This is a fact-based fiction story of Arthur who grew up in Marinette, Wisconsin. A small logging town on the shores of Lake Michigan. As a young boy, he worked in these lumbermills.
Then as a young teen, he went down to Milwaukee to work in the steel mills. In his mid-tense, he and a friend decided to take a train to Montana and to the wheat field. But the drought there dried up the crops, so on the advice of people on the street, he decided to go up to Regina, Canada to find work in the wheat fields. The adventures he had there would remain with him, for the rest of his life.
From Moose Jaw, Canada he took another train across Canada then dropping down into Portland, Oregon. From there he took a paddle boat up the Mighty Columbia River to a town called the The Dalles, Oregon. All this before he was drafted as a very young 20-year-old into the WW1 boot camp. From there he spent 7 years in Alaska, then coming back to the Columbia River region and there he found love. Read the authentic letters of a friendship that blossomed into love and the everyday life of Art and his girlfriend Elsie in 1927 & 1928.
I grew up on my grandparent's farm just outside the small town of Troy, Idaho. I graduated from high school and married my high school sweetheart. We had 3 kids, all of whom had grown into beautiful and thriving adults. After 25 years of marriage, we decided to divorce.
It was during the marriage that I met Art when he was 95 years old. We became friends and he loved watching my small children play. After the divorce, I attended college for the first time in my life. I loved all my classes, especially my English classes. It was during those years of college that the love letters written by Art and Elsie were discovered in a long-forgotten dresser drawer. By this time, Art had passed away at the age of 102 and a half years.
I was given permission to write his story into a book. Their letters were the foundation of the book, but then I also found many cassette tapes, that Art spoke into on his 100th birthday, telling of his early life's story. In addition to the letters and tapes, there were 3 different newspaper articles written about his life. My theory was if Art wrote, spoke, or was written about something in his life, that gave me permission to research the facts and put them in the book.
I paid a professional illustrator to draw 17 illustrations from the stories that Art told of his life. There are gaps in his stories, so I tried to fill in the gaps as best as I could. thus, making this book fiction based on facts. I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I had fun putting it together.
