“Stumpy”

Every spring on the National Mall in Washington, DC, the cherry trees bloom to the delight of millions of visitors. Some of the trees, though, because of rising waters of the Tidal Basin, decayed and died. Yet one Japanese cherry tree, though hollowed out, continued to blossom. When the National Park Service had to remove the tree in 2024 to fix the seawall, which was failing, cuttings were taken to the U.S. National Arboretum for later replanting. The famous blossoming tree even had a name.

Longtime Chicoan Karen McHenry tells the story of “Stumpy” ($19 in hardcover from Kismet Publishing), a lyrical children’s book for ages 6-10, from the tree’s perspective. The colorful illustrations by Tommy Hardman, where pink blossoms predominate, bring Stumpy to life. 

A tourist sensation during the day, as night comes Stumpy is alone with his thoughts. “It is silent now, except for the lapping of the water at the sea wall and the rattling of leftover autumn leaves twirling past. Stumpy gazes out over the Tidal Basin that has been his lifelong home and wonders what becomes of cherry trees when they are cut down. He shudders, knowing that it isn’t the chill breeze blowing around him. He was once a robust, sturdy tree. Now, he is scrawny and crooked and hollow inside.”

Yet Stumpy continues to bloom and a visiting bird calls Stumpy “the Little Cherry Tree That Could.” What’s more, says the bird, “People see you as a symbol of perseverance—because you refuse to give up. That is why they come to take your picture, and put flowers at your roots, and play music for you.” Those words “warm Stumpy’s hollow core, down to his chilly roots.”

Later a mysterious voice tells Stumpy that it’s too late for him to be moved; he must be cut down. What will happen then? The voice responds that clippings from Stumpy will be replanted: “You will live on, not only in people’s hearts, but in new trees. … The Sakura Japanese cherry blossoms are a symbol of a life well lived. And you, Stumpy, are a symbol of that, too.”

May McHenry’s pitch-perfect story tug at your heart and blossom into resilience.

“100 Years Of Ridin’ Wild! Red Bluff Round-Up, 1921-2021”

The Red Bluff Round-Up is “the largest three-day rodeo in the United States.” As Josie Smith writes, “The Round-Up is more than a rodeo. It’s a living, breathing testament to the quintessential true grit spirit of Tehama County, its sense of community, and the determined resilience of the American West.”

As memories linger after the Round-Up each April, they are added to its extraordinary history, which Smith, a board member of the Tehama County Genealogical & Historical Society, has compiled with the help of many hands. “100 Years Of Ridin’ Wild! Red Bluff Round-Up, 1921-2021” ($79.95 in large-size softcover from Chico’s Stansbury Publishing) is available at the Red Bluff Round-Up Mercantile Store, 649 Main Street, Suite 1. The store is open Tuesday through Friday from 11:00 am – 5:00 pm and Saturday from 10:00 am – 5:00 pm.

Each chapter covers a decade of the Round-Up, full of personal stories. There are hundreds of black and white and color photographs and a century of champions. “I took one year out of the picture business to go into rodeo,” team roper and actor Ben Johnson noted. “My dad was a world’s champion, so I wanted to be. I won the world’s championship in team roping (1953), but at the end of the year, I didn’t have $3. All I had was a wore-out pickup truck and a mad wife.”

Radio announcer Bob Tallman put it this way: “Pick a road, any county road. You’re going about 40 miles an hour in your pickup. At that point, jump out, and try to tackle a mailbox. That’s steer wrestling.”

It began October 6, 1921. That day, Tehama County Day, “the first day of the Red Bluff Round-Up, private businesses closed at noon so people could enjoy … the opening of a four-day rodeo program put on by the newly created Red Bluff Round-Up Association. The Red Bluff Daily News enthusiastically declared: ‘Red Bluff Rodeo Starts With A Whoop!’”

The book is a stunning achievement. 

Give the last word to bullfighter Felix Cooper, who noted in April 1974 that “If the whole world was full of rodeo people, it would be a good world.”

“The Heyday Of Willie, Duke, And Mickey: New York City Baseball’s Golden Age Amid Integration”

Robert C. Cottrell is Professor Emeritus at Chico State in History and American Studies, but he’s also a consummate baseball historian. In “The Heyday Of Willie, Duke, And Mickey: New York City Baseball’s Golden Age Amid Integration” ($38 in hardcover from Bloomsbury Academic; also for Amazon Kindle), Cottrell focuses on an unmatched era in Major League Baseball.

“At different points during the mid-1950s,” he writes, “Willie Mays, Duke Snider, and Mickey Mantle were each viewed as not only the greatest center fielder but the finest player in the major leagues, in addition to being a candidate to eclipse Babe Ruth’s single-season home run record.” The statistics are all here, but so are the stories.

“For the four years—1954-1957—featured in this book,” he adds, “Mays, Snider, and Mantle vied for supremacy among New York City center fielders as their teams strove for and reached the pinnacle of American sports at the time. Each was proclaimed, for one year at least during that critical period, the very best player in the game as he led his respective team to a World Series championship.”

The Yankees, Giants, and Dodgers  “exuded star power befitting their sporting prowess and New York City’s preeminence.” 

Yet Cottrell’s story “is also that of the game’s far too belated integration, its reticence in pushing back against the American nation’s racial divisions. The decision by some in Organized Baseball to sign Robinson, Doby, Campanella, Don Newcombe, Paige, Minnie Minoso, Irvin, Mays, Aaron, and Ernie Banks to contracts paralleled the budding civil rights struggle to rid the United States of hateful, hurtful, poisonous Jim Crow edicts and discriminatory practices.”

In fact, “only recently have Negro League games, according to MLB, been acknowledged as on par with those of the major leagues.” In postwar baseball, the Negro Leagues began to “wither,” as Cottrell writes, “tempered by the introduction of Black players into the National and American leagues….”

Cottrell also documents the painful moves of the Dodgers to Los Angeles and the Giants to San Francisco. 

All in all, it’s inside baseball, a paean of praise to a beloved game, warts and all.

“The Family Liar: A Novel”

Teri Kanefield (terikanefield.com), with a law degree from UC Berkeley and a degree in fiction writing from UC Davis, now lives in San Luis Obispo. She writes me that her “husband lived in Los Molinos. We spent lots of time in Chico because my stepdaughter was in a production of Annie at the Chico Theater Company.” All the while, for more than forty years actually, she wanted to tell a story based on her life in a horrendously dysfunctional family.

Though she changed names, “telescoped events, combined minor characters, and left out a lot,” she drew on “letters, diaries I began keeping at the age of twelve, and memory…. To borrow Emily Dickinson’s phrase, this novel is my letter to the world.” 

“The Family Liar: A Novel” ($18.99 in paperback, independently published; also for Amazon Kindle) is a kind of mystery story told by Natalie; in later life she is determined to discover the reasons her father, Jack, was mostly withdrawn and passive while his wife, Natalie’s mother Lenora, operated as a master manipulator, turning family member against family member. 

The couple married in 1959 “at United Hebrew, St. Louis’s reform temple. After the wedding, they rented a one-bedroom apartment four miles from Jack’s television repair shop.” Natalie was born a year later.

When she was eight, a game of pennies taken from her father’s piggy bank went awry, and her mother, “impatient with my explanations, said ‘I can see you are a liar, but I’m not going to spank you. Your punishment is that from now on you will be known as the family liar. We will always know who the liar is. Once a liar, always a liar.’”

The family, including siblings Carly and Teddy, moved to California when Natalie was ten. Natalie could hardly wait until she turned 18 to leave. On her own, virtually ignored by her family, which was breaking apart, Natalie contended with the nagging question: Is it all my fault? Am I bad?

The story, raw in its emotions and psychologically astute, offers a kind of answer to Natalie’s mystery and, as a result, a powerful transformation of Natalie herself and, perhaps, even the reader. 

“Author Of Creation: Free Will, The Trinity, And The Restoration Of All Things”

As Christians around the world contemplate the promise that in the resurrection of Jesus Christ on Easter morning all things will be made new, one may wonder what such an audacious claim actually means. My friend and colleague, retired Butte College philosophy instructor Ric Machuga, proposes an answer in “Author Of Creation: Free Will, The Trinity, And The Restoration Of All Things” ($34 in paperback from Cascade books; also for Amazon Kindle).

For Machuga, it’s a matter of “faith seeking understanding,” and thoughtful believers as well as others interested in the Christian story, and whether it “hangs together,” will perhaps find unexpected (and delightful) answers to some of the most perplexing questions: What is a free will? What is the soul? Who is God? What is Jesus? What is belief? With so much evil in the world, how can God be all-powerful and truly good? Who will be saved?

Though philosophically astute, the book offers a vast variety of everyday examples to make its points, drawn from tennis, biology, the lottery, and an author and the author’s book. In fact, Machuga argues that the best way to understand God is not as a “Supreme Being” (the biggest dude on the block) but rather as a divine author with creation as his “book.” 

God is like Shakespeare, and creation like Hamlet. So it’s mistaken to think of God as a Divine Craftsman within the universe, part of the cause-and-effect chain, and better to recognize that God created the universe with time, not within time. 

Shakespeare intimately knows Hamlet, but Hamlet, of course, knows nothing of Shakespeare. Similarly, humans know nothing of this unknowable God except that in the Incarnation “God (the father) writes himself (the Son) into our story and then sends the Spirit who teaches us how to read what God wrote.”

In the end Machuga proposes what he calls “trinitarian universalism,” that “this God both can and will choreograph our free choices to bring all creatures to a glorious end…. A Supreme Being can’t ensure that ‘all shall be well’ without violating human freedom.”

Easter hope, then, is a sure and certain promise.

 

“The Burning Battle: The King’s Frog Hunter Book 3”

The kingdom of Ameram, including its aging monarch, King Ahmbin, and his only child, Ekala Oleen, heir to the throne, is under siege. An evil force is at work in Ameram manifesting in the disfigured Baskin who wants nothing more than to rule from Ahmbin’s Castle Ambermal.

Baskin will stop at nothing to twist the many peoples of the kingdom and beyond to do his will. Only a small group of compatriots loyal to Ekala can offer a defense. They must try to untwist the twisted and fight with near-living swords against an enemy spawning deadly worm-snakes.

One such friend is the King’s Frog Hunter, Thalmus, “guardian of the Prophecy of Ameram” which predicts the rise of Ekala Oleen. (In Ameram, frogs are human-sized and plenty mean, but their legs are a delicacy.) 

Former Paradise resident Ken Young, now living with his wife Cindy in Idaho, brings his epic sword-and-sorcery trilogy to a conclusion in “The Burning Battle: The King’s Frog Hunter Book 3” ($18.25 in paperback, kingsfroghunter.com; also for Amazon Kindle). Book One, “The King’s Frog Hunter,” introduces Thalmus; Book Two, “Shadows Of War,” shows the Prophecy includes Boschina, the Stone Cutter’s daughter, whose father, Veracitas, carves the truth.

With cover and maps drawn by the inimitable Steve Ferchaud of Chico, and profiles of persons, animals, and locations included, the book takes Thalmus, Boschina, and others, through seemingly unending skirmishes. As Thalmus says, “There is a source stirring in the depths of Ameram that is driving this upheaval. We have felt its presence, experienced its wrath, but we have yet to find it.”

But find it they will. As battles rage in the North and South Fords of Ameram, Baskin seems always just beyond their grasp and Captain Kali, with her forces weakened, threatens to give up. But Thalmus encourages her. “There is always a way. Sometimes the answer is hidden from our sight until we venture forward.”

Then, in the most unlikely of places, the showdown with Baskin begins. A city is in flames, and the evil threatens to engulf all that is good. But for this deeply imagined story, the end, blessedly, is not yet.

“Eve And Me: The Shadow That Spans 3000 Years”

“Throughout our long history on this planet,” writes Karen Gilden in a book-length exploration of women’s history, “men and women have sought to make life easier for themselves and for the ones they loved. There is evidence that early men and women lived together happily without either being dominant.”

Then, she says, the story takes a turn: “But whenever land was procured, when trade became a way of bettering yourself, when couples were divided in their efforts, equity was lost. And slowly but inevitably the idea of power over others evolved, and centuries passed. Women were no longer equal partners in life but were subject to laws that, in some places, reduced them to little more than slaves.”

Gilden was born in Chico, attended public school in Willows, and in 1959, when she graduated from high school, enrolled at Chico State. Though a music major, she found she was more interested in travel and writing. She and husband Ray lived in France, Turkey, and Oregon (where she now resides) during their 53 years of marriage. He was a feminist before the word became popular, “a kind, intelligent, courageous man who spent much of his time in determined activism” before he passed away in 2018.

Gilden combines historical vignettes throughout the ages with a memoir of awakening to feminism in “Eve And Me: The Shadow That Spans 3000 Years” ($18.50 in paperback from Artha One Publishing). The shadow is what she calls “the mythology of Eve,” who, beguiled by the serpent in Genesis, must come under male authority. “Misogyny,” she writes, “has never needed an excuse to stick its ugly snout into women’s business….” Religious and cultural institutions have embedded the “fear and hatred of women.”

She writes of women who have made their own rules, and that gives her hope. “Eve broke the rules and paid the price” but “those cracked and disregarded rules, like broken windows, let in unfiltered light.” In the various waves of feminism in her lifetime, the shadow, here and there, is being dispelled by “light that I believe is waiting for us, but in a future only men and women together can create.”