You'll love Ida Mae!

Introducing "Ida Mae and Her Passage to Chautauqua," Rick's second published novel.  Like his breakout success "Curse of the Klondike" (also published by Koehler Books), Ida Mae shares a common genre known as narrative non-fiction.

Come and meet Ida Mae. You’ll learn to love her. You’ll hear her speaking in the first person as if her words were presented directly to you— “My good friend Jess (also 13) lived in the holler, a place where Momma said I couldn’t go, but I went anyway. As a single unmarried woman with no job, Bridget, Jess’ mother, couldn’t afford to live anywhere else, and Jess and me (my name is Ida Mae) went there often. 

One day, Bridget fell into one of her trances. While under the influence, she announced that an incident involving Loretta Looper would occur during the upcoming vesper services. When word got out, most of the folks in town assumed that a healing of Loretta’s MS would be featured. As a result, the church that evening was packed to the rafters. 

The onlookers were shocked, however,  by what did occur, and sure as Ketchup, it wasn’t a healin’. When the smoke cleared, two men lay dead on the church floor, one of whom was Loretta’s estranged husband.” 

Ida Mae’s adventures as she evolves from a high-spirited thirteen-year-old into womanhood don’t end there. Although the initial experiences occurred in Mammoth Falls, a fictitious town in West Virginia, Ida Mae soon found herself at Pitt on a music scholarship, and from there to Vietnam as a member of the Women’s Army Corps with a loss of one husband and one lover, both of whom die in Nam. 

Attendance at the Ball Buster’s Bash in San Francisco on her way home from war served as a diversion as does her experience as a salesperson at Holly’s Hat on Rodeo Drive in Hollywood, California. She arrived at Mammoth Falls in time to travel with friends to Woodstock. Eventually, along with her husband Dennis and her son Adrian, she traveled to Chautauqua, a gated summer resort on Chautauqua Lake in northwestern New York, where her adventures and those of her son continued.