Ron Rozelle – författare

Mark Twain couldnt have penned a finer boyhood than mine. I was Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer rolled into one, and Harrisonburg was any moon-washed river town that Huck and Jim would have floated past on their raft. While much of the nation forged headlong into the relatively new century, shooting skyscrapers higher and higher and flying aircraft unfathomable distances, Harrisonburg and its neighboring towns clung comfortably to the past, making do with mostly one story buildings, as many horse-drawn wagons as motorcars, and boats that had slowly plied the river for decades. Anyone making their way up to the town from the river had to pass the top of the bluff, between a pair of businesses owned by Arch Aplin, Esquire. Who was, in addition to being my father, a walking embodiment of an entrepreneur. One business being a cotton gin and the other a general mercantile store.Before I was old enough to venture out on my own or to go to school, my mother would take me with her to the store every early morning and Id stay there all day, watching the shoppers come and go. When it was time for a nap, Id stretch out on a cot in the back room and close my eyes and take in all the smells of the place and listen as women chattered away around the stove. The jingling bell over the front door and the clanging of the cash register are perhaps the earliest sounds I remember. Theyve played like a sweet tune down the years. Ive finally come to realize that they really might have been more than just pleasing sounds. They may have been a sirens call to the inviting waters of commerce.

On March 18, 1937, a spark ignited a vast pool of natural gas that had collected beneath the school building in New London, a tiny community in East Texas. The resulting explosion leveled the four-year-old structure and resulted in a death toll of more than three hundred—most of them children. To this day, it is the worst school disaster in the history of the United States. The tragedy and its aftermath were the first big stories covered by Walter Cronkite, then a young wire service reporter stationed in Dallas. He would later say that no war story he ever covered—during World War II or Vietnam—was as heart-wrenching.In the weeks following the tragedy, a fact-finding committee sought to determine who was to blame. It soon became apparent that the New London school district had, along with almost all local businesses and residents, tapped into pipelines carrying unrefined gas from the plentiful oil fields of the area. It was technically illegal, but natural gas was in abundance in the “Oil Patch.” The jerry-rigged conduits leaked the odorless “green” gas that would destroy the school.A long-term effect of the disaster was the shared guilt experienced—for the rest of their lives—by most of the survivors. There is, perhaps, no better example than Bill Thompson, who was in his fifth grade English class and “in the mood to flirt” with Billie Sue Hall, who was sitting two seats away. Thompson asked another girl to trade seats with him. She agreed—and was killed in the explosion, while Thompson and Hall both survived and lived long lives, never quite coming to terms with their good fortune.My Boys and Girls Are in There: The 1937 New London School Explosion is a meticulous, candid account by veteran educator and experienced author Ron Rozelle. Unfolding with the narrative pace of a novel, the story woven by Rozelle—beginning with the title—combines the anguished words of eyewitnesses with telling details from the historical and legal record. Released to coincide with the seventy-fifth anniversary of the New London School disaster, My Boys and Girls Are in There paints an intensely human portrait of this horrific event.

Leaving the Country of Sin is a tale of Rafferty, who was saved as a teenager from a promising career of juvenile delinquency and slapped into a six-year hitch in the army to avoid jail time. Early on his anger and fierce resolve catch the attention of an officer in charge of a small cadre of soldiers who provide unique, subdued solutions to problems that are too sensitive for more obvious snipers or commandos. But it is also the story of the inner reckoning the central character faces once his army career is complete. Rafferty, having long determined to retire on Galveston Island, which he had visited as a child with his uncle, hovers between seeing his past deeds as providing a patriotic service and just another form of murder. The dilemma is intensified when his old mentor, the general who pulled him into that world and managed him for two decades, shows up with an assignment that will rid the world of a very  evil man, whose actions threaten the security of the nation. Thus the story, already an inward journey motif, becomes a real one, sending Rafferty off on what he determines is his last mission, one he wishes hadn’t fallen to him.The Sabine Series in Literature

Winner of the 2000 Texas Review Fiction Prize Set in Galveston during the 1900 storm, the most devastating natural disaster in the history of the United States, this sweeping novel follows the fates of several richly drawn characters. It is the story of Sal, the little girl who is wise beyond her years and who holds out as much hope for the world as she does for her father, the ruined son of a respected father. It is the story of Sister Zilphia, the nun who helps run the St. Mary's Orphanage. The only thing separating the two long buildings of the orphanage is a fragile line of sand dunes; the only thing separating Zilphia from the world is the brittle faith that she has been sent there to consider. A faith that has never been truly tested. Until now. And it is the story of Galveston herself, the grand old lady of the Gulf Coast, with her harbor filled with ships from the world over; her Victorian homes and her brothels and her grand pavilions set in their own parks; and her stately mansions along Broadway, the highest ground on the island, at eight feet above sea level. All must face their darkest night now, as nature hurls the worst she can muster at the narrow strip of sand and saltgrass that is doomed to become, for a time, part of the ocean floor. This is the story of heroes and villains, of courage and sacrifice and, most of all, of people trying desperately to survive. And it is the story of an era now gone, of splendor and injustice, filled with the simple joy of living.Prologue It started raining after midnight. At first a few heavy drops, as large as pebbles, splattered against windows, and spotted the dry pavement of the streets. They plinked into half-full troughs of dirty water outside the saloons on Post Office Street; horses tied there winced against the stings. People inside the saloons-sailors and dock workers and whores-paid no attention to the steadily quickening tattoo being pelted out on the tin sheets or slates of the roofs but kept to the business at hand: the drinking, and gambling, and the sweaty, brief stabbing away at the very oldest of human exertions. Some of Galveston's people, in other parts of the city, listened to the rain from their beds. A few, who had looked up that day at the Levy Building on Market Street and noticed the pair of warning flags that flew from the fourth-floor offices of the Weather Bureau, knew that this was the first, slow calling card of a tropical storm. Isaac Cline, the chief of the bureau, had hoisted the flags on Friday morning, and they had danced and popped in the brisk north wind all day. The red one, with the black box in its middle, meant that a particularly malevolent storm was a possibility. The white one, above it, meant that if it came, it would come from the northwest. But not too many people had seen the flags. And now the first big drops of rain plopped into the sand dunes and salt grass of the island and slid through the muted light of the gas street lights in town, and nobody paid much attention to them. Those in bed closed their eyes and let the tapping of the rain sing them to sleep. It had come a long way, this storm. Almost two weeks before, somewhere on the immense, swaying surface of the eternal Atlantic, a small portion of the sea had rebelled against the unremitting late summer heat, and heaved itself up in protest. Africa lay a thousand miles to the east, over the vast, bowl­like curve of the world, and many more thousands of miles of ocean and sky stretched endlessly to the west. The air above the place had become suddenly full of new, burdensome moisture.

Set in Galveston during the 1900 storm, the most devastating natural disaster in the history of the United States, this sweeping novel follows the fates of several richly drawn characters. And it is the story of Galveston herself, the grand old lady of the Gulf Coast, with her harbor filled with ships from the world over; her Victorian homes and her brothels and her grand pavilions set in their own parks; and her stately mansions along Broadway, the highest ground on the island, at eight feet above sea level. All must face their darkest night now, as nature hurls the worst she can muster at the narrow strip of sand and salt grass that is doomed to become, for a time, part of the ocean floor. This is the story of heroes and villains, of courage and sacrifice and, most of all, of people trying desperately to survive. And it is the story of an era now gone, of splendor and injustice, filled with the simple joy of living. For the first time in hardcover, The 25th Anniversary Edition includes a new preface from the author.