Snady : A Memoir

TELL ME ABOUT YOUR LIFE.

That’s how this touching, humorous and ultimately poignant memoir begins, as Sandy Ranger—aka Snady—puts it all down to capture the time and sense of place and the energy of everything she’s experienced as a daughter, wife, mother and grandmother. After she learned a shocking truth at five years old, that she almost never was, Snady whisks us along to the “World of Tomorrow,” the 1939-40 World’s Fair, in a propeller plane piloted by her original hero Frank Park Fall. We meet her mother Ethel Catherine Fox, a Michigan native and self-professed “nervous Nelly” who, despite being born in 1894 in the Motor City at the historic dawn of the automobile age, never got a driver’s license.

Coming of age and moving into adulthood during the 1940s and 1950s, Snady experiences the postwar surge of American industrialism in Detroit, the epicenter of automotive ingenuity. She takes us inside one of her first jobs at the advertising agency Kenyon & Eckhardt in downtown Detroit, a workplace in parallel with the hyper-sexism of 1950s culture. When Snady meets Edward McDonald Ranger, the future course of her life—as mother and grandmother—is set.

The narrative travels far and wide from the verdant fields of Pennsylvania, to Michigan and the stark beauty of the Arizona desert. Lovingly told, with clear precision, "Snady" is a reflection on a life well lived, a memoir to keep it all alive to live and breathe again.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS
GRACE SANDRA FALL RANGER was born in 1934 in Philadelphia, and in 1939 flew to the World’s Fair in New York with her father piloting his own plane. She has lived in Pennsylvania, Michigan and, since 1979, Arizona. She is the mother of five children and has thirteen grandchildren. She has traveled to more than twenty-five countries, experienced three earthquakes on two continents and, at age 69, became certified as a yoga instructor. She has hiked to the bottom of the Grand Canyon twice, including when she was 80 to celebrate her birthday. This is her first book.

LANDON J. NAPOLEON is the award-winning and critically acclaimed author of numerous fiction and nonfiction books that have been translated into multiple foreign editions. He is a previous Barnes & Noble “Discover Great New Writers” finalist, his debut novel “ZigZag” was adapted into a film, and his nonfiction biography “Burning Shield: The Jason Schechterle Story” was a “The Arizona Republic Recommends” selection. He has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Arizona State University and a master’s degree in creative writing from University of Glasgow in Scotland. He lives in Arizona.