It's back to books again.
I'm still working on taxes, but I'm not going into detail about it other than to point out that tax work goes MUCH better when watching episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (started at Disc 1 Season 1 and hoping to go through all Seven seasons...).
The book pictured above is a title that I've actually had in my database since 2002. This is the second book in a three book series (my bet is that they didn't sell as well as hoped and the series was canceled by the publisher, which happens far too frequently. The author, Walker Tompkins, is a well known western pulp fiction author who later in life settled in Santa Barbara and then (and as far as I can tell, still does write) researched and wrote books about the area.
One thing I didn't know until today is that while a native of Washington State, he and his family moved to California when he was a teen and he lived not too far from where I am now. His family farm was in Turlock, CA, and he attended Modesto Junior College (in good ole Modesto, CA) before going into the army.
A hometown guy, as it were.
I'm not sure why this book hasn't been snapped up long since. It's a scarce series to find, it's on a subject not normally seen in juvenile series (Ham Radio operators and fans), and it's not a homemade series (IE: vanity press). I guess, for some reason or other, there's just not enough buzz about it out in the collecting world. The text is peppered with Ham radio slang (with some translation for those uninitiated like me) and the plot is quite interesting, though the prose is a bit 1960's in format and styling.
This is not one of those books that I'll pull off my shelves after a few years. I KNOW there's someone out there looking for this book -- they just haven't found it yet.
Signing off...
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