Johnny Armstrong and I will be at Cavalier House Books in Denham Springs Saturday at 2 p.m. to sign copies of our books.
Armstrong, like me, is a native of Ruston and he has written a delightful conservation-themed novel entitled Shadow Shine. The book is receiving excellent reviews from editors and bookstore owners alike. It’s about a cooperative effort by the forest animals to save their environment from the destructive forces of man. The hero of the story is a possum who isn’t aware he is a possum.
His adventures as he traverses foreign territory is a fast-paced read and the book far exceeds the usual first-novel by an author.
I will be there signing my new book, Louisiana’s Rogue Sheriffs: A Culture of Corruption. As the title suggests, the book is about corrupt, unethical sheriffs in about three dozen Louisiana parishes who run their personal fiefdoms like the dictator many feel they have become—like the sheriff who was leasing a marina from his own company for $1700 per month until the disastrous Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico at which point the sheriff sub-let the marina to BP as a staging area for the spill recovery at $1.1 million per month.
Cavalier House is in the Denham Springs Antique Village and is run by John and Michelle Cavalier, a busy, civic-minded couple who have made the concept of independent book stores a viable business and a local attraction to readers from all around.
If you can’t be there, you can order the book from me (and I’ll sign it) for $30 by clicking on the yellow
button in the column to the right of this post. Or you may mail a check for $30 to Tom Aswell, P.O. Box 922, Denham Springs, Louisiana 70727.
Shifting gears a little, I was in Alexandria on Tuesday for a book signing and got a most pleasant surprise.
First, a brief background story to put Tuesday’s events in context.
I grew up in the only house on Fielding Drive in Ruston. After my grandfather died in 1971, my grandmother moved in with her youngest son, my uncle, in Monroe and we rented the house out to Louisiana Tech students.
Fast forward to last Tuesday and a gentleman named Mike Mikell approached the desk where I was setting up my books and said, “I have something to show you.” Mikell, who holds an engineering degree from Tech, held out a thin book that I didn’t immediately recognize because it was hard-bound. He opened the book to reveal the cover of a paperback book entitled Bonnie and Clyde that I had written 50 years ago this year about the outlaws who terrorized the Southwest during the 1930s. The book was adapted from a series of articles I had written for the Ruston Daily Leader when I was a wet-nosed reporter there. The writing project was undertaken to coincide with the Warren Beatty-Faye Dunaway movie of the same name that was showing in theaters across the U.S. Here’s a PHOTO of the two of us with the old and new books. The picture is sideways because I haven’t figured out how to rotate the image and make it stay that way.
The Ruston Daily Leader was the first paper in the nation to report the 1934 ambush and death of the pair in neighboring Bienville Parish, just 20 miles west of Ruston. The ambush by Texas Ranger Frank Hamer occurred just before the Leader‘s deadline but after the deadlines of other afternoon newspapers.
“I lived in your old house on Fielding Drive while I attended Louisiana Tech,” Mikell explained. “I found this book in the house and when I heard you were going to be here today, I just had to come here and show you this.” The book had been bound, probably by a library that stocked the book 50 years ago. “I want one of your sheriffs books and I would like you to sign both books,” he said.
I was honored to do so.
“A lot happened on Fielding Drive when I was living there,” he said. “The concept of drive-thru daiquiris was born in that house. My roommate David “Tater” Ervin opened the very first one in the state and he dreamed up the idea while were were living in your house. We kicked around a lot of ideas to make money while we played chess there.”
While Mikell has his memories of that house, I have my own. That’s the house where I was brought as an 18-month-old malnourished infant after my grandfather rescued me from a hospital in Galveston, Texas, where I had been abandoned by my mother.
We were poor, very poor. But what we lacked in financial resources was more than made up for in love and caring given me by my grandparents. My grandfather drilled into my head and heart that if something is not altogether right, “then, by God, it’s altogether wrong.” He lived by a code that every living being is to be treated with respect and dignity and that everyone you meet is a potential friend until they prove that they don’t want to be.
Once, when I accompanied him to the Ruston Feed Mill to get feed for his cattle, he met a man on the loading dock and stood talking to him for nearly an hour. On the way home, he said, “That man back there is a liar and a thief.” Unable to wrap my young brain around his congeniality toward the man, I asked, “Why were you friends with him if he’s a liar and a thief?”
He stopped and pulled to the side of the road and turned to me. Pointing a finger at me, he said, “Son, you can be friends with anybody as long as you know who they are.”
That was a sixth-grade education unloading some deep psychology—and a powerful life lesson—on me and I’ve never forgotten that.
Something else I’ve never forgotten. He bought me a candy bar once and on the way home, I unwrapped and threw the wrapper out the window. He never said a word but I felt a pop on the back of my head and I saw Jesus waving me to the light. To this day, I will not throw so much as a gum wrapper out of my vehicle.
Yes, Mike Mikell, Fielding Drive did indeed possess some wonderful memories and I cherish them to this day.
I love these stories and envy you for having so many. Thanks for sharing.