Ragtime for the Rockies


Book Description

This tragic love story unfolds in and around the town of Platteville, Colorado in 1925 and 1926. In the Roaring Twenties, young women challenge their elders by dancing to jazz music, wearing abbreviated clothing, and drinking prohibited alcohol. Some men express their opposition in church. Otbers join the Klux Klan,which expands into the Northern States, promising violent resistance to social change. OWEN MATTISON comes to Platteville High School as athletics coach and science teacher, including Vocational Agriculture. Owen's bride, RUBY, a Home Economics graduate, is an accomplished pianist and jazz fan whose clothes and bobbed hair show the triumph of flapper fashion. We meet Owen and Ruby, married for six weeks, sharing a picnic on the LYDELL farm overlooking the river. Inspired by natural beauty, Owen sings a favorite hymn, and Ruby harmonizes. Returning to their tiny rented home, Owen receives a telephone call from ARTHUR STARK, a School Board member. Stark's son later says Stark dislikes the twentieth century and wants to hold it back. Stark changes a meeting date with Owen to attend a luncheon where he joins the Ku Klux Klan, with OLIVER SCOTT, the Platteville barber. Both men participate in the next Klan raid on a dancehall. Eager to teach moral values, the School Board votes to require readings of the King James Bible as part of classroom opening ceremonies. This distresses Catholic parents, whose children will be required to hear a proscribed text. FREDERlCK KOBLENZ, owner of the Platteville Mercantile store, organizes a protest student walkout. FRANCIS (FRA1\K) KOBLENZ, Frederick's son, leads the walkout from Owen's classroom. The School Board soon writes to all parents, requiring all students to remain for the Bible readings




Colorado


Book Description

Introduces the geography, history, government, people, culture, and attractions of Colorado.










Murder in the Rockies


Book Description

As his first case after graduating from an east coast law school, Andrew Coyle travels west to defend a rancher accused of murdering a miner. Public opinion and all the circumstantial evidence are against the accused and his tenderfoot lawyer. Coyle determines that he must find the real killer in order to prove his clientÕs innocence. But the task proves daunting and he is shot at on two different occasions, nearly burnt up in a cabin fire, and beat up in a barroom brawl. Along the way, Coyle meets the haberdasherÕs daughter, and a rocky romance ensues. Sensing that he is loosing the case in the courtroom, Coyle has an inspirationÑusing technology that is new in the 1890s. It is a gamble, but CoyleÕs only chance, and the only way he can save his client from hanging.




Box Office


Book Description




The Fiddler's Almanac


Book Description

Includes a wealth of fiddling lore and illustrations; a guide to buying a fiddle and bow; tips on learning and playing the fiddle; over 800 listings of books, records, fiddling and bluegrass organizations, fiddling schools and camps, violin making supplies, films, etc.; information about fiddle contests.




The Canadian Rockies


Book Description

Arthur Philemon Coleman was a passionate Canadian and one of the first to truly discover the beauty and majesty of this country''s mountain ranges as an explorer, geologist and mountaineer. In 1884, before the railway traversed the Rocky and Columbia mountains, Coleman headed west on the first of what would be eight mountaineering expeditions, making his way on foot and pack horse, with Native guides and without, over passes in Alberta and British Columbia. First published in 1911, this new edition gives modern-day readers a glimpse of the early days of mountaineering in the Canadian west. It paints a sympathetic picture of the rugged men and women who opened the region and of the hardships they endured. In his travels he encountered some of the main characters in Canadian mountaineering history, including Mary Schdffer, Joby Beaver, Frank Sibbald, Reverend George Kinney and Adolphus Moberly.




The Vanishing Vision


Book Description

This spirited history of public television offers an insider's account of its topsy-turvy forty-year odyssey. James Day, a founder of San Francisco's KQED and a past president of New York's WNET, provides a vivid and often amusing behind-the-screens history. Day tells how a program producer, desperate to locate a family willing to live with television cameras for seven months, borrowed a dime—and a suggestion—from a blind date and telephoned the Louds of Santa Barbara. The result was the mesmerizing twelve-hour documentary An American Family. Day relates how Big Bird and his friends were created to spice up Sesame Street when test runs showed a flagging interest in the program's "live-action" segments. And he describes how Frieda Hennock, the first woman appointed to the FCC, overpowered the resistance of her male colleagues to lay the foundation for public television. Day identifies the particular forces that have shaped public television and produced a Byzantine bureaucracy kept on a leash by an untrusting Congress, with a fragmented leadership that lacks a clearly defined mission in today's multimedia environment. Day calls for a bold rethinking of public television's mission, advocating a system that is adequately funded, independent of government, and capable of countering commercial television's "lowest-common-denominator" approach with a full range of substantive programs, comedy as well as culture, entertainment as well as information. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1995.







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