Marilyn June Coffey

This is a story of a family in the early 1900s-a time when the anxiety of World War I was running high, the suffrage movement was in full swing across the country, and many families struggled to cope with a bleak and troubling outlook. In her trademark storytelling style, author Marilyn June Coffey beautifully paints the portrait of a family, who despite the woes of the world outside, fills their home with love and warmth, along with the excitement of new opportunites for their future. The family watched with fear as an accident changed everything in one stroke, and colored their world with a different brush.

Award-winning Great Plains writer Marilyn Coffey recounts her family's intricate dance with the Teamsters, beginning with her dad's tiny trucking company spawned on a front porch in 1929, in a David-and-Goliath encounter that spanned decades.In 1956, Tom Coffey knuckled under Jimmy Hoffa's six-month-long Teamsters strike. He sold his twenty-seven-year-old truckline, Coffey's Transfer Company, rather than sign Hoffa's contract. But the story didn't end there-and Hoffa didn't win after all. In 1958, the Coffey family gathered in Washington, DC, to see Tom testify against Jimmy Hoffa before then-Senator John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, the Rackets Committee's counsel who had sworn to put Hoffa behind bars. Get the exclusive insider's perspective with Marilyn's firsthand narrative of this feud in That Punk Jimmy Hoffa

On they came, from Belgium and New Hampshire, from Ireland, Germany and Scandinavia, from the Chicago fire, from the territories: Utah, Wyoming, Kansas, the Dakotas. All the way they brawled, about Indians, about border lines, about slavery, about who was the bigger imbecile. And then they fought County Seat Wars in most of the 3,000 new counties. A thousand of those remaining ended up in south central Nebraska, scrapping about Harlan County and which still-imagined town should hold the seat of government.