Welcome, and no, you didn’t land here by mistake.  Kate Damon is the pen name I’m using on my new book, Jury Duty is Murder.  Why use a pen name?  Good question.  I’m known as a western historical romance writer and my new book is a contemporary cozy mystery.  A person picking up a Margaret Brownley book might be disappointed to find a mystery instead of a romance.  So a pen name is designed to avoid reader confusion.

To tell you the truth, I was hesitant to write under a different name, The last time I wrote under a pseudonym I almost got arrested. A new writer at the time, I was thrilled to walk into a store and spot my books on a shelf. 

I remembered being told that readers liked autographed books.  So I pulled out a pen and set to work.  All was going well until someone saw me. Thinking I was defacing books, the person called the police.  I explained to the officer what I was doing, and he seemed nice enough. But then he asked for my I.D.  Without thinking I whipped out my driver’s license, which of course didn’t match the name on the book.  Boy did I have a lot of explaining to do.

Anyway, Jury Duty is Murder is a book I’ve had on the back of my mind for a long time.   Other than the mystery I wrote in sixth grade and the puzzle of the missing socks, this is my first real mystery (although there are mystery elements in my westerns).  Hope you enjoy.  And if by chance you spot me signing books somewhere, please don’t call the police. Come up and say “hi” instead.

Let’s Talk Turkey

Regale your guests with these fascinating facts about turkeys:

We all know that Columbus was geologically dyslexic and thought the land he discovered was part of India. Since he’d heard that India was highly populated with peacocks he named the large birds “tuka,” which means “peacock” in the Tamil language. Actually, turkeys are related to pheasants.

Turkeys happened to be the most plentiful meat available at the time of the first Thanksgiving in 1621, which is how the tradition started. (Aren’t you glad the most plentiful meat wasn’t squirrel or ‘possum?)

Benjamin Franklin wanted the turkey to be the national bird and one day a year he gets his wish: 91% of us eat turkey on Thanksgiving.

The Apache Indians thought the turkey timid and refused to eat it or use its feathers on their arrows.

Only toms gobble. Hens make a clicking sound.

Be warned:  If you want to go “natural” and catch your own turkey you better get yourself a good pair of running shoes. A spooked wild turkey can run up to twenty miles per hour. They can also burst into flight with speeds of at least fifty miles per hours in a matter of seconds.  Domesticated turkeys can’t fly.

Turkeys have delicate constitutions. They can drown if they look up in the rain and have been known to have heart attacks. When the Air Force was conducting test runs and breaking the sound barrier fields of turkeys would drop dead.

The first meal in outer space was—you guessed it—turkey!

We’re told to be extra careful in handling poultry but that wasn’t always true. It was common practice for store owners to hang turkeys in the window for display. A 1910 edition of The National Provisioner ran an article on why butchers lose money on turkeys. According to the article turkeys often had a “foul” smell on Thanksgiving day, resulting in the customer storming the store the following day for a refund. (We now know the day after Thanksgiving as Black Friday but back then it was more like Red Friday, since store owners had to appease disgruntled housewives.) 

At the risk of turning your stomachs, I quote: “Those turkeys are on the road two or three days or more before the butcher gets them, then they hang in his window in foul air all night.” The author goes on to say, “The customer who buys one puts it in a dinky little icebox—if she has one. If not the windowsill will do as well, or so she thinks.”  The writer urged butchers to store turkeys in coolers and stop the habit of window displays.

Not all turkeys were hung from windows. The Los Angeles Fruit store in Tombstone in 1886 advertised fine live turkeys. And in Arizona Territory turkey shoots were popular on the day prior to the holiday.

Wild turkeys have a very different taste from farm-raised turkeys. Almost all of the meat is dark, even the breast, and has a more intense flavor

We also have the turkey to thank for TV dinners. In 1953 Swanson created the dinners because they needed to do something with the 250 tons of frozen turkeys left over from Thanksgiving.

I leave you with this question to ask guests at your Thanksgiving dinner: Name a utensil not found at the first Thanksgiving Feast.

Answer: A fork. Pilgrims ate with spoons and knives.

I came across some old notes I wrote while doing research for a book. I think I was trying to come up with a name for my town and looking for inspiration. Texas sure does have some odd, charming, and altogether weird and funny town names. Here are just a couple that I had jotted down.   

Cut and Shoot, Texas

Believe it or not, this town’s name was the result of a church fight.  No one knows what the dispute was about. Some say it was over the new steeple; others say there was a disagreement as to who should preach there. Still, others insist it was over church member land claims.

Whatever the reason, the meeting at the church turned violent.   A small boy at the scene declared he was going to take up a tactical position and “cut around the corner and shoot through the bushes.”

Later, after the matter was taken to court, the judge asked a witness where the confrontation had taken place.  Since the town didn’t have a name the witness described the location the best way he knew how. “I suppose you could call it the place where they had the cutting and shooting scrape,” he said, and the name stuck.

Ding Dong, Texas (which just happens to be in Bell County)

As the saying goes, if you find yourself in Ding Dong, you have to be looking for it.  Two early residents Zulis Bell and his nephew Berth ran a general store and hired a local painter named C.C. Hoover to make a sign for their business. Hoover illustrated the sign with two bells inscribed with the Bells’ names and then wrote “Ding Dong” coming out the bottom of the bells.  No one remembered the Bells but they sure did remember Ding Dong and the name stuck. 

Jot-Em-Down, Texas

This is a small unincorporated community in Delta County.

The town’s name comes from the name of a fictional store in the Lum and Abner radio show, which aired in the 30s and 40s.

Dime Box, Texas

The name originated from the practice of leaving a dime in the box at Brown’s Mill to have a letter delivered.  The practice stopped when a post office was opened in 1877.

The following town isn’t in Texas but I just love the name—and of course the love story.

Total Wreck, Arizona.

Total Wreck was discovered by John L. Dillon in 1879.  He named it such because he thought the ledge the mine was on looked like a total wreck. A man once got into a shooting at Total Wreck and survived because the bullet lodged in a stack of love letters he had in his jacket. He later married the girl who wrote the letters!

What is the strangest named town you ever visited?  For me, it would have to be Monkey Eyebrow, Arizona. 

Is it just me or have good manners gone the way of trail drives?   I have three grandchildren working summer jobs and I’m appalled at the stories they tell about customer rudeness.  

It didn’t always used to be that way.  Back in the Old West, manners ruled.  A cowboy might have been rough around the edges and whooped it up on occasion, but he also minded his Ps and Qs.  To show you what I mean, let’s compare today’s manners with those of the past.

Driving:  Navigating some of today’s roads is like steering through a metal stampede. It’s every man/woman for his/her self.  Cars ride on your tail and cut you off. To stay on the defense, today’s drivers must contend with drunkenness, speeding, and texting—and that’s not all.  If thinking about this doesn’t make you long for the good old days, I don’t know what will.  

The Cowboy Way: A cowboy would never think of cutting between another rider and the herd.  Nor would he ride in such a way as to interfere with another man’s vision. Crossing in front of another without a polite, “Excuse me” would not have been tolerated.  As for riding drunk; that would have gotten a wrangler fired on the spot.

Please and Thank You:  Recently I saw a young man hold a restaurant door open for a young woman.  Instead of saying thank you, she chewed him out. Oh, me, oh, my. What is the world coming to?

The Cowboy Way: The first man coming to a gate was expected to open it for the others. Everyone passing through would say thank you.  Holding a door open for a lady went without saying, as did tipping his hat and saying a polite, “Howdy, ma’am.” A cowboy might have gotten a smile from the lady, but he sure wouldn’t have gotten a tongue-lashing.

Cell Phones: I could probably rattle on about poor cell phone manners, but for me, loud talking is the worst offense.  During a recent visit to the emergency room, I was privy to everyone’s medical condition and more. 

The Cowboy Way: Those early cowboys didn’t have cell phones, of course, which is probably a good thing; A ringing phone would have startled the cattle and maybe even the horses.  John Wayne wasn’t talking about cell phones when he said, “Talk low, talk slow, and don’t say too much,” but that’s not bad advice.  Especially in the ER.
Okay, so what do you think about today’s manners?

My recent release, How the West Was Wed, follows the story of two rival newspaper editors.  JOSIE LOCKWOOD is the successful editor of the town’s only newspaper until the very charming, very handsome BRANDON WADE moves to town to start his own newspaper. At first, Josie welcomes the competition but soon learns that readers prefer Wade’s bold hyperbole to her more serious type of journalism.

I especially enjoyed writing about a Victorian newspaperwoman. Women editors date back to colonial times, and some edited publications in the East during the first half of the nineteenth century. Still, in those early days, the newspaper business was primarily a male occupation.

This changed somewhat during the westward movement. The late eighteen-hundreds saw some three hundred females editing 250 publications in eleven western states. California led the way with 129 known female editors. No doubt there were more, but some female publishers sought credibility by listing a husband’s name on a masthead.

Newspaperwomen covered everything from national and local news to household hints. Newsprint at the time also carried what today might be called fake news. Along with their morning cup of Arbuckle’s, Victorian readers were regaled with stories of mysterious creatures, flying objects, ghosts, extraterrestrials, and other strange phenomena.

It’s not hard to see why the news business would attract female interest. Having control over editorial content afforded women the opportunity to lead a crusade, promote religious and educational activities, and bring a community together. Women still didn’t have the vote, of course, but some female publishers had strong political views which they were all too glad to share with readers.

Editorial disputes like the one between Brandon and Josie were common in the Old West, but not all had such a happy ending. Sometimes things went too far.  In some instances, the feud ended in gunfire.

Most feuds, however, were carried out with a war-of-words. Rival editors prided themselves on the quality and quantity of their insults. Typesetting was a tedious job. It took less time and effort to call someone an idiot or numbskull in print than to find a gentler approach.

If editors weren’t fighting each other, they were fighting readers. Any editor printing an inflammatory story could expect to be accosted at the local saloon or challenged to a duel. Things got so bad that an editor of a Kansas newspaper wrote: “What this community needs just now is a society for the prevention of cruelty to writing men, otherwise editors.”

After one man was acquitted of killing the editor of the Leavenworth Times, the Marion County Record wrote, “That’s just the way with some juries—they think it no more harm to shoot an editor than a jack-rabbit.”

Fortunately, today’s disgruntled readers are more likely to drop a subscription than drop an editor, that is, if anyone still reads a newspaper.

For more than a hundred and fifty years, the death of newspapers had been predicted.  It was once thought that the telegraph would do the ghastly deed. Instead, it was the Internet. 

        “Yesterday’s gone on down the river and you can’t get it back.”

One of my favorite books is Lonesome Dove, and it’s hard to believe that it’s been 35 years since the TV mini-series thrilled millions of viewers.  Based on the book Written by Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove is about two retired Texas Rangers, “Gus” McCrae and “Woodrow” Call who drive a herd of cattle from Texas to Montana. 

The Pulitzer Prize-winning story was loosely based on the true story of Charles Goodnight’s and Oliver Loving’s cattle drive from Texas to Montana. Goodnight and Loving were close friends. Before Loving died, he asked that his body be returned to Texas.  He did not want to be buried in a “foreign land.”  Charles Goodnight and Loving’s son, Joseph, carried the metal casket 600 miles back to Texas.

  “I guess this’ll teach me to be careful about what I promise in the future.” 

In Lonesome Dove, Gus dies, and Call carries his friend back to Texas as promised.  If this doesn’t make you cry, I don’t know what will.  

McMurtry originally wrote the story as a short screenplay named Streets of Laredo.  It was supposed to star John Wayne as Call.  But Wayne dropped out and the project was abandoned. 15 years later McMurtry saw an old bus with the phrase “Lonesome Dove Baptist Church” on it.  He revised the book into a novel and changed the name.  (Ah, inspiration.)

“…you ride with an outlaw, you die with an outlaw.”

The book went on to win a Pulitzer Prize. The mini-series also went on to win many awards, including the Golden Globes.  It was cheated out the Emmy by War and Remembrance.  Considered the “Gone With the Wind” of Western movies, Lonesome Dove has sold more DVDs than any other western.

It’s hard to imagine anyone but Robert Duvall as Gus, but he was actually offered the role of Woodrow Call and turned it down.  His wife had read the book and told him, “Whatever you do, don’t let them talk you into playing Woodrow F. Call.  Gus is the part you should play.”

James Garner was also considered for the role, but he had to turn it down because of health problems. 

McMurtry said that he wrote Lonesome Dove to show the real hardships of living a cattleman’s life vs. the romantic life many think they lived. Some think he failed in this regard. Instead, many readers and critics see Lonesome Dove as a celebration of frontier life. 

Have you read the book or seen the mini-series?  If so, what part stood out for you?

Recently, it was my granddaughter’s prom night. The students met beforehand for three hours of picture-taking.  I showed my age by commenting that Matthew Brady and his helpers were able to record the entire Civil War with only 1100 photographs. I wonder what he would think today if he knew that a simple high school prom required many times that number.

I’ve always been interested in old-time photography and have nothing but awe for the brave souls who first took camera in hand.  Not only did they contend with unwieldy equipment but also dangerous chemicals and exploding labs.

Women had an advantage over male photographers who were often confounded by female dress. This explains why one photographer advertised in 1861 for an assistant, “Who Understands the Hairdressing Business.”

Women also had a few tricks up their leg of mutton sleeves—or rather their skirts.  Elizabeth Withington invented a “dark thick dress skirt” to use as a developing tent when she traveled. 

Then there was Julia Shannon of San Francisco who, in 1850, took the family portrait to new heights when she shockingly advertised herself as a daguerreotypist and midwife. 

Women photographers were no better than men in preventing the cheerless faces in those early photographs. The sourpuss expressions were partly due to the uncomfortable vices that held heads still for long periods of time. Photographers used all sorts of devices to hold a client’s interest.  One even had a trained monkey. Another photographer had a canary that sang on command.  Mechanical birds were a favorite gimmick and “Watch the birdie” became a familiar refrain in studios across the country.

Magazines and newspapers ran ample advice for posing.  An 1877 edition of The Chicago Inter-Ocean advised women with large mouths to say the word “Flip,” although one photographer preferred the word “Prunes.” If a small mouth was the problem the word “Cabbage” would make it appear larger.

Not everyone was enamored with cameras.  One dog owner put up a sign warning “photographers and other tramps to stay away” after his dog had an unfortunate run-in with a tripod.

Did photography have a bearing on the suffragette movement?  Indeed, it did, but it appeared to be more of a detriment than a help.  The photographs of militant suffragettes or women dressed in bloomers did more harm than good.

If you think America was tough on suffragettes, think again. The women’s rights movement was considered the biggest threat to the British Empire.  According to the National Archives, the votes-for-women movement became the first “terrorist” organization subjected to secret surveillance photography in the world. 

Photography has come a long way since those early daguerreotype days.  One can only imagine what the brave souls of yesteryear would think of today’s “aim and click” cameras and cell phones.  Nowadays you can’t even drive down the street without having your picture taken. The only defense we have is to not leave the house unless we’re ready for a close-up.

I’ve got candy on my mind and it has nothing to do with Valentine’s Day or the empty box of chocolates on my desk. The real reason I’m thinking of all things sweet is that I just finished a book about a heroine who owns a candy shop. 

While doing the research for my book, I turned up some fun and interesting facts. For example, we can blame our sweet tooth on our cavemen ancestors and their fondness for honey.  But the most surprising thing I discovered was that marshmallows grow on trees—or at least used to.  That was before the French came up with a way to replace the sweet sap from the mallow tree with gelatin. 

I also learned that during the middle ages, the price of sugar was so high that only the rich could afford a sweet treat.  In fact, candy was such a rarity that the most children could expect was an occasional sugar plum at Christmas.  (BTW: there are no plums in sugar plums.  Plum is another word for good). 

This changed during the early nineteenth century with the discovery of sugar-beet juice and mechanical candy-making machines. 

Soon jars of colorful penny candy could be found in every trading post and general store in the country. It took almost four hundred candy manufacturing companies to keep up with the demand. 

This changed the market considerably. Children as young as four or five were now able to make purchases independent of their parents. (Had youngsters known that vegetables including spinach were used to color candy, they might not have wasted their money.) 

Children weren’t the only ones enjoying the availability of cheap candy. Civil War soldiers favored gumdrops, jelly beans, hard candy and hub wafers (now known as Necco wafers). 

Never one to miss a trend, John Arbuckle of coffee fame, noted the sugar craze that had swept the country and decided to use it as a marketing tool.  He included a peppermint stick in each pound bag of Arbuckle’s coffee to encourage sales. 

 “Who wants the peppermint?” was a familiar cry around chuck wagons. 

This call to grind the coffee beans got a rash of volunteers.  No rough and tumble cowboy worth his salt would turn down a stick of peppermint candy, especially when out on the trail.

Arbuckle wasn’t the only one to see gold in candy. Outlaw Doc Scurlock, friend of Billy the Kid and a Bloody Lincoln County War participant, retired from crime in 1880. Though he was still a wanted man, he moved to Texas and opened up a candy store.

Cadbury, Mars and Hershey rode herd on the chocolate boom of the late 1800s, early 1900s.  Penny candy still made up eighteen percent of candy sales but, by that time, some merchants had refused to sell it.  Profits were thin and selling such small amounts to children was time-consuming. Chocolate was more profitable. The penny candy market vanished altogether during World War II when sugar was rationed.  Fortunately, no war could do away with chocolate.

As a child, Saturdays were my favorite day of the week. I remember getting up early and rushing through chores just so I could spend the afternoons watching Westerns.  I had an unstable childhood, so I found comfort in the predictability of those old shoot-em-ups.  When a cowboy rode into town, you just knew he would set things straight before riding into the sunset. 

I also knew that when the camera zoomed onto the hero’s spurs as he walked into a saloon, the message was clear.  No one had better mess with him. 

I became fixated on spurs and for good reason. As a foster child, I was constantly being bounced from family to family. This meant I was forever having to change locations.  But the hardest part for me was having to walk into a new school, which I did more times than I can remember. This always made me feel like an outsider. Because I was shy, thin as a rail, wore glasses, and had red hair, I endured much teasing. No one called it bullying back then, but in modern terms, that’s what it was. 

After going through an especially hard first day at a new school, I remember thinking enough was enough. Would Hoot Gibson, Ken Maynard or Bob Steele stand around while the town picked on them? They would not! Only ten at the time, I decided what I needed was spurs, just like my favorite western heroes wore. The next time I walked into a new school, my spurs would send a clear message that no one better mess with me.

Convinced I had an answer to my problem, I asked for spurs the following Christmas but never got them.  It didn’t matter. The next time I walked into a new school, I pretended I was wearing spurs just like I’d seen one of my cowboy heroes do the previous Saturday.  They only jingled in my head but, you know what?  It worked.  Somehow the jingle-jangle sound that only I could hear helped drown out the teasing and that made me smile.  And that smile helped me do something I’d not been able to do at other schools: make new friends.  It was a lesson I never forgot.

In that spirit, I wish you all a jingle-jangle holiday season filled with lots of smiles, good friends, and loving families.  May all your spurs, imagined or real, be shiny ones and bring good things your way. 

We’ve all heard of Old West cattle drives, but did you ever hear of a turkey drive?

If you raised turkeys during the early nineteenth century and wanted to get them to market in time for Thanksgiving or Christmas, there was only one way to do it; you had to walk them.

Before refrigerator boxcars and trucks, drovers herded turkeys thousands of miles to markets or railheads. They crossed mountains, plains and deserts. In 1863 Horace Greenley walked five hundred turkeys from Iowa to Colorado, a trek of six hundred miles.  His wagon was packed with corn and drawn by six horses and mules, but his turkeys grew fat by devouring grasshoppers. 

Greeley wasn’t the only one with a long trek. It was once to a year for breeding herd to be driven from New Mexico Territory to California.  Some farmers hired boy drovers to help keep the feathered hikers in line, others used dogs.

Turkeys are temperamental birds, but they are fast walkers.  With no distractions, the wind behind them and a certain amount of luck, they can travel twenty-five miles a day.  They also have strange habits. One early drover complained that if his turkeys had a mind to, they would bed down at three in the afternoon and nothing or no one could change their minds.

Cattle had nothing on turkeys as far as stampedes were concerned.  A rifle shot, howling coyote or flutter of paper could put drumsticks on the run.  One poor drover herding his rafter of turkeys through town had to give chase when a streetlight turned on.

Turkeys liked to roost in trees, but roofs were favored, too, sometimes with disastrous results.  When a flock traveling from Vermont to Boston roosted on a schoolhouse, the roof caved in and the late-working schoolmaster barely escaped with his life.  Another flock flew onto the roof of a toll bridge and the drover’s profits went toward replacing the roof.   

Turkey farmers have it easy today in comparison and, so for that matter, do we.  Now we can enjoy our Thanksgiving dinner without having to worry about the roof caving in.

Hope you have a great Thanksgiving!