Roseburg 1959 - Softcover

George Byron Wright

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0963265547 ISBN 13: 9780963265548

Publisher: C3 Publications, 2007

Synopsis

On August 7, 1959, at 1:14 a.m., a truckload of explosives blows up, gutting twelve square blocks of downtown Roseburg, Oregon. Ross Bagby stands at the edge the conflagration unaware that his so-called life has also just gone up in the flames. Ross s often humiliating marriage to the granddaughter of timber baron Jonah Armbruster is already an exercise of placid endurance. But when war hero Colonel Gordon Butler McKenzie, the figurehead director of the Armbruster charitable foundation, is with the wrong woman when the town explodes, Ross inherits complications he could never have imagined. A piece of shrapnel puts the Colonel in a coma and Ross, as his assistant, is appointed to replace him. Things immediately get messy when a belligerent board member accuses Ross of embezzling foundation funds. While Ross vents his denial of the theft, the woman the Colonel was with turns up pregnant. Things darken further when Ross receives anonymous letters decrying the sexual exploitation of vulnerable women by men in positions of influence. The desperate letters are pleas for Ross to act on their behalf, to make the abuse go away so the women can have their lives back. Along with his own infatuation with a young waitress, Ross faces layers of adversity such as he has never known. In the days ahead, he will discover what he's made of.

About this title

About the Author:

George Byron Wright was born in The Dalles, Oregon. Along with his mother and brother, he migrated to three other small Oregon towns as his father pursued the life of a mortician. Living in Baker City, Tillamook and Roseburg endowed him with a lifelong fondness for small places. Following a lengthy career in the not-for-profit sector, during which time he wrote professionally, publishing books on management and board development, George returned to his love of fiction. In 1996 he began work on what has become his Oregon Trio , three novels set in the small towns of his youth. BAKER CITY 1948 was published in 2005, followed by TILLAMOOK 1952 in 2006, and now ROSEBURG 1959, completes this unique body of work. George lives with his wife and first reader, Betsy, in Portland, Oregon.

Review:

'Roseburg 1959' a novel look at the Blast George Byron Wright lived in Roseburg when he was a pre-teen, but was not living here in August 1959 when the city suffered the nearest thing to the devastation of war of any city in America the day a dynamite truck caught fire and exploded, taking out 12 blocks in the core of the city. Yet, that traumatic incident serves as what he calls the tapestry for his new book, Roseburg 1959. The book is a novel and while Wright certainly works with the explosion and the aftermath in a factual manner, it only serves as the vehicle for him to tell the story of Ross Bagby, the novel's protagonist. The soap opera drama that unfolds is when he marries Maybelle Armbruster, the granddaughter of Jonah K. Armbruster, a lumber baron in Douglas County. He considers himself a kept man losing his own identity when he agrees to work for the Jonah Armbruster Foundation headed by a local Lothario named Gordon McKenzie, a pseudo war hero. The book opens when Ross is jolted out of bed by the blast. Wright emphasizes the book and its characters are fiction, but the story is written around the facts of the early morning 1959 blast when a Pacific Powder Co. truck from Tenino, Wash., carrying six tons of explosives, is parked on an empty street next to the Gerretsen Building Supply Co. and explodes. At that time, Gerretsen's was located where the now vacant Farm Bureau store is today. Interestingly, in the beginning of the book, the scenes are all too familiar to any resident of the community today, street names, cafes, buildings, even Mercy and Douglas Community hospitals and the VA hospital. Ross is almost immediately involved in a coverup of the foundation's leader, Col. McKenzie who is seriously injured in the blast while in bed with the wrong woman. He is secreted from the scene and taken to the VA hospital. He is in a coma as a result of the head injuries he sustained. Ross is appointed to head the foundation on an interim basis. An audit finds a substantial amount of money is missing and Ross is accused of embezzlement and the plot deepens. Wright says he was 10 years old when his father, a mortician, moved his family into an upstairs apartment above Long & Orr Mortuary, now Long and Shukle. His family had moved away in 1952, seven years before the blast. He said memories of the town stayed with him and he plotted his story around that event. It is his third novel, all uniquely about events that happened in the Oregon cities of his youth. In 1947, our family moved from The Dalles, my birthplace, so my father could begin his career as a mortician in Baker City, Wright said. Then we moved to Tillamook for a short time before coming to Roseburg in 1950 when my father was hired by Frank Long to work at the Long and Orr Mortuary. It should not be surprising that his first novel was entitled Baker City 1948, based around the murders of women in Baker City that were never solved. His second book was Tillamook 1952, a plot based around the 1933 forest fire that devastated Tillamook County. Wright calls the three novels the Oregon Trio. He explains the three books are not a trilogy, because each is a separate story and there is no connection among the three works, other than he has lived in each of the three locales and draws from that experience to write authoritatively about each area. Wright said he researched the blast by coming to Roseburg, walking the streets, searching the archives at the Douglas County Museum, the Douglas County Library and the newspaper records of the explosion. Interestingly, Wright ends his book, which contains several photos of the disaster, with a quote from The Oregonian: A lesser city might have died on the spot and been consumed in its own funeral pyre. Roseburg rose to the occasion. --Bill Duncan, Roseburg News-Review

About this edition

• Publisher: C3 Publications
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0963265547
• ISBN 13: 9780963265548
• Binding: Perfect Paperback
• Number of pages: 267
• Editor: Karen Brattain
• Illustrator: Dennis Stoval