Some of you know that I have another blog--"Daily Doggerel"--which is, well, exactly what it says it is: daily verse on various subjects, verse that lies firmly in the realm of Doggerel and has no visa allowing entry to the realm of Poetry. (Link to that blog.)
In recent months I've been writing on the subjects of "101 Books"--favorite books from throughout my life--a different book--a different verse--each day.
The other day I was preparing to do a post on Jim Bowie: Boy with a Hunting Knife, 1953, a book I loved as a wee lad (obsessed as I was with the Davy Crockett episodes on Disneyland--and especially with the Alamo segments).
Some years ago, working on a memoir of my reading life, I bought that book again on ABE and re-read it, discovering, of course, that it was largely a fabricated story of Bowie's childhood. The book was part of a series published by Bobbs-Merrill: The Childhood of Famous Americans series. A pix of my gnarly copy lies atop this post.
I read a lot of the books in that series, back then.
Anyway, as I was working on my doggerel (which will appear in a day or so), I tried to find out something about the author, Gertrude Hecker Winders. Google didn't come up with much. I thought it was perhaps even a pen name?
But I subscribe to an online service--newspapers.com--a searchable database of many newspapers across the country, and I did a search there and found both her obituary and, in another article about her, a photo (at the bottom of this post).
Her obit--from the Indianapolis Star, Sept. 28, 1987--says that she died at 90 on the 26th. She was from Indianapolis but had been living in Elkhart, where she'd died. She wrote some other volumes for the Childhood series, had published stories in True Confessions (and similar publications), had graduated from Butler Univ. (where an uncle of mine had taught!), had taught some college-level creative writing courses and run some workshops for writers.
The obituary did not include a picture, but I found one in the Noblesville (Indiana) Ledger from November 10, 1958, the day before I turned fourteen. The picture accompanies a story about a local book fair in Hamilton County--a fair for school kids. Here's what it says about her:
Gertrude Hecker Winders, author of four of the books in this [Childhood] series, will be at the Book Fair from 3 to 5 CDT on Saturday afternoon. Mrs. Winders will be glad to talk to boys and girls and autograph copies of her books.
Wish I'd been there. Wish I'd talked to her. Wish I'd gotten my Bowie book signed. Wish ...
Aw, if wishes were horses, bookish boys would ride ...
And thank you, newspapers.com!
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