Look and Listen

Biography

My career took off when our sons decided they were grown up and moved out. The first thing I did was call the New Dick Van Dyke Show, which was filming south of Carefree and north of Scottsdale, Arizona before Scottsdale started its march toward Utah. There was actually a movie studio called Carefree Studio there on the Sonoran Desert. Norman Powell (actor Dick Powell's son) gave me a job as the script writer's assistant. I was thrilled to watch a show come together, from Monday mornings when they read from scripts and the director blocked the action, right on up to Thursday evenings when they filmed before a live audience. I loved it. I went to the filmings even though I didn't have to. Didn't want to miss any of it. After the show moved to California I started freelancing, and sold the first article I wrote, about the world-famous bar, the Cave Creek Corral. Harold Gavagan called it world-famous because celebrities and travelers from all over managed to make a stop there. Scenes from some movies were shot there, and I was on hand for some of that. It was evident that there was a little bit of show business in me, so while I was selling magazine articles, I was the first one to show up when Anne and Carl Nusbaum, from a theatrical background in Chicago, arrived in Carefree and organized the Desert Foothills Community Theater. It was a great learning experience for me. I did everything from stage managing, to being the directors' assistant, to acting. My first role was as Penny Sycamore in "You Can't Take It With You." I played myself, a writer, artist and ding-bat. My last role was as Elwood P.Dowd's sister in "Harvey." I forget her name, but it was a memorable play. There was something about 20-year periods. I consider that the natural life of a job. I was active in the theater for exactly that length of time. The same was true with my article writing for "Carefree Enterprise Magazine." I worked for three sets of publishers/editors. After that I continued freelancing, and launched into writing books, the first being "From Thunder to Breakfast." It had nothing to do with food, but it was an expression used by storyteller Hube Yates. He told me it came from a Texas expression, "from hell to breakfast." Being a son of a minister, he didn't curse. He substituted the word "thunder" for the word he didn't want to say. "We were in a thunder of a fix," was one of his expressions. The man was a REAL Southwesterner and he looked the part. The book consists of the highlights of his life, from the covered wagon trip to Arizona with his family of nine when he was eleven years old, to receiving the Carnegie Hero Medal for saving an old man from drowning in the flooding Salt River at night during a hailstorm, to an outrageous practical-joke period. I published the first edition, the second was by Northland Press, and after it was out-of-print for a number of years, I decided that it deserved to be revived. In the interest of time, I put it with www.xlibris.com. I was talked into writing another book, Widowhood Happens, by a friend who lost her husband. She convinced me that a book written by me was needed, so I started out with a chapter about her experiences as a widow. It snowballed from there. One widowed person would steer me toward another, and on I went, from personal stories, to experts who help the widowed — a lawyer, physician, a priest who was instrumental in holding theraputic weekends for the bereaved, another organization got women who hadn't worked outside the home for many years back into the workforce, a minister who didn't think the church was very helpful to someone who lost a spouse, and an alternate lifestyle run by a county department. It was published by a traditional publisher, Burning Gate Press. The CEO finally decided that there were easier ways to make a living than publishing. The title was "Widow ... Or Widow-To-Be?" I thought that explained it all, but after it was out-of-print for a while I decided that I had neglected to include men in this project. They, after all, sometimes had problems adjusting to their widower status, so I interviewed two of them. That was because I had written the stories of twelve women,and I wanted to make the chapters in the same ratio of women to men as it is in real life. With a slight variation once in a while,it's six or seven to one. This called for a change in title in order to include the men. Now "Widowhood Happens," can mean anybody, anytime, anywhere. After a while I niggling thought grabbed me. I hadn't included a chapter about a very important organization—Hospice.That's the reason for the third edition. Then, simply because I had photos I had taken in our Cave Creek yard, I decided to write a children's book about javelinas. Most people don't know about them, so I made the cover say a lot. The title is "Javelina (Have-uh-WHAT?), published by createspace.com. Another one of my favorites is "There's Something About CAVE CREEK (It's The People)." I really do like the people of this little Southwestern town. I was fortunate enough to interview them about their lives in the 1970s, when they were old-timers. Those interviews stand out in my mind, even though I interviewed actors, artists, architects, travelers, church leaders, entrepeuners, and other interesting people. From the time I sat enthralled as I listened to cowboys, prospectors, bartenders and strong women tell me about their lives, I stuffed the thought in the back of my mind that I was writing history, and some day I could make it all come together in a book. That some day came in 2006. I'm proud of that little book. It IS history, and people are showing me that they appreciate it. It's a good feeling. Another milestone in my life happened during my writing career. I founded a cooperative art organization, Desert Artists. That was in 1983, and it's still going strong, it's main focus being teaching art to Special Ed kids in the public school. My husband and I were members for 16 years.

Inspiration

My own curiosity is my inspiration. I didn't have a mentor. There were always things I wanted to see if I could do, and I had the nerve to do them, so I prepared myself educationally. And I'm very independent. I wrote my very first essay in first grade. The assignment was to write a story about what I would do if my house caught on fire. I wrote that I would save my baby sister. There were other things I would do, but that was the most important.