Books Worth Reading
Back in 1928, off-planet operators were still booking lemur folk into the historic Wild West for steak dinners and trail rides, but the proposition was on shaky ground.
America’s first interstate highway had been routed straight through the Dakotas. The Lazy L Ranch, 20 miles north of Black Rock, was not as discreet a place to land spacecraft as it used to be.
Continue reading “Folksy!”
In 1955, Mom began dating Alan Maury Razovsky — a second-generation immigrant Lithuanian Jew, born 1914 in St. Louis MO, more recently from Dallas, Texas, an electrical engineer at TVA where Mom worked.
** Flashback ** There were twelve Jews at UTexas Austin in 1935, where AMR got his engineering degree.
One of them ended up working in the New York City financial district — World Bank, or maybe Agency for International Development.
Continue reading “Camera Familia — Chapter 2”
Signalman Benjamin Franklin Dyer, United States Navy, the South Pacific, circa 1944.
I have Frank Dyer’s semaphore flag, his father’s shotgun, a war trophy Japanese rifle, an engineering handbook printed in 1934.
But I never knew my natural father. He died in July 1950 when I was five months old, heart stopped by a stray current traveling between an electric stove and a washing machine, in our kitchen on Mountain View Circle in Flintstone Georgia, far from the battlefield.
Continue reading “Camera Familia — Chapter 1”
A wave of Italian emigration to Mexico in the late 1800s had left its mark on the village, particularly at the center. The church and courthouse, on opposite sides of the square, were Spanish. Everything else was Italianate except the band shelter — aluminum poles, sandbags, nylon ripstop roof, circa big-box warehouse store.
The sun descended below mountaintops, throwing shadows into valleys. Streetlamps blinked on. Shops lit signs. The town square came alive with hanging lights and illuminated fountains.
A gypsy jazz band from Hungary filed onstage; guitar, upright bass, clarinet, and a gym-bag percussionist equipped with snare drum, high-hat, washboard, block and cowbell.
Continue reading “Preview!”
Kind of. You be the judge.
John Dyer Writes 
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