MARY ELIZABETH GOLDMAN

The Inside "Scoop" on To Love and Die in Dallas
From the beginning To Love and Die in Dallas was a joy for me to write and through this writer’s wonderful world of selective recall it was possible for me not only to revisit the past but to reinvent history and create the cast of characters in this story.

Still, these characters, the good, the bad, the beauty, and the uglies, like everything else in life, have undergone several transformations and while some of them with their unique traits and personalities may seem real, and I hoped that they would, they are not and except for a glimpse back to the sock-hop era and a chance to briefly recall a few isolated political and special events such as the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the Cotton Bowl game, and the Texas State Fair and popular places like Brownie’s, The Pig Stand, Winfrey Point and other landmarks around White Rock Lake this is entirely a work of “inspired” fiction.

The inspiration started like this: The very week after high school graduation I left home, I left Dallas, and I left Texas. In the soaring 60s Las Vegas was a small windy town in the middle of the desert where the wealthy, the desperate, the naïve, and the notorious came to play, catch good lounge shows featuring top industry names, enjoy free call drinks, and roll the dice. Clark County Nevada was the last frontier of the fast and furious, where gamblers and mobsters and lawmen rubbed elbows, and I was under age in a city that looked the other way. Politicians freely moved about the casinos with high profile celebrities and scantily-clad starlets, and all cameras were strictly forbidden. In those days, what happened in Vegas really did stay in Vegas. There was too much at stake for it to be otherwise, consequences were swift and exact and I was paying attention to those who introduced me to the glitzy lights of a darker world.

A few years later, I left Vegas and thought I was prepared for anything. I returned to Dallas, Big D, where women had big hair and men didn’t walk, they strutted! It was an era where wildcatters were as comfortable climbing the rigs as they were buying furs for their “gals” downtown at Neiman-Marcus. No writer has ever had more colorful history to draw upon than Texas and Texans, a treasure trove of inspiration.

Years went by quickly and one day in the early spring I received a notice of my upcoming high school class reunion. Early on I had resolved, and up until then had managed, to avoid such events but apparently time had softened me and now I was curious to discover what had become of my classmates at the school “near the city’s eastern borders underneath the Texas sky.”

Were the football players still popular? Did the ROTC cadets continue to stand at attention, did the class personalities become as successful as I imagined? Did the cheerleaders continue to exude bubbly encouragement? Did the preacher’s daughter ever learn to behave, and was homecoming queen still the most enviable girl alive? Sadly, there were several, too many, missing from this one time hopeful group of wide-eyed wonders, but Vietnam, the drug culture, and the sexual revolution had that effect on many graduating classes in the sixtieth decade of the twentieth century. I wanted to bring them back, to remember them in an imaginary world, and as a result, I created a handful of eager young people found here in the pages of To Love and Die in Dallas. I hope you enjoy reading the mystery, perhaps solving it as you go, and almost recognizing the characters portrayed.

    And, the answers to the above questions are absolutely yes, in every case!

The Inside "Scoop" on Forever Texas
When Mike and I decided to take on this unique project, we broke the task into two parts. Mike would collect the archival material and as one participant to this book put it, I “drew the short straw” and would work with the here and now, the living among us, to define the ever-illusive Texas mystique.

But truth be told, there were no “short straws” to draw and nobody could have enjoyed the effort more than I, for this has given me wonderful opportunity to meet, and in small ways, get to know up close and personal some very special Texans. I’ve always been luck that way.

Collectively the stories weave a small corner of an incomplete tapestry depicting the colorful history, the excitement of today, and a glimpse of a promising future.

The Inside "Scoop" on A Trail Rider's Guide to Texas
It was with much enthusiasm that I gathered information for this book. It was a labor of pure love – first for the horses and second for my love of adventure.

Wagon tracks have always had a peculiar hold over me. I have been known to follow deep ruts into far distances until they were obscured with years of untamed vegetation or in time washed away with stormy weather. Much of my trail riding has been in search of legends of varying degree, some well known legends and some known only to the man at the filling station where the highways cross roads with the farm to markets who shared with me.

This book is about what I found horsin’ around in Texas and this book is about the adventure on horseback.