Well, with only a small amount of difficulty, I finally found this blank page to write on this morning. Why can't they just put a button on the page that says, "Blank page to write on" ??

Of course, leave it to me, I've got to be different!



One of my all time favorite pet peeves are people that start out telling me , "All you gotta do is....." Yeah, right. THEY know how to do it, their kids know how to do it, and 99.999per cent of the world's population knows how to do it, but me, now that's another story. Someone out there please tell me that I'm not alone with this malady!



Once I was working a job where our vehicles were parked in a locked enclosure. The gate had just a plain old padlock on it. A co-worker and I had just gotten brand new keys issued to us for that padlock. He dropped me off at the gate to get my vehicle and for some reason, I asked him to wait and see if my key would fit the padlock. He started to argue a little with me, telling me that ALL I HAD TO DO was open the padlock, but I told him that, no, really, if anything can go wrong, it definitely will! Sure enough, the key would not open the lock, although HIS would. We compared the keys and they were identical!



And as far as computers? Well, just multiply that example about a kazillion times! Story of my life....Mr. Murphy, of Murphy's Law fame, ain't got nuttin' on me!



Onward and upward....



Today, groundhog's day, is somewhat different for me than for most folks. It is my Dad's birthday. He would have been 95 years old today, but he passed in 1995 at the age of 81. Now THERE'S a guy that could tell a story! He lived thru the years of WWI, the Depression, WWII, Korea, and Viet Nam, although he was never in the military. However, he raised 7 kids to adulthood before he died. With a 4th grade education obtained in a one room country schoolhouse in Missouri, he did pretty well. He was one of the great generation, they call it nowadays. He would have just called it trying to make a living.



But the way he made a living sometimes made for some great stories....like his riding freight trains during the depression, his association with infamous outlaws like Bonnie and Clyde, and Pretty Boy Floyd, and his varied occupations while coming to maturity. Fiction? Partly, maybe, we all know how storytellers like to embellish things, but somewhat documented as well. But that's another story in itself.



He always told a story about two not very well known outlaws in S.E. Missouri back in the late 20's and early 30's. Their names were Harry and Jennings Young. They lived on a farm just outside Republic, Missouri, near a small community named Brookline Station, apparently named for the railroad station located there.



Anyway, my dad lived on a farm, the land of which backed up to the Youngs' farm. These two brothers had a younger sister named Vinita, who my dad was sort of "sweet on". They would walk across each other's fields to visit and being neighbors, Dad knew all about Harry's and Jennings' criminal activity.



They were car thieves, and later, killers. They would steal a car in or around Springfield, drive it to their farm, paint it, and drive it to Texas and sell it down there. Of course, to get home, they'd steal a car down there and drive it back to Missouri, where it would be painted, or chopped down, and they'd sell it. This went along all right until one night in 1929....



One of the boys, and I don't remember which, got drunk, and apparently a little disorderly as well, as drunken people are sometimes wont to do, in Republic. The local law officer, a gentleman named, "Noe", in attempt to arrest the young miscreant, was killed. The young men both fled to Texas, unknown to the local Missouri authorities.



A couple of years went by. Nothing was heard of Harry or Jennings until around New Year's day, in 1932. Vinita and her sister were seen in town trying to sell a car to a car dealer. The dealer became suspicous because the car had no title, and the police were called. Vinita and her sister were arrested and held so that they couldn't go back to the farm and alert their brothers that the law was on the way.



The police, believing that the brothers may be at the farm, went, enmasse, out to investigate. My dad told me that, thank God, he was in town that afternoon.



Out of, I believe, eleven officers, at least 6 of them were killed in what came to be known as the "Brookline Massacre", which, until September 11, 2001, was the deadliest incident for all of law enforcement in U.S. history.



The brothers both escaped. They were later killed in Houston, Texas, in a standoff with police.



Now, I said all that to come back to a phrase I used before my story started----"somewhat documented". I had heard this story all my life from my dad, and, yes, I'm condensing it a lot, but I had never heard of it in any history books or news accounts or anything in print. I just wrote it off as an old family story with little interest to anyone but my dad.



Then, I read a book by a Tulsa, Oklahoma, based author named Michael Wallis...great author, great historian and a great guy. The book "Pretty Boy, the Life and Time of Charles Arthur Floyd", just barely touched on, but gave a small account, of the Brookline massacre. Like I said, I'd never seen it in print before, but there it was, almost verbatim to the way my dad had told it all those years! My Dad's version never changed, either, by the way.



But the real kicker, the thing that nailed it, so to speak, was the bibliography. Mr. Wallis, in the bibliography, stated that he had actually interviewed Vinita, "now in her 80's", it said. This was before my Dad had died, but I hadn't read the book until several years after it was published.



So, "somewhat documented"? Of course, being the history buff I am, I had to "look it up" and, sho'nuff, the Brookline Massacre is very, very well documented, especially in Greene County, Missouri.



As for my dad's association with it? You be the judge...

Getting Started

Well, this is my very first blog and was inspired to set this up by a lady who has a website called Elderstoryteller or something like that. I posted a small story on there and she wanted to know where I blogged. Feeling somewhat computer challenged anyway, I thought that I'd just do some diggin' and find out what this is all about......so..........

Google to the rescue!! taaDaa! Here I am, with many thanks to Ronni Bennett, the lady mentioned above!

I've noticed in the past that my writing skills have improved whenever I get on a writing kick and actually put my butt in a chair and write. Duh! Makes sense to me.

That last line is not mine.....I, once again, have to give the credit to a wonderful vo-tech creative writing teacher that I met about a year ago, who gave it to the class. She said simply that if you want to write, you have to just sit your butt in a chair and write--simple as that. I did so for about the length of the class and maybe a little longer until other things in my life overlapped my writing time and my interest waned. Of course when that happens, one looks at the clock, then the calendar, and then a month, or two, or six has gone by and no writing. Uh, oh!! All to do over again!

Maybe, I hope, that doing it on a computer instead of a spiral notebook, and having a blog to be responsible to, will inspire me to keep it up.

I made the statement in that creative writing class I took a year or so ago, that I wanted to write a novel. Skip the short stories, magazine articles, and all that and get right to the novel. Surely fortune and fame would await me......I could see it all: Me hosting book signings, being overwhelmed with speaking engagements, my name becoming a household word......I was beginning to feel like the character "Ralphie" in the movie, "A Christmas Story"!

And then, as they say on virtually all the infomercials, "But Wait!"

This novel writing stuff is getting a little harder than I thought. Backdrops, characters, plot, dialogue, suspense, where does it all ever end? Not to mention the fact that I seem to have a bit of difficulty bringing all that and more, together! Thank God there are more styles of writing than just doing novels!

Oh, well, maybe someday when I'm old.....

But in the meantime, there are blogs!! Yea!!!

So maybe, as the very honorable H. Bogart said to Claude Rains in "CasaBlanca", just maybe,
"this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."

Sure hope so!