Kirjahaku

Frank Guittard, for years history department chair at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, was facing his personal Everest. His university president Samuel P. Brooks had strongly advised him to go back to school and earn his doctorate. So now at age fifty-six Frank was sweating blood at Stanford as the oldest student in the room and occasionally wondering why he had agreed to do it. Brooks, who was not well at the time, had his own ultimate challenge-defending against an unrelenting fundamentalist archenemy intent on exposing alleged evolutionists on Baylor's faculty, the battle requiring Brooks to adopt increasingly aggressive defensive strategies to protect academic freedom. These lively, colorful letters from the 1920s by an unassuming professor and his family are bound to entertain, resonate, and inform with their "everyman" and "you are there" feeling. Frank's family members went about their normal, everyday lives. Praise for A Ph.D.'s Reverie: The Letters "...eminently enjoyable..." - Kimberly R. Kellison "...illuminating and entertaining..." - Paul Emory Putz "...masterful, interwoven portrait..." - William F. Cooper "...artful and compelling..." - Ken Bain "...a completely unique form of biography..." - Charles W. McGarry

What can happen when an 80-year-old Dallas widower meets an 80-year-old Austin widow and they discover they have a lot in common? Several things, one right after another. They start emailing and texting each other, telling each other their stories from eight decades of living apart; then, in a matter of weeks, deciding to get married, and, soon after, resolving to tell a broader audience the stories they had been telling each other. Front and center is their courtship experience itself told through their emails, combined with Charles and Nancy's separate accounts of growing up. Charles details his parents' attempts to polish him and wise him up about sex; his efforts to combat his social anxiety; stories about lassos, bullwhips, and crossbows; one disastrous bridge game and a biology science project gone wrong; and tortured therapeutic sessions with pediatric nurses, orthodontists, and dermatologists. Nancy's separately chronicles her efforts competing at tennis, swimming, and singing; relationships that went nowhere; days as a civil rights protester; moments as a college prankster; slow-dancing with a boy wearing contact lenses; the family dog that ate a chicken; and her adventure at the laundromat. Finally, for those who are really thinking things over, wondering about the hereafter, a sobering fantasy of a final judgment day concludes this memoir. Charles Francis Guittard is retired trial attorney and mediator; teacher, coach, and trainer; and author of I WILL TEACH HISTORY, The Life & Times of Francis Gevrier Guittard, the 3rd volume of a trilogy chronicling the life of a long-time professor of history at Baylor University. memoir, late-life romance, 1950s, teenagers growing up, orthodontists, dance lessons, bridge games, tennis competitions, scouts, high school debate, sex education