Doug McGuinn

THE BEAVER DAM RAILROAD AND THE CRANDULL & SHADY VALLEY RAILWAY OF JOHNSON COUNTY, TENNESSEE contains the history of two northeastern Tennessee short lines: the Beaver Dam Railroad and the Crandull & Shady Valley Railway, both located in Shady Valley, TN. The Empire Lumber and Mining Company, located in Crandull, 8.5 miles south of the Virginia/Tennessee state line, in Johnson County, built the railroads in order to exploit Shady Valley's vast timber and manganese deposits.

The six stories contained in this collection may all be different in their contents, but they all share one common theme: they are all set in North Africa. Scattered throughout the book are images from the author's postcard collection.

THE "VIRGINIA CREEPER" is a historically accurate (although the author admits having to use his "poetic license" a few times) novel about the rise and fall of the lumber/railroad town of Elkland (present-day Todd), N.C, the rise and fall of a lumber/passenger train, the Virginia-Carolina (aka the "Virginia Creeper"), and the rise and fall of a lumber company (the Hassinger Lumber Company) and the company town (Konnarock, Va.) the lumber company created.

"To hell with the ET&WNC, we'll start our own railroad " Those words were spoken in anger by Lewis Gasteinger, general manager of the newly formed Pittsburgh Lumber Company in Carter County, Tennessee, to William Flinn, president of the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania construction firm of Booth & Flinn, which had recently, in 1909, purchased 12,00 acres of virgin-timber land in the Dennis Cove area of northeastern Tennessee. The lumber company needed a way to take the finished wood to market. They approached a local railroad called the East Tennessee and Western North Carolina (aka "Tweetsie"), seeking to build a spur from the firm's sawmill, located about one-half mile east of the Carter County village of Hampton. No satisfactory arrangement, however, could be agreed upon. So the Pittsburgh Lumber Company decided to build its own railroad. Incorporated in April 1910, the railroad ran from Elizabethton to Laban, Tennessee, a distance of 14.9 miles, the mainline mostly following the Laurel Fork of the Doe River.

All nine-going-on-ten-year-old Wade McHenry wanted to do at the beginning of the summer of 1956 was to join his daddy, an Air Force serviceman, in North Africa. The Suez Canal crisis, however, delayed the plans. While Wade and his mother waited for the crisis to end, Wade had to risk his live to save the life of a gravely ill relative, work against time to exonerate his hero, who had been accused of a crime Wade was convinced he did not commit, and suffer from what Wade saw as a betrayal by a much older woman with whom he had fallen madly in love. Before the summer was over, Wade learned that heroes are not super¬humans, but ordinary people capable of extraordinary acts of courage.

Writing this book has helped me psychologically. It was, in part, written to help me deal with the death of my eldest son, Jamie, who was killed at the age of 23, on October 5, 2006, the day before my 59th birthday. The seed for this book was planted in my head while I was practicing my kick with a kickboard at the swimming pool at the gym I go to. For some reason, I had this crazy idea of quitting teaching and becoming a lifeguard. The idea of sitting high up there in a lifeguard stand and thinking great thoughts between heroic rescues of saving people from drowning, really appealed to me. This book is sort of a reverse coming-of-age story; maybe a going-of-age story. In it are a series of essays about my growing up and my growing old, as well as an on-going novella based loosely on my swim clinics.

Bumbling to Zion is set in the years 1966 and 1967, probably two of the most turbulent years of the Vietnam War era. Matt McCoy, the main character, is fresh out of high school and needs to enroll in an institute of higher learning (any institute) in order to receive a student deferment from the draft. Because of his bad high school grades, Matt is only accepted at Pure White Light Bible College in Flinthill, Tennessee. The pro-war beliefs at the ultra conservative college and Matt's anti-war beliefs are regularly in conflict. Matt, however, ends up falling in love with one of the college's fundamentalist students and befriending the preacher of the Sink Mountain Signs' Following Church of the Prince of Peace, whose congregation follows the signs mentioned in Mark 16: signs like speaking in tongues, drinking deadly things, and taking up serpents. To his surprise, Matt discovers that the beliefs of the signs' followers, and his own anti-war, anti-government beliefs aren't that much different. During the summer of 1967 (the "Summer of Love") Matt goes to Haight-Ashbury, where he gets involved in the whole hippie scene. A disillusioned Matt McCoy, however, escapes from Haight- Ashbury and returns to his native east Tennessee, where, he realizes, he belonged all along.