West Of Dodge (Ss) (1996) (29 page)

Haig*--His last name. Louis described him as a Scotsman, once an officer in the British-Indian army. Louis says he was "an officer in one of the Scottish regiments." Louis knew him in Shanghai in the 1930s, but we don't know how old he would have been at the time. He may have been involved in some kind of intelligence work. For a while, he and Louis shared an apartment that seems to have been located just off Avenue King Edward VII.

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Joe Davenport--Louis heard of him in China. In the early to mid-1930s he was to deliver a shipment of guns and ammunition to General Ma but was killed before he could make the connection. He was once a U. S. Marine.

Milligan--A pilot in China in the mid-1930s. A friend of Haig's. We think that he saved Louis's life by getting him out of the country. Born in Texas, once a U. S. Marine.

Lola LaCorne--Along with her sister and mother, was a friend of Louis's in Paris during World War II. She later taught literature at the Sorbonne, and had (hopefully still has) a husband named Christopher.

Dean Kirby--Pal from Oklahoma City in the late 1930s who seems to have been a copywriter or something of the sort. Might have worked for Lusk Publishing.

Bunny Yeager--Girlfriend of Dean Kirby's from Oklahoma City.

Virginia McElroy--Girl with whom Louis went to school in Jamestown.

Eleanor and Geraldine "Jeri" Medsker--Sisters from Shaw-nee, Oklahoma. Louis knew them in the late 1930s. Louis last saw Eleanor at a book signing in Thousand Oaks, California.

George Russell--Friend of Louis's from Kingman in the late 1920s, married one of the Von Biela sisters.

Any of the Von Biela sisters--Louis knew them in, you guessed it, Kingman, Arizona.

Arleen Weston Sherman--Friend of Louis's from Jamestown, when he was thirteen or fourteen. I think her family visited the LaMoores in Choctaw in the 1930s.

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Her older sister's name was Mary; parents' names were Ralph and Lil; Ralph was a railroad conductor.

Merle Templeton--A man Louis knew from Kingman. He ran a rodeo for Bill Bonelli in Los Angeles. Bonelli was a political figure of some sort.

Harry Bigelow--Louis knew him in Ventura. He had a picture taken with Louis's mother, Emily LaMoore, at a place named Berkeley Springs around 1929. Louis may have known him at the Katherine Mine, near Kingman, Arizona, or in Oregon.

Tommy Pinto--Boxer from Portland; got Louis a job at Portland Manufacturing.

Percy E. "Steve" Stephens--Louis knew him in Kingman; he was married to Alice Von Biela. Louis saw him again at a book signing in Escondido in 1983.

Nancy Carroll*--An actress as of 1933. Louis knew her from the chorus of a show at the Winter Garden in New York and a cabaret in New Jersey where she and her sister danced occasionally, probably during the mid- to late 1920s.

Judith Wood--Actress. Louis knew her in Hollywood in the late 1920s.

Stanley George--The George family relocated from Kingman, Arizona, to Ventura, California, possibly in the late 1920s.

Francis Lederer*--Actor that Louis knew in the late 1920s in Los Angeles. He may have been a Hungarian and was acting in Hollywood as late as 1933.

Anyone familiar with Singapore in the late 1920s, the old Straits Hotel and/or the Maypole Bar.

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Anyone who is very knowledgeable in the military history and/or politics of western (Shansi, Kansu, and Sinki-ang Provinces) China in 1935-37.

Anyone who served on the S. S. Steel Worker between 1925 and 1930.

Anyone who served on the lumber schooner Catherine G. Sudden between 1925 and 1936.

Anyone who served on the S. S. Steadfast between 1924 and 1930.

Anyone who served on the Annandale between 1920 and 1926.

Anyone who served on the Randsberg, a German freighter, between 1925 and 1937.

Anyone who knows anything about a short-lived magazine published in Oklahoma City in 1935-36 called Uptown Magazine. A photocopy of any issue of this magazine would be very interesting to us.

Anyone familiar with the Royal Government Experimental Hospital in Calcutta, India.

About Louis L'Amour "I think of myself in the oral tradition--as a troubadour, a village tale-teller, the man in the shadows of the campfire. That's the way I'd like to be remembered--as a storyteller. A good storyteller."

It is doubtful that any author could be as at home in the world
re-created
in
his
novels
as
Louis
Dearborn L'Amour. Not only could he physically fill the boots of the rugged characters he wrote about, but he literally "walked the land my characters walk." His personal experiences as well as his lifelong devotion to historical research combined to give Mr. L'Amour the unique knowledge and understanding of people, events, and the challenge of the American frontier that became the hallmarks of his popularity.

Of French-Irish descent, Mr. L'Amour could trace his own family in North America back to the early 1600s and follow their steady progression westward, "always on the I

About frontier." As a boy growing up in Jamestown, North Dakota, he absorbed all he could about his family's frontier heritage, including the story of his great-grandfather who was scalped by Sioux warriors.

Spurred by an eager curiosity and desire to broaden his horizons, Mr. L'Amour left home at the age of fifteen and enjoyed a wide variety of jobs including seaman, lumberjack, elephant handler, skinner of dead cattle, assessment miner, and an officer in the tank destroyers during World War II. During his "yondering" days he also circled the world on a freighter, sailed a dhow on the Red Sea, was shipwrecked in the West Indies and stranded in the Mojave Desert. He won fifty-one of fifty-nine fights as a professional boxer and worked as a journalist and lecturer. He was a voracious reader and collector of rare books. His personal library contained 17,000 volumes.

Mr. L'Amour "wanted to write almost from the time I could talk." After developing a widespread following for his many frontier and adventure stories written for fiction magazines, Mr. L'Amour published his first full-length novel, Hondo, in the United States in 1953. Every one of his more than 100 books is in print; there are nearly 230 million copies of his books in print worldwide, making him one of the bestselling authors in modern literary history. His books have been translated into twenty languages, and more than forty-five of his novels and stories have been made into feature films and television movies.

His hardcover bestsellers include The Lonesome Gods, The Walking Drum (his twelfth-century historical novel), Ju-bal Sackett, Last of the Breed, and The Haunted Mesa. His memoir, Education of a Wandering Man, was a leading bestseller in 1989. Audio dramatizations and adaptations of many L'Amour stories are available on cassette tapes from Bantam Audio publishing.

The recipient of many great honors and awards, in 1983

About Mr. L'Amour became the first novelist ever to be awarded the Congressional Gold Medal by the United States Congress in honor of his life's work. In 1984 he was also awarded the Medal of Freedom by President Reagan.

Louis L'Amour died on June 10,1988. His wife, Kathy, and their two children, Beau and Angelique, carry the L'Amour tradition forward with new books written by the author during his lifetime to be published by Bantam well into the nineties.