“Cruisin’ The ‘Nade: Coming Of Age In The 1960s In Northern California”

For longtime Chicoan Michael Halldorson, “my ‘coming of age’ began in September 1959 when I, and other Chico Junior High School graduates, moved on to Chico High School to begin our sophomore year. It ended in June 1969 upon my graduation from Chico State College.”

In between, “a three-year hitch in the Navy in the mid-1960s, serving aboard a destroyer off the coast of the Republic of Vietnam, marked an interlude in my studies at Chico State.” He adds, in a winsome memoir, that “one of my first priorities upon returning to college was to learn how to do all the new dances with all the bitchin’ moves that had come out while I was overseas. This would also be, I believed, a good way to get a girl.”

Though he played sports at Chico High, he mostly focused on “cars and girls”; his co-author, prolific Chico writer David Bruhn, supplies background material on some of the great athletes who emerged (like MLB pitcher Nelson Briles) and offers historical insight. Together they make “Cruisin’ The ‘Nade: Coming Of Age In The 1960s In Northern California” ($23 in paperback from Heritage Books) a must-read for those who want to know what makes Chico Chico.

Chapters cover the explosion in 1962 which “destroyed a Titan 1 missile and caused extensive damage to its silo … north of the Chico Municipal Airport.” 

There were the hot rod races by high school kids on the Esplanade. Halldorson and others “tooled around,” “honking at girls and honking at friends. Once downtown, the typical route was to start by the college and cruise out to the A&W Drive-in and back.” His first car “was a 4-door 1953 Chevy.” His second: “a 1950 Olds painted metallic blue. I got in in 1963….” 

The book covers the Chico draft protests in 1968, concerts at Chico State (Lou Rawls, The Grateful Dead, Johnny Cash), and more.

Halldorson studied art at Chico State under world-renowned printmaker Janet Turner; spent time in the Netherlands with M.C. Escher; and was named a Chico State University distinguished alum in 2019. 

Took some time, but he “came of age.”

“Midstream: A Life Remade In 50 Swims”

Sacramento writer Kate Washington (kawashington.com), who grew up in Chico, detailed in her book “Already Toast: Caregiving And Burnout In America” how suddenly, unexpectedly, she had to become the caregiver for her husband Brad, whom she married in 1999, after he faced aggressive lymphoma in 2014; in his mid-40s, he needed a stem-cell transplant. 

Now the rest of the story. Though Brad survived, the marriage did not. A year-and-a-half away from her 50th birthday, Washington writes that her life “felt constrained and constraining, dull and joyless, full of doing for others while neglecting myself.”

So she “hatched the idea for what I came to call the 50 Dunks Project. My plan was to get in fifty different natural bodies of water before turning fifty in October 2022…. However I got in the water, I hoped it might dissolve my midlife stagnation.” The liberation process is told in “Midstream: A Life Remade In 50 Swims” ($27.95 in hardcover from Beacon Press; also for Amazon Kindle).

Both Kate and Brad were PhD’s with English degrees and they had two daughters. Kate was devastated when her mother died by suicide, and Brad’s new job meant Kate had to take on childcare responsibilities. And Brad’s cancer did not so much as change everything, but revealed a dark truth: “Our tendrils were diverging well before Brad was sick, with separate interests and the pull of careers, but afterward it was like we were strangers.”

During the Dunk Project (and counseling) it became clear the marriage wouldn’t survive. All 50 swims are listed, though only some key encounters with the freeing waters are given in the chapters. Dunks include Salmon Hole in Upper Bidwell Park; Bear Hole; One Mile; Butte Creek. “I had become embodied again,” she writes, “after years of alienation.”

With great insight, Washington confronts “my fears and dissatisfaction with myself and my choices.”

Kate Washington is Nancy Wiegman’s guest on Nancy’s Bookshelf on Northstate Public Radio, mynspr.org, Wednesday, July 15 at 10:00 a.m., repeated Sunday, July 19 at 8:00 p.m. The Bookstore in downtown Chico will be holding a creekside book launch party and author signing July 23; contact the store for details. 

“Ode To Hemingway: Three Stories And Ten Poems”

Ernest Hemingway, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954, made his literary debut in 1923 with “Three Stories And Ten Poems.” He was unable to accept the Prize in person after surviving “two plane crashes in two days in the elephant country of Uganda,” resulting in a concussion from which he never recovered.

Retired Chico State business professor Curt DeBerg (curtdeberg.com) has spent decades on Hemingway’s trail, visiting the writer’s haunts around the world, detailing his many demons. Now living in Hendaye, France, DeBerg, 70, suffered his own plane crash in 2016: “I was pulled from the wreckage with a leg that would never fully heal.”

Rather than a memoir of the crash, DeBerg has crafted what he calls “a ledger of survival,” an homage to his favorite writer. “Ode To Hemingway: Three Stories And Ten Poems” (available in Amazon Kindle format from Paul Adrian Books), with sketches by Tony Ridgway, expresses not disillusionment with a world war (as Hemingway did), but rather with “the polarization of modern political rifts and the slow, grinding recovery of the body.”

The stories are very short, dark, death imbued. In an Interlude DeBerg defends his love of Hemingway’s writing, despite what critics might say (“Don’t let others tell you what should make you happy”). The poems (with explanatory notes) evoke emotional moments in DeBerg’s life, like when his brother, who he felt “small” around, showed up for him after his plane crash, which “changed something between us.” 

“Then the sky fell./ The plane went down in a Polish field./ The twisting carnage of the cockpit/ Broke the bones but hardened the spirit./ And you were there….”

In 2021, DeBerg “discovered that a Franciscan sister had preserved a copy of ‘The Old Man and the Sea’ bearing what are believed to be the last words Hemingway ever wrote—a personal inscription to the nun who cared for him in his final months.” DeBerg carried the book to the Nobel Prize Museum in Stockholm “and spoke at the ceremony” covered by the New York Times.

Two lives, intertwined, but with a significant difference. DeBerg’s “Ode” refuses to follow the way of despair.

“Three Fire Mountains: Stories Of Wildfire And Recovery In California”

“Wildfire traumatizes a community all at once,” writes Katie Simmons, former Disaster Recovery Director for the Town of Paradise, “leaving everybody reeling with shock and dealing with one another and themselves in a heightened emotional state.”

Now Deputy Chief Administrative Officer for Butte County, Simmons was part of the first Policy Fellowship with Stanford University Impact Labs over the course of two years, beginning in late 2023. “When I started the fellowship,” she says, “I didn’t plan to talk about suicidal thoughts, or my dad’s death,” or her chronic illness. Instead, “I planned to talk about fire through the narrow lens of data…. As it turns out, reckoning with fire is indistinguishable from reckoning with life, because fire touches every part of life.”

Simmons reckons with both fire and life in her extraordinary memoir, named for a Camp Fire memory her youngest daughter had as she saw it from Chico. “Three Fire Mountains: Stories Of Wildfire And Recovery In California” ($37.99 in hardcover from Springer) is a heart-rending account of recovery’s messy reality, told through individual stories as well as from a professional vantage point that contends with agencies at odds with each other.

Simmons presents a recovery triage tool, a host of questions dealing with the aftermath of a fire both for individuals and the community. She feels rage when Federal and State agencies don’t seem to understand the vast difference between urban and rural recovery (and what does recovery even mean?) and intact and destroyed communities.

There are some victories. “For both the Camp Fire and North Complex fire,” she writes, “I worked with staff to build cases for time extensions on FEMA Individual Assistance and we were successful.”

When the fire is out, “except for the destruction it has wrought and the landscape it has altered, the sky turns blue again and life goes on.” But trauma remains. “Fire recovery is like putting together a delicate puzzle wearing a blindfold and heavy gloves.”

“As we await the start of another fire year I wonder … how do we keep going?” We keep going, she writes, because of love. “My definition of recovery is love.”

“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.” 

“Outer Space Is Closer Than Antarctica: And Other Things I Learned While Falling In Love At The Bottom Of The World”

In four work trips to Antarctica’s McMurdo Station from 1999 through 2007, Chicoan Michelle Ott’s life changed dramatically. In Antarctica, she writes, “I have experienced the sadness of a long-distance breakup. I have scrubbed dirty pots and pans for ten hours a day, and I have witnessed the bright-green aurora australis at -30 degrees Fahrenheit; it was so beautiful I cried, and my tears froze my eyes shut. I have had my breath knocked out of me by a gust of Antarctic wind.”

A metaphorical wind knocked her breathless when in 2004 she met Sean, also bound for Antarctica via Christchurch, New Zealand. Sadly saying goodbye to her New York boyfriend, Ott found love at McMurdo, and the story is told in her unconventional memoir, “Outer Space Is Closer Than Antarctica: And Other Things I Learned While Falling In Love At The Bottom Of The World” ($19.95 in hardcover from Chronicle Books; also for Amazon Kindle).

It’s unconventional because it blends the author’s inner exploration with the science she learned (and experienced) at McMurdo. In her time there she worked as a dining attendant and baker (included is the round cookie recipe for 1000 people; think 10 pounds of butter and 40 eggs), later as a janitor, and still later as Administrative Coordinator in the galley.

Antarctica—coldest place, windiest, driest. And then there’s “the Kármán line,” the place “where outer space begins, 62 miles above sea level; it is the border between earth’s atmosphere and outer space. When we cross this threshold, we leave the conditions of aeronautics and enter the conditions of astronautics. We can no longer fly airplanes; we need spaceships.” Ott notes the distance from Chico to McMurdo Station “is 8,496 miles. This means that outer space is closer than Antarctica!”

Ott’s whimsical drawings make the science accessible as she describes katabatic winds, the polar vortex, an ice cube neutrino detector, and the thirteen pieces of clothing needed for extreme cold.

Her 47-year-old self looks back two decades, “yearning for a different feeling…. That which I thought was far away has arrived.”

“Why Am I Still A Christian?”

The Advent season, with its glitter and good tidings, has a dark side. The promised one who will loosen the stranglehold of death has not yet come. “In 2025,” writes Ricky Hayes in his spiritual autobiography, “the headlines have been littered with assassinations and murders. I didn’t know the victims, but I know they didn’t deserve it. That’s the sickening part about Death: it doesn’t discriminate, it doesn’t ask, it doesn’t care. All it does is take.”

Hayes, born and raised in Chico, found Death “would pop up again and again—sometimes as a shadow in the corner of my room, sometimes in hospital corridors, sometimes in the faces of people I loved.” So, he asks, why did God “let me carry this fear like an uninvited passenger for my entire life?”

Hayes explores that question (and many more) in “Why Am I Still A Christian?” ($13.99 in paperback from Publishers Brew, publishersbrew.com; also for Amazon Kindle). The story is “messy, it’s raw, it’s sometimes irreverent, but it’s real.”

The first half of the book is Hayes’ spiritual odyssey, and it’s messy indeed. “It’s about how grief, doubt, porn, legalism, cult-like religion, and plain old despair nearly convinced me to leave Christianity behind. But it’s also about how, through all that chaos, Jesus kept showing up. Not the Jesus of fire insurance, shame, and performance, but the Jesus who refuses to let go, even when you’re screaming at Him.”

The second half focuses on specific theological issues, with a biting critique of the modern American church which all too often, Hayes writes, suggests “salvation depends on our performance instead of Christ’s finished work.” In fact, “what I have learned most of my life from Christians, both Fundamentalist and Charismatic, is how not be be a Christian…. We’re supposed to influence people to be reconciled to God by loving one another, not by fighting a cultural war.”

The promise has been fulfilled: “The cross is about God revealing the greatest love one can give through the light of the world, Jesus Christ. Whatever blackness hinders our souls from seeing his beauty, God will shine through if we desire him to do so.”

“Father And Son: The Hitler Loyalist And The US Airman”

Mary Jensen, a “recovering grants writer” and Chico State Professor Emerita, told the story of her marriage in “Rudy’s Rules For Travel: Life Lessons From Around The Globe.” Her late husband had flown US Air Force bombing missions over his homeland in Germany.

In 1999, faced with difficult medical news, they became caregivers for each other, Rudy writing his long-delayed memoir and Mary acting as editor. “Rudy wrote quite unceasingly,” Mary recalls, “easily capturing the perspectives and voices of himself as toddler, adolescent, and young man, as each took his turn living with Papa.” 

The beautifully crafted story is told in “Father And Son: The Hitler Loyalist And The US Airman” ($16.95 in paperback from Astoria Books; also for Amazon Kindle) by Rudy Jensen with Mary K. Jensen. 

“Papa was 100 percent Danish but a German loyalist,” Rudy writes, “who had moved heaven and earth (and a pregnant wife) to have his son born a German citizen.” Born May 17, 1921 in Hamburg to Papa’s wife, Francisca, Rudy lost his birth mother to gallbladder disease just after turning two.

Papa (a seafarer) and Rudy settled in Washington, DC; eventually there was a new “Mutti” (“‘Mutti’ is a German endearment, much as ‘Mommy’ is in English”), Anna Weber, “a southern German whose family had been deeply scarred by World War I.” Papa became a waiter at the fancy Willard Hotel restaurant, which catered to official Washington, and there he met J. Edgar Hoover and the two became friends.

Rudy wanted to become an American citizen and Papa was adamant that the German occupation of France was “positive progress” (it took a long time for Papa to accept the truth). With American’s entry into the war in 1941, “overnight the entire Jensen family became designated ‘Enemy Aliens.’”

“War does strange things,” Rudy writes; in 1943 he began “a 27-month journey … being drafted into the American Army Air Force, not only as a German citizen, but also as an Enemy Alien.” (He soon became an American citizen.) The bombing missions he describes are deeply poignant. 

And yet Rudy survived. His subsequent decades with Mary testify to an extraordinary life.

“Magical Realism: Essays On Music, Memory, Fantasy, And Borders”

LA-based author Vanessa Angélica Villarreal joined a group of students at Butte College last week to present “Speculative Writing as Time-Travel to Heal the Present.” Sponsored by the Puente Project, helping “educationally under-served students enroll in four-year colleges and universities,” Villarreal used “Back to the Future” as a creative way to change the past to right the future despite the bullying Biffs of the world.

Villarreal expands on this in her “Magical Realism: Essays On Music, Memory, Fantasy, And Borders” ($29 in hardcover from Tiny Reparations Books; also in ebook and audiobook versions), longlisted for the National Book Award. 

She was born in the Rio Grande Valley to Mexican immigrants. The essays in the book trace her journey through challenging family dynamics, taking a job cleaning houses, marrying an unfaithful man, birthing a son, enduring a messy divorce, and eventually earning a doctorate at USC. 

Fantasy (which often in its world-building looks back at some golden age sullied by evil) and science fiction (which is forward-looking but tends to focus on apocalypse) helped her make sense of the abuses she endured. 

“Fantasy is a space safer than memory to process trauma and escape abuse into a world where the helpless are empowered by magic, friends are found among outcasts and survivors, and a hero will defend you with his sword until you find the hero was you all along.”

In nuanced analyses, Villarreal pulls back the curtain on the racialized and colonial stereotypes in much popular fantasy and science fiction, especially video games. And yet:

“Perhaps I am so drawn to fantasy because it is also the space of immigrant dreaming, the projection of the self into an impossible imaginary to bear the reality of the present one. Its central question: Forces larger than myself have estranged me from my home; what can displacement into new lands make capable in me?”

Readers will see the answer in this powerful memoir.

News: Brenda M. Lane, Napa author and contributor to “Chicken Soup for the Soul: Hope, Faith & Miracles,” will be signing her books at Barnes & Noble in Chico on Friday, October 24, from 11:00 am – 4:00 pm. 

“HIDEAWAYS: Within And Outside My Polygamist Family”

A Chico resident for almost half a century, Jerry Allred retired from a long career in education. His childhood, it turns out, was also an education—in hiding.

That’s because his father (born in 1906, murdered in 1977), was part of a fundamentalist Mormon group. “The year I was three, Daddy violated parole by moving our families to Colonia LeBaron, a ranch set in northern Mexico’s Chihuahua desert, to start a colony for Saints who were violating the laws of the land by living God’s holiest law of Celestial Plural Marriage.”

“HIDEAWAYS: Within And Outside My Polygamist Family” ($20 in paperback, independently published; also for Amazon Kindle) contains nineteen “creative nonfiction” stories imagined from family recollections, journals, and research. So while individual characters are not strictly historical, the fact remains: 

“Being the family’s eighth son and fourteenth child, I am one of forty-eight children born to Dr. Rulon Clark Allred and his seven wives. My mother, Mabel Finlayson Allred, was his fourth plural wife, and her identical twin, Melba, was also her sister-wife.”

Since the LDS Church had outlawed plural marriage in 1890 (and reinterpreted the 132nd Section of the Doctrine and Covenants), family members frequently hid, devised cover stories, and moved to places where they hoped to establish sanctuaries for persecuted Saints (Mexico; Elko, Nevada; Colorado), all to escape Church officials and the FBI vice squad.

Jerry’s coming into the world was a difficult birth indeed but Rulon’s ministrations (he delivered thousands of babies in his lifetime) saved both mother and child. Allred writes with great sympathy toward his father. “Daddy was convinced that his faith should be, and eventually would be, true for every person who ever lived, or else.”

Yet in his teen years Jerry departed from his father’s convictions. He was learning about evolution and could no longer believe as his father did that God had created everything “all at once” a few thousand years ago. With compassion and deeply felt emotion, Allred takes the reader into daily life and painful separations, an inseparable part of his own journey.

An interview with Allred, conducted by Nancy Wiegman for Nancy’s Bookshelf on mynspr.org, is available at tinyurl.com/2rnd4d79.

“Our Marriage: Sixty-Four Years And Counting: A Testament To Enduring Love”

Retired Butte County educators Jim and Nancy Barnes now live near Paradise Lake, the same home as Jim’s “Little Mouse” creation (www.LittleMouseTheMouse.com). Jim “is eighty-six years old,” Nancy writes. “I am eighty-three…. We have been married for over sixty-four years, and we love each other more now than when we courted, when we were newlyweds, and when we celebrated our twenty-fifth and fiftieth anniversaries where we renewed our vows.”

“Our Marriage: Sixty-Four Years And Counting: A Testament To Enduring Love” ($10.99 in paperback, independently published; also for Amazon Kindle), by Nancy Marie Barnes, is not a guidebook for others but rather a celebration of God’s goodness. 

In over seventy prayerful reflections, Nancy writes “as a God-fearing woman, believing in holding good morals and values and desiring to be the very best person possible—who loves the Lord with all her heart, mind, and soul—and who is incredibly in love” with Jim. (The two were married at St. Thomas More Catholic Church in Paradise.)

Marriage is a sacred vow. “We knew we were both humans with faults,” Nancy writes, “and when things were going bad, we’d hang in there and work through any issues. In any disagreements we addressed the problem, not with the attitude of who was right and who was wrong but the best way to solve or address it.”

“The moment I recognize that Jim is upset, it does not matter why. I ask, ‘Do you want to be helped, heard, or hugged?’ I may not word it just that way, but I know the gist.”

Not all their dreams came true. “Although we didn’t have children (not by our choice), we scored well in … serving children and parents in the elementary school setting. Actually, both of our careers and our marriage made good our commitment to ‘spiritual good.’”

There are special moments, “sitting close, kissing, hugging, listening to soft instrumental music, or quietly listening to the crackling fire in the fireplace, just the two of us, thanking the Lord for all His gifts, this day and this lifetime, seen and unseen. We are blessed,” Nancy writes, “with ‘Taste of Heaven’ moments.”

“Across Yosemite’s Wilderness: A Trailblazing Woman’s Career Protecting The Park’s Backcountry”

Laurel Munson Boyers was born in Yosemite Valley. In 1903 her great grandfather, who ran a way station for park visitors, welcomed Teddy Rosevelt and John Muir. Her parents lived near Ansel Adams, and after she joined the park service in 1976 Boyers guided former First Lady Laura Bush and companions through the backcountry (the two becoming longtime friends).

Having served the park for more than thirty years, “the first female full-time mounted wilderness ranger” and a decade as “Yosemite’s first female wilderness manager,” Boyers recounts her life in a two-part memoir, “Across Yosemite’s Wilderness: A Trailblazing Woman’s Career Protecting The Park’s Backcountry” ($22.95 in paperback from Falcon Guides; also for Amazon Kindle).

Dozens of photographs celebrate the park’s grandeur and its dedicated workers, with artwork by brother Lex Munson, who lives outside Nevada City. Boyers herself still lives in the park with husband Darell but writes me that “my nephew, his wife, son and daughter (named Laurel Ann after me) live in Cottonwood.”

The book’s first part is “a telling of my last wilderness patrol, an expedition across the entire length of Yosemite National Park in 2007, when a group of us took a 10-day backcountry journey all the way across the park.” Part two “holds essays about the years that led up to that remarkable patrol … caring for that part of the park that is beyond Yosemite Valley.”

Though she recounts scary experiences leading horses and mules in slippery environments and hearing strange sounds when she is all alone in a backcountry cabin, Boyers focuses on what she calls the timeless benefits of the wilderness: “witnessing the wonder of nature, of intact ecosystems, of living and breathing and enjoying open space and wildness with one another, or even while alone.”

Just as Chicoans do with Bidwell Park, she wrestles with just how human-accessible to make Yosemite’s backcountry. “We need to maintain humility and understand that we don’t have all the answers,” yet “we need to eliminate the impact of humanity’s presence on the nonhuman world as much as possible to allow these systems … to evolve naturally. Our future may depend on it.”

“Wildfire Days: A Woman, A Hotshot Crew, And The Burning American West”

Redding-based Kelly Ramsey has written an intense “you are there” memoir of 2020 and 2021 when she fought fires on the Rowdy River Hotshots. These were “Wildfire Days: A Woman, A Hotshot Crew, And The Burning American West” ($29.99 in hardcover from Scribner; also for Amazon Kindle and in audiobook format read by the author).

Back then “I lived in a town called Happy Camp. Yes, that’s a place. This was the real Northern California, not the Bay Area, thank you very much. If the Golden State is a bent appendage, its swollen forearm bearing LA like a red boil, my California lay above the elbow.”

Divided into the two seasons, the first focuses on Ramsey as a rookie hotshot. “Hotshot crews,” she writes, “are physically and operationally intense. … These crews tackle the most difficult and remote parts of wildfires, doing the hardest manual labor and hiking deep into the wilderness to places other crews can’t or won’t go.” 

And “scariest of all, while I had hoped the crew would pick up another lady or two, I learned that I’d be the sole woman and the first in nearly a decade. To many of the guys, I’d be the only girl they’d ever worked with. Just me and nineteen men who were probably faster, stronger, and more knowledgeable than I was. No big deal.”

That season they worked the Slater Fire, North Complex, and August Complex, among others. The second season would take them to the Monument and Dixie fires, and more. In this season personal entanglements rise to the fore. Engaged to a non-hotshot firefighter, Ramsey finds a deep-seated acceptance among the Rowdy River crew—just one of the dudes—and a soul-deep freedom she doesn't have with her boyfriend.

The child of a dysfunctional and broken family, the influence of her alcoholic father looms large in Ramsey’s yearning to find herself and be herself. Beautifully written, often raw, it’s an unforgettable journey, callouses and all.

Kelly Ramsey is Nancy Wiegman’s guest on Nancy’s Bookshelf on Northstate Public Radio, mynspr.org, Wednesday, July 9 at 10:00 a.m., repeated Sunday, July 13 at 8:00 p.m.

“Evergreen Lodge: A Memoir”

The cover shows two best buds in the summer of 1982, in front of Half Dome, Tom on the left and taller Brad on the right. Tom Bross would go on to graduate from Chico State in 1986, then to careers in marketing, advertising, and (now) memoir writing.

“Evergreen Lodge: A Memoir” ($16.99 in paperback, independently published; also for Amazon Kindle and audiobook format read by the author) takes the reader to the summers of 1977 and 1978 and “an often dysfunctional family business located near the west gate of Yosemite National Park.” 

Brossie, raised by a hippie mother who calls him Jupiter, is 15. Lots of extended family members and friends round out the cast for a joyous romp of a teen sex comedy reminiscent of “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.” 

Bross superbly captures the ethos (and raunchiness) of the times, and there are (sweet) pictures. He writes that the events in the book “are mostly, but not exactly, true. Duh. How could they be? … I was fifteen and sixteen years old and twenty-two percent hormones by body weight…. This is an homage to the era when we were no longer children and not yet adults, and a new song was enough to blow our minds.”

For Bross and Brad and chums, the sex jokes come hot and heavy, especially when new babes move into the nearby lodges. Flights of fancy stoke their imagination, like when a drunken woman twice Brossie’s age makes eyes at him. “She’s a mammal. She’s female. She’s alive. She meets my minimum requirements. But this woman is also attractive and sexually mature. And she’s wasted. Now all my boxes are checked. I’m thinking, I’m getting de-virginized tonight.” But, uh, “consent requires consciousness.” Duh. 

Though he never does get de-virginized, he does (reluctantly?) peer through the peephole made to the women’s shower, check out the female guests (a “smorgasbord of hotties”), and play with--words. If there’s Boise, Idaho, “shouldn’t there be a Girlsy, Wyoming, too?” 

Pringles, beer and pot round out the food groups, and a Half Dome hike with buds makes a forever memory. Bottom line: “We’re fifteen, we’re idiots, and you only live once.”

“Right Place, Write Time: A Lifetime Of Memories With Sports Legends”

Tiger Woods “won nine times in 2000,” Chico State grad Mark Soltau writes, “a year many consider the best stretch in golf history. He won three majors and returned to Pebble Beach in June to capture the U.S. Open by a record 15 strokes.” 

A longtime sportswriter for the San Francisco Examiner, who worked for Tigerwoods.com from 1997 through 2018, Soltau says that “at most tournaments, I would spend time with Tiger … and wish him well. The first time I said, ‘Good luck,’ he glared at me. ‘It’s not luck,’ he said. From then on, I have always said, ‘Play well.’” 

Tiger “did a surprise video when I was inducted into the Chico State Athletics Hall of Fame in 2007.”

Soltau covers his five decades in sports writing with an exuberant memoir, “Right Place, Write Time: A Lifetime Of Memories With Sports Legends” ($19.95 in paperback, independently published; also for Amazon Kindle). No stranger to football (“I covered the NFL for almost 25 years”), Soltau “spent much of my childhood attending games with my mother at Kezar Stadium…. My father, Gordy, was an all-pro end and place kicker for the San Francisco 49ers (1950-58) and led the NFL in scoring in 1952 and 1953.”

Soltau’s book, loaded with photographs, includes chapters on Bill Walsh, Steve Young, John McEnroe, Barry Bonds, Walter Payton (at Laguna Seca Raceway), and Joe Montana (who used the sideline phone, meant to connect with coaches, to call his wife: “I’m just sitting here on the sideline and thought I’d call and tell you I Love You”).

In 1977, as a Chico State senior, Soltau’s father gifted him two tickets to Super Bowl XI, pitting the Oakland Raiders against the Minnesota Vikings at Pasadena’s Rose Bowl. He and a buddy managed to get there and found their seats “were on the 50-yard line on the press box side in the middle of American Football Conference owner’s section.” The Raiders won, 32-14. The two made it back to Chico the next day, “tired and euphoric.”

The book is not a tell-all, but a “let me tell you about my friends.” Well played, Mark.

“Katharine: Annals Of An Immigrant Family 1866-1964”

Chicoan Dave Schlichting traces the lives of his maternal great grandparents, Katharine Deininger and Gottlieb Hinderer, in a compelling narrative that is a model of historical retrieval. Replete with period photographs, genealogical charts, census documents, timelines, maps and meticulous references (with GPS locations), the research never overshadows the stories. 

“Katharine: Annals Of An Immigrant Family 1866-1964” ($25 in large-size paperback from Chico’s Memoir Books) has two parts. The first is dedicated to family beginnings in the “old country” (southwestern Germany), the passage to America aboard the steamer Havel, time in Michigan and Iowa, and their Minnesota arrival in 1898.

The historical account in Part I gives way to family stories in Part II, drawing on interviews with family over five years beginning in 2000. Presentation of the stories is not haphazard; various family units each receive a carefully researched chapter. 

Though readers may not know this family, the historical background throughout the book, giving context to how one group of families lived in bygone times, brings to life Katharine’s legacy. Katharine and Gottlieb were married in Iowa early in 1862 and had seven children. 

In a tribute to Katharine, Schlichting writes that she “found employment working as a domestic for the Hinderer family in Brend, Germany. She soon began a relationship with the Hinderer’s oldest son Gottlieb. In time, their relationship resulted in Katharine’s pregnancy. By itself, this was not uncommon. The norm for couples was to live with either of their parents, have children, and then formally marry once the young man was earning a sufficient income to support his young family.”

Katharine was no wallflower. “When action was required, she took the lead. She tolerated neither fools nor villains.” Through two World Wars and a Great Depression she and her family survived through “resilience” and hard work (especially on the Hinderers’ farm in Minnesota) and the “strength of character” she instilled.

They faced many challenges but there were also lighter moments; the book concludes with an Appendix of family recipes, including Katharine’s Wax Bean Pickles, Spaetzle, and Pfeffer Nuesse (Pepper Nut) Cookies.

The book is a window into the lives of “ordinary” people--who are far from ordinary.

“Letting All The Light In: Gracefully Surviving Illness, Injury, And Grief”

Dax Meredith (daxmeredith.com), the pen name of a Chico area author, college instructor and counselor, wrote of her escape from the Camp Fire in "The Sound Of The Snow Geese." But she is also dealing with a years-long debilitating illness. 

“Both the illness and the fire almost killed me,” she writes in “Letting All The Light In: Gracefully Surviving Illness, Injury, And Grief” ($15.99 in paperback, independently published; also for Amazon Kindle). “Twice now I have been much closer to death than I like to consider. But I am a better person because of it. … I am more patient, more grateful, more present in the moment each day because of those events.”

This is not a story of “arrival” but an ongoing journey as Meredith navigates the health care system and returns with cautionary tales. 

The book’s three parts include the harrowing memoir of her mysterious illness where, she writes, “The left side of my face was numb for almost a year. … My spine was numb. I remember constant and continual migraine headaches. The pain was excruciating. I remember endless vomiting, blurred vision or partial and temporary blindness, and on several occasions, hallucinations.” She adds: “As a general rule of thumb, hallucinations are just not a good sign.”

The second part features short interviews with two dozen sufferers, of all ages, each presenting the biggest challenge (including grief at the loss of a son and wife, amputation, addiction, miscarriages, multiple cancers, depression), resources used, the person’s belief system (some are Christian, some “spiritual,” some have no professed religious commitment), what others need to know, the roughest parts, and what wisdom has emerged. The accounts are devastating, gut-wrenching, in part because this is you or someone you know.

The final section is practical advice; Meredith covers everything to be aware of, from how to talk with one’s children to fighting the judgment from others and oneself. “I don’t believe all the bad things that occur are a punishment from God. But there are lessons in the bad things that happen to us.”

With graceful kindness, Meredith may well change how you understand your very life.

“Even Broken-Winged Divas Can Fly”

Forty-something Chicoan Jennifer Kuhns (www.jenniferkuhns.net) has published more than a dozen books. “I write children’s books,” she tells readers in her latest memoir, “most of which have a disabled protagonist with a strong and positive character and attitude. Well, maybe a little bit of a snarky attitude … What can I say? I put a little bit of me into all of my characters.”

Her own story is told in “Little Diva On Wheels: Growing Up Differently-Abled” and now “Even Broken-Winged Divas Can Fly” ($16.95 in paperback from Shalako Press) which focuses on her high school and college days. Born ten weeks early, diagnosed with spastic quadriplegic cerebral palsy, Kuhns notes that while “my fine motor manual dexterity is basically non-existent,” she has “the ability to memorize like a freaking elephant.”

This “broken-winged diva” has a penchant for literary symbolism, “a strange sense of humor,” a competitive instinct, and self-advocacy.

Her cerebral palsy affects speech. “I can say the word. The problem is ‘saying’ and ‘enunciating’ a word are two absolutely, completely, different animals.” Most of her family members, friends, and those who have interacted with a disabled person understand what she calls her “CP-babblelistics.” She is “greeted, not ignored. I was spoken to, not at. I was not made to feel like I had leprosy. And I was verbally understood.”

Perhaps other adults lack the patience or are afraid, but there is no rancor in Kuhns’ description. Instead, she reveals a well-rounded life, including raising a sheep and an awkward relationship with her mother: Mom is the boss at home, but she is also hired as an aide by the Department of Rehabilitation and so Jennifer is her boss at school.

“I’ve not always been happy about my condition, my situation in life. I’ve been mad, and I’ve been sad, and I’ve hated the body I’m in.” And yet, “I know how to harp like nobody’s business to get what I need, want, or think I should have … not that it always works.” 

A color section at the end showing some of her tattoos (one for each book published), receiving her MA, and newspaper clippings, demonstrates that something very much worked.

“Stand Easy: Creating A Small British Pub And Considerable Comradeship In The Corner Of A Garage”

For Chicoan David Bruhn it happened almost by chance. After weekly mountain biking with longtime friend Pat O’Connell, the two would “sit at a small bar in my garage and enjoy a beverage—he a bottle of water, and I a bottle of beer. (I attribute these choices to his having served in the U.S. Air Force and I in the U.S. Navy.)”

The bar was something like a British pub, and over seven years, with input from a group of friends, it took on real character, befitting the real characters who frequented “Stand Easy” (a military term meaning “take a break”). And now Bruhn has published an account of its construction, filling it with a hundred photographs and diagrams, stories from the friends who meet there regularly, and an assortment of British pub jokes.

“Stand Easy: Creating A Small British Pub And Considerable Comradeship In The Corner Of A Garage” ($23.50 in paperback from Heritage Books, Inc.) is not just about the artifacts that populate the pub, including a hand-made chandelier of 9 wine bottles with their bottoms cut off, but “about building friendship and espirit de corps.”

Bruhn writes that “moderation is the key” during “our weekly use…. The Stand Easy is formally open between 5:30 and 7:00 p.m. During this time everyone enjoys at most two drinks and a home cooked meal prepared by my wife Nancy or Rich Varlinsky.” (Recipes in an Appendix include Nancy’s Kickin’ Crab Corn Chowder.)

Friends’ stories add to the ambience of the book, from Deadhead Grace who dated Neil Young to Rich and Cindy’s Mexican Riviera cruise. 

In 1989 sociologist Ray Oldenburg argued that “third places,” like local bars, were democracy’s grassroots where people, putting aside the demands of work and home, could meet for lively conversation, lessening some of the division that characterizes the moment we are in. Among Stand Easy’s small group of friends, the garage pub is indeed a “great good place.”

David Bruhn is Nancy Wiegman’s guest on Nancy’s Bookshelf on Northstate Public Radio, mynspr.org, Wednesday, November 6 at 10:00 a.m., repeated Sunday, November 10 at 8:00 p.m.

“The Adventures Of Wild Willy: True Stories From 1940-1980”

Born in 1933 in Los Angeles, writer-artist Wilma Rae Forester moved to Chico with her family around 1940 and “finally settled in the barren wastelands of the eastern part of town called Pleasant Valley. Ours was one of only two houses on Cactus Ave. … It was great horse country and easy to access Bidwell Park.”

She and her young chums certainly did horse around back in those days, and Forester recounts some of those memories (with real names and only just a tad exaggeration here and there) in “The Adventures Of Wild Willy: True Stories From 1940-1980” ($25.49 in paperback from ReadersMagnet LLC, readersmagnet.com; also for Amazon Kindle).

“I married very young and had two sons and later a daughter…. The R.G. Rolls family moved to Forest Ranch in 1964. I married Jacques Gubbels in 1997 and we still live in Forest Ranch. I have trophies and ribbons from riding and painting” but her Christian faith sustains her along with her “children, grandchildren and great grandchildren.” 

In 1945 it took months but the family nursed a downed bird they called “Goose Gander” back to health with masking tape and a cardboard box. Then, hearing another flock overhead, the bird flew up to join them, slowly rising and circling the barn as if to say thanks. But there was a surprise: “We finally found his picture in our ‘Book of Knowledge,’ and Goose Gander was not a goose. He was really a Trumpeter Swan.”

Years later, housewife Wilma and friend Marge, both riding motorcycles, found an old logging road above Forest Ranch and made their way down the mountain to Butte Creek. And needing to get home by entering into a “no trespassing” area owned by “a cranky retired sheriff who lived all by himself” near the creek they found him “holding a rifle and packing a pistol on his hip.” Did I mention two big dogs? It took real smarts to get away.

The book is filled with Forester’s paintings and youthful shenanigans, but most especially is an homage to her home: “I love Forest Ranch.” Her memories, now in this time of challenge, are especially poignant.