Saving Grace: A Story of Adoption

From the Author of the Amazon #1 Best Seller The Book of Barkley – Love and Life Through the Eyes of a Labrador Retriever – a story of family, redemption, and hope.

It started with a piece of paper–a birth certificate, sent to the author’s parents long after her birth. There is much history in that piece of paper. For she was born to an unwed mother in the generation prior to Roe v. Wade, on a warm day in August-a small, painful beginning in which she had been an unwilling participant, yet one that would shape her destiny. She is adopted into a loving home with another child that would become her beloved brother. She finds herself pregnant; she’s a teen and a college student, abandoned at the news.

The options are obvious, but there is only one decision she could make: to give her child up to a family praying for one, and walking away.

Saving Grace is more than a story of adoption. It’s a deep look into family-at hope and faith and why we end our days surrounded by souls that may not bear our name or share our blood, but who are our true family.

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Coming to Las Vegas, A true tale of sex, drugs & Sin City in the ’70s

In 1973 graphic designer Carolyn Hamilton comes from Los Angeles to the little desert town of Las Vegas with boyfriend Del to join the business side of the newly-formed Las Vegas International Circus. Del will be their general manager and Carolyn will handle advance publicity. They look forward to an adventurous life on the road in both the United States and Central America.

The circus business takes longer than anticipated to be ready to travel, and Carolyn and Del are not being paid. Inevitably they run out of money.

Carolyn gets a job as a cocktail waitress in the soon-to-open MGM Grand Hotel/Casino. She’s not impressed with this desert town and wants to make just enough money to get back to L.A.

Through DEA connections and nefarious means, Del gets the position as bailiff for District Court Judge Paul Goldman.

The circus finally goes to Central America without them. This turns out to be fortunate because when the owner insults a foreign government official, all equipment is confiscated and everyone is jailed and ultimately deported to their birth countries.

Carolyn and Del marry, but when Del’s ex-wife surfaces he is revealed as a bigamist. Good to have a District Court Judge to fix this new challenge.

Working cocktails at the MGM turns out to be more colorful than a nice Lutheran girl from Seattle would think: rumors, parties, stealing, sex, drinking and drugs are the main entertainment for a bored crew of cocktail waitresses, bartenders, dealers and floormen.

Carolyn faces a personal challenge when she becomes pregnant. Del, who is 16 years older, does not want children and thinks abortion is still illegal. Carolyn has her own secret reason for wanting the abortion.

Some cocktail waitresses date culinary union bosses, who have their own high drama of payoffs, fights for control, fire bombings and an 18-day culinary union strike that cripples Las Vegas.

Hailing from a loyal Teamster’s Union family (her father was a laundry delivery driver in Seattle), Carolyn gets surprising and revealing insight into union operations.

After a drunken ménage a quatre with two other waitresses and a casino floorman, Carolyn decides this is not the kind of life she wants for herself. After three years of glitz and glamour and earning gobs of money, she leaves the MGM to rediscover her personal values and her commitment to her marriage.

Each story told in this memoir—of the Martin Scorsese “Casino” era of Las Vegas—is true, and many are humorous as well as outrageous.

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It Takes a Village – The Integration of the Hillburn School System

Hillburn is a village of approximately 1,000 residents, just 40 miles northwest of New York City and, until 1943, its elementary school children were sent to separate schools, divided by race.

The Hillburn Main School (known locally as the “white school”) was a modern 2-story stucco building with many amenities necessary to foster learning. Brook School (known locally as the “colored school”) was a rundown, small building that looked more like a house than a school and it lacked indoor plumbing, physical education space, or even a library.

The integration of the school system was the result of the efforts of Alexander family patriarch, Thomas Ulysses Alexander, who was the president of the local NAACP chapter, along with representatives of the NAACP legal department, including attorney Thurgood Marshall.

The book tells the story of how these two men, and others, successfully forced the school board to close Brook School in 1943, over a decade before the historic U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education.

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