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|  | | On the Strand
This book wraps up what I began with Waking Up in the Studebaker, that being surviving high school and making it to college. Memories of an era 1968 - 1974.
Was it fate or responsibility that brought me to the plains? Or an escape? And why Kansas? Certainly a girl was involved. Three for sure! The reason for heading west from my home in Virginia and making a new one in Kansas is long and complicated. Maybe this is why I always looked at myself as the silent observer, as well as the kid who continually questioned his actions.
When I finished my original manuscript for On the Strand, I asked a friend from my past – who just so happens to be a character in this story – how she remembered me from age 11, when we first met, to 21 the las | |  | | To the Prairie and To God by Harold L. Gray
Sorry but I can't get my own name out of the title area. Headaches with trying to cram a poet and a writer all on the same site. This posthumously published book is my attempt to share my father's youthful passion for writing poetry. Dad had come of age on a small, dusty Illinois farm during the Great Depression, where he still found the wherewithal to pursue a college education and follow his many dreams.
He began writing in high school, but his time spent at Kansas State Teachers College (now Pittsburg State University) provided a revealing outlet on paper for both his love of the Kansas prairie and for God.
A war and his desire to follow the dreams expressed in his lines meant leaving his writing passion in Kansas, the state he would eventually return to in retirement and to be buried, as he once had written, on a Kansas hillside.
Fortunately, my father saved his working and finished drafts for me to find. Why he never wrote another line after 1941, I can only guess. At least, this very personal and insightful collection of poetry helped me better understand my father.
Kevin L. Gray,
Paola, Kansas
| |  | | Waking Up in the Studebaker
My memoir illuminates a generation -- including my own intellectual, physical, moral, romantic, and spiritual development -- while bringing a tumultuous era back to life.
Waking Up in the Studebaker is the memoir of Kevin Gray, who proudly came of age in the suburbs of Richmond, Virginia. Kevin captures an era starting with his earliest memories in the 1950s. He covers a lot of ground, including impressions about racism in the former Capital of the Confederacy. Teen music and teen rites from the late 1950s drew him in by age 10. He offers personal insights on Vietnam, music, and the drug culture, and the turbulent times right into 1968.
Gray admits, "I thought America the greatest place on the face of this earth to grow up in, but, then, I realized m |
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