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Hello, Reader

For almost a year now I've been promising new books, and the first one will be coming in a few weeks. More on that just below. I've been working very hard to get the Undertold Texas Volume 1 done for a release at the end of April since that is tied to my online Rice University Continuing Studies course that starts in mid-March. Not to make it confusing, but the course will highlight 64 subjects over 8 weeks. I've got book chapters done for 50 of those now! The book itself will only have 48 subjects because of space and size constraints. But it all comes out even with 4 books and 3 Rice courses, if they decide they want more. I'm excited about the whole project.

New to View

Coming in February is Wingo: The Remarkable Life of an Ordinary Man. It's a fictional memoir recounted to the writer by a 116-year old man. The old fellow spent his life in baseball, but many of the stories are as much about life, love, loneliness, and coming of age as anything else. It is also a very personal and rollicking tour through American history beginning on the first day of the 20th century. One more thing, it is intended to be laugh out loud funny.

I can't give you an exact release date, but the inside of the book is now formatted, and the cover is being developed. I'm still working on the blurb and back matter. Details will be forthcoming including an informal book release celebration and hopefully some signings after that, perhaps in Houston and Austin. Meanwhile, here's the first sneak peek ever offered. It involves the most famous ballplayer of all time - Babe Ruth. The year is 1924, and our old man Rube Wingo is recounting a tale:

At the time, the Babe was living at the Ansonia Hotel on Broadway at West 73rd. It was some kind of rolling party at that place, too, boy. Babe was the king of the roost. He paraded all over the joint in his bathrobe, even down to the barber shop in the basement. Usually that New Brunswick hound dog padded along in his wake.

Chippies would drop in and out of the big hotel at all hours of the day. The Babe had something to do with it, sure, but the bigger truth is that it was one of those times and places where the younger folks were not at all particular about who they boffed. Seeing a couple of total strangers macking in the elevator lobby was the norm.

I reckon I had my share of fun whilst I was a hanger on there, but not all of it was on the sheets. Once, had to be after midnight on a game day, the party had wound down to the Babe, Long Bob Meusel, myself and a bob-haired floozie in a tasselly green dress. She had passed out and then rallied to start back on the champagne. As I recall, she had enough makeup smeared on her cheeks by that time to pass for an opera clown, and her left stocking had a run in the thigh that would render it unfit to catch salmon. The party had got real tame. Long Bob was making noises about getting home to his pregnant wife, and I had already said that the tumbler of Scotch in my big paw would be my last.

Suddenly, the Babe tugged on a tweed Ivy cap and announced he wanted to play some golf.

“Babe, it’s a mite dark,” I pointed out.

He just countered with, “Kid, you work for the ball club, and the ball club wants me to be happy. Right now, what’ll make me happy is to play golf.”

What I'm Working On

We're in the final stretch of completion on the modern makeover of the first full length Texas history documentary I ever did. Houston: A Nation's Capital, which was originally released in 2011, is being redone with some additional interviews and vastly overhauled and improved visuals. Even though it was a Platinum Award winner at a major international film festival at the time, it will be brought up to the high level of the other Birth of Texas documentaries. I've been enjoying digging around for higher resolution images, mostly in the public domain to keep costs low. Over the past couple of weeks that means looking for old prints of dueling, 1830s Bible pages and a fun little 1916 silent film about rats. They will all help tell the story of 1837 Houston. I'll keep you posted on the release dates for this.

MIKE VANCE - Home

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