators. She is silent and not moving from her spot directly in front of the entrance doors, and she is holding a modest sign printed in calligraphy: REMOVE A MONSTER.
Readers of the novels of my series, Once Upon a Time in the Texas Panhandle, sometimes think they recognize people they know, places they’ve been to, or events they have witnessed. They ask me, “Is that So-and-So?” Or they declare, “That must be Such-and-Such a store in Such-and-Such a town.” Or they say, “I’m wondering if there was someone who stimulated your thinking about This-and-That.” Or they question, “Does that culture really allow pre-marital sex in the parents’ home—like you say in your book?”
I must remind these readers, “It’s just a story.” I originally set out to write an updated history of Amarillo and the Texas Panhandle, with pages and pages of footnotes to document the objective facts of my objective history.
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In these stories, healing comes from falling in love with a compassionate and understanding young lady, who helps her lover carry his burden. The pain and bad memories will never go away. But love heals. And bearing the burden together, the couple will be able to live happily ever after.
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Once upon a time, the Comanche people ruled the Texas Panhandle. Then they were disappeared and erased—saw both genocide and “cultural genocide.” Tammie’s Destiny, Volume 6 of my historical romance series, tells the coming-of-age story and forbidden love between an adolescent Comanche girl from a reservation in New Mexico and a young man from a Texas millionaire ranching family. The tale’s background is the generational hatred between Texans and Native Americans, seemingly making such a relationship impossible.
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If I had to pick one of my novels to submit as a movie script, it would be Colleen and the Statue. The movie’s opening scene would be the novel’s Chapter 20, when Sgt. Nicholas Ruff, U.S.A. comes for his family in August 1865, after witnessing Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. In war movies, the most emotional scene is when the soldier everyone thought had died, returns. Usually, this happens at the end. I would put it at the beginning, to set my story’s emotional tone. I would show Sgt. Ruff first slowly riding through his hometown in Nacogdoches County, Texas, accompanied by a platoon of Yankee cavalry, then going past the Ruff plantation’s Big House, and finally going out to the cabins where he had grown up as a slave. Along the way, I would zoom in on the faces of the spectators, to show their varied reactions to the totally unexpected return.
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As I said, Jim Crow was not real for me. I grew up in Amarillo’s white ghetto, totally unaware of how “coloreds” lived their lives in N-town on the other side of the tracks. I had no idea of the unofficial brutal system that completely controlled their lives, and of the horrific consequences for even the slightest violation of Jim Crow’s unwritten laws: disappearance, lynching, indefinite imprisonment, beatings, castration, gang-rape, black-listing from employment, burning down of houses, and more—much more. Even today, I find it hard to believe that this was happening in the city and the region where I grew up. … But I’m not a black, so “they didn’t come for me.”
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The background of my latest romance novel, Colleen and the Statue, is the on-going controversy over what to do with Confederate statues scattered ubiquitously across the states of the Old South, including Texas. For example, is the statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee in a park a symbol of States’ Rights and the Southern Way of Life, or rather is it a symbol of slavery and white supremacy? If the former, it should stay; if the latter, it has to go somewhere else—perhaps to a museum.
It is instructive to compare this American controversy with a similar, recent controversy in Spain over what to do with the to-be-exhumed body of Gen. Francisco Franco. Was he a hero, who saved Spain from Communism and restored the Catholic Church to its proper place or rather was he a brutal dictator, who fought only to acquire power and money? How you answer that question about Franco will determine what you do with his body.
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I recently had a phone conversation with a good friend—a lady in her mid-70s—who lives in Fairfax County, Virginia. She’s perhaps typical of older white Southerners, whose grandfathers served under Gen. Robert E. Lee in the Army of Northern Virginia. My friend said that although she deplored the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, which resulted from the “Unite the Right” rally of August 11-12, 2017, she agreed with the rally organizers that the City Council’s order to remove the statue of Robert E. Lee from Charlottesville’s Lee Park was a mistake. “You can’t rewrite history!” my friend emphatically insisted over and over again, during our long discussion about removal of this and other Confederate statues—including that of a Confederate soldier in Ellwood Park, Amarillo, Texas, where I grew up.
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I think about that border over there, first of all, because I’m Irish on my mother’s side and Scotch-Irish on my father’s side. That is, my mother’s Catholic McDade family came from what is now the Irish Republic; and my father’s Protestant Nicholl family came from what is now Northern Ireland. And secondly, I think about it because Volume 5 of my Once Upon a Time in the Texas Panhandle series—a romance novel entitled, Colleen and the Statue—has as its main female character an Irish teenager who has immigrated to Texas, in great part, as a political refugee, leaving her homeland to get away from “ethno-nationalist” violence.
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I thought of my dad yelling at me, “No more of these damn comic books!” when I read the opinion piece, “The death of serious reading among teens,” by high school and college social science teacher, Jeremy Adams (Los Angeles Times, August 23, 2019). Having published four novels and with a fifth soon to be published, I’ve yet to find a young person who has expressed interest in reading my stories, even though they’re “coming-of-age” romances, and are set in West Texas cowboy country—an exotic region, which I thought would excite young folks. It turns out that it’s the older crowd—well over thirty—who are reading my Once Upon a Time in the Texas Panhandle series.
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If you want to send somebody “back,” you need to ask, “Back to what?” The next volume of my series, Once Upon a Time in the Texas Panhandle, is entitled, Colleen and the Statue. In the first chapter, teenaged Colleen is about to leave Ireland. In the second chapter, she is in Mackenzie, Texas—my invented town. It’s the 1950s, and she’s a young and single Irish Catholic—a religious and ethnic minority. She often hears Protestant “Anglos” whispering, “Why doesn’t she go back? We should send her back. We don’t need her kind here.”
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In recent times, starting in the mid-1920s and the 1930s, white supremacist groups, such as the modern KKK, have claimed the statues as their own—as heroic defenders of the white race. The original meaning has been co-opted, so that now—today—in the first decades of the Twenty-First Century, long after the last Confederate veteran has died, and after almost all the children of Confederate soldiers have passed away, the racists, the white supremacists, Aryan Nation members, neo-Nazis, neo-KKK members, and the like, have made the statues of the Confederate soldier into symbols of the so-called “movement” to defend and preserve the white race.
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Seventy-five years ago—on January 25, 1944—Army Air Forces 2nd Lt. Toney W. Gochnauer of Amarillo, Texas, disappeared. At the time twenty-four-years-old, he was co-pilot of a B24J Liberator bomber, which had departed from Kunming, China on a supply mission over the Himalayas to Chabau, India. The aircraft, with its crew of eight and four passengers, failed to arrive. On January 26, 1946, the lieutenant was declared, “Dead while Missing.” On May 13, 2019, his remains, which were found in wreckage near a rural village in eastern India, were identified, and he was declared, “Accounted For.”
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It is inconceivable to me that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott would do what California Gov. Gavin Newsom just did: issue by executive order an official apology on behalf of the citizens of California for a history of “violence, maltreatment and neglect” against Native Americans. (Los Angeles Times, June 19, 2019.) It is also inconceivable to me that the Amarillo Globe-News would do what the Los Angeles Times just did: publish an editorial challenging the City Council to likewise issue an apology for its complicity in the genocide to which Gov. Newsom refers in the text of his apology. (Los Angeles Times, June 21, 2019.)
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