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Paperback: 380 pages
Publisher: Hollow Square Press/CreateSpace, 2013
ISBN-10: 1492171522      ISBN-13: 978-1492171522
(Available via Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online bookstores and through your local bookstore.)

Lovers and adulterers, heroes and harlots, gossips and thieves, and maybe the occasional ghost (and certainly skeletons in the closets), the Miller and Baker families had their share, and Tom is willing to tell all. This memoir, initially written for distribution to family members, had been intended for eventual publication, but the author did not get around to editing it before his death. His friend Jonathan has managed that feat in part as a gift to the Miller family as well as to any reader intrigued by the tale of a boy growing up and his life in Southern Illinois and Las Cruces, New Mexico in the 1920s and 1930s (with family tales tall and otherwise taking it back further in time and the author's own musings bringing it well into the early 2000s). Since the author had always thought of himself primarily as a lyricist, a selection from his musical plays and his occasional lyrics appears at the end. Readers who have met the author through his autobiographical World War II novel Boy at Sea and  A
Fever of the Mad
, his memoir about working as a film publicist, will be pleased to see this earlier version of the Tom they have come to know. His late sister Norma Miller was invaluable to him in providing stories from the past and reminders and refreshers on tales he remembered. Quotations from her diaries and from letters written by various family members and friends add to the pleasure of the work.

For your enjoyment, there is a slideshow feauring Tom's parents, James Clyde Miller and Addie May Baker Miller and his stepmother Leannah Orr Miller.

Following that is another slideshow featuring his sister Norma.

As practically a co-author of this work and as a third major influence on Tom's life, Norma Miller (1906 - 2000) certainly deserves her own slide show. Readers of the book may find this particularly useful as a guide to how Norma looked over time. To me, she was not exactly beautiful, but with her stature, her intelligence, and her stylish manner of dress she apparently attracted men like honey does flies. Or so it would seem from the beaus and dates and boyfriends of hers one meets in the book. The photographs certainly vary in quality, and for that I make no apology.
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