KAREN’S KILLER BOOK BENCH: Welcome to Karen’s Killer Book Bench, where readers can discover talented new authors and take a peek inside their wonderful books. This is not an age-filtered site, so all book peeks are PG-13 or better. Come back and visit often. Happy reading!

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DOMINIC DRIVE
Family Life Fiction
BY RONALD TRAVIS LUND
&
LARRY K. & LORNA COLLINS

BLURB

Dominic Drive is the coming-of-age story of Charlie Williams, a young man who has a difficult childhood but who remains optimistic and hopeful, told through the eyes of another young man who becomes as close as a brother to him. Set in the late 1950s and early 1960s, it captures life in a post-WWII Southern California community.

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DOMINIC DRIVE
Family Life Fiction
BY RONALD TRAVIS LUND
&
LARRY K. & LORNA COLLINS

Foreword by Lorna Collins

My brother, Ronald Travis Lund, began writing this story many years ago. He was concerned about his severe dyslexia, but I assured him if he wrote it, I would edit it. He sent me a couple of chapters. I edited them and sent them back to him. I even ran one by our critique group. Everyone thought he had an interesting story to tell and encouraged him to complete it.

He never sent me anything else, and I thought he had stopped working on it.

Following his death, in August of 2020, we discovered a spiral notebook filled with the handwritten pages of his story. He had only written about eleven chapters—more of an outline than a complete story. He did not include the ending and never told me how he intended for the story to conclude.

I very much wanted to honor my brother by completing and publishing his book.

Thank goodness, my husband, Larry, was able to collaborate on this project because he brought the male point-of-view. Since we all grew up in the same neighborhood, and the book was set in a similar location, Larry had many shared experiences.

We did our best to be true to Ron’s vision.

This is his first—and only—book. We hope you enjoy it.

Lorna (Lund) Collins, his sister

EXCERPT

As a child growing up in the 1950s and ’60s, my family lived on Dominic Drive in a typical post-war Southern California housing tract a few miles east of downtown Los Angeles.

Lots of new housing was built for returning GIs from WWII. These homes were quite small by today’s standards―less than one-thousand square feet. They cost a little over ten-thousand dollars new. Most started out as two-bedroom one-bath plans. A few had three bedrooms. But they sat on large lots. As families grew, they could easily add onto their homes. Over the years, most did.

This was a great place in which to grow up. Most of the people who lived in our neighborhood were young families, just starting out. Almost every house on the street had kids within about a seven-or-eight-year age range. So, there was always someone to play with.

We could explore by ourselves with no sense of danger. I rode my latest rebuilt bike everywhere in town. Sometimes my friends rode with me. We could be gone all day, and our parents never worried about us.

On our street, our neighbors were more like extended family. If we needed help with something, we always knew we could count on them. We had no need for block parents. We could go to any house in the neighborhood.

This closeness also had a downside. If any of us did anything wrong, word reached our parents before we got home.

In the Southern California of my youth, somewhere near every housing tract was an area with a stream or creek running through it. It was where we could feel like we were out in the country. In our area, this place was at the end of our street. We called it “the Gully.”

A busy street ran along the south side with a large culvert under the road. When it rained hard, the culvert routed the excess water away into the sewer system. As it dried out, I remember seeing muddy footprints on the concrete floor. I assumed someone had gone there for shelter.

I later found out the Gully had been an old hobo camp before they started building our homes.

When it wasn’t raining, there always seemed to be standing water in the Gully, choked with tall weeds and inhabited by insects. I remember the unending sound of crickets and flies and mosquitoes. As a kid, I was fascinated by the dragonflies with their iridescent and nearly transparent wings. I tried to catch them, but they were always too fast.

We also caught polliwogs and took them home, where we watched them turn into frogs. We kept them until our parents made us take them back to the Gully because they made too much noise.

In the late summer, nasty green scum grew on top of the water. The breeze piled it up at one end. And the awful stench kept us away. Once the rain began, the green goo washed into the culvert, and the odor gradually diminished.

When I was little, my friends and I built forts and makeshift hideouts down there using whatever junk was abandoned. (It was often used as a dump.) People from outside the area discarded lots of old stuff. Once in a while, someone from the city arrived to clean it out.

Our parents didn’t want us to go there, but it held too much attraction for us to stay away. Of course, my older sister, Sharon, never went there. She didn’t like to get dirty.

About Author Ronald Travis Lund…

LARRY K. and LORNA COLLINS grew up together in Alhambra, California. Larry studied engineering at Cal Poly Pomona, and Lorna was an English major at Cal State Los Angeles. They have been married for fifty-nine years and have one daughter, Kimberly.

As an engineer, Larry worked on projects throughout the United States and around the world. Lorna was employed in Document Control, Data Management, IT Change Management, Editing, and Technical Writing. They both worked in Osaka on the Universal Studios Japan theme park.

Their memoir of that experience, 31 Months in Japan: The Building of a Theme Park was a 2006 EPPIE finalist, named as one of Rebeccas Reads Best Nonfiction books of 2005. Their mysteries, set in Hawaii, are Murder…They Wrote and Murder in Paradise. The latter was a finalist for the 2012 EPIC eBook award.

Lorna co-wrote a series of sweet romance anthologies, set in the mythical town of Aspen Grove, Colorado, with friends Sherry Derr-Wille, Christie Shary, Luanna Rugh, and Cheryl Gardarian: Snowflake Secrets (a finalist for the Dream Realm and Eric Hoffner awards), Seasons of Love, Directions of Love (winner of the 2011 EPIC eBook Award for best romance anthology), An Aspen Grove Christmas, The Art of Love, and …And a Silver Sixpence in Her Shoe.

Lorna’s solo mystery/fantasy is a ‘beach read’ called Ghost Writer. She also wrote Jewel of the Missions: San Juan Capistrano, a children’s book, Lola, The Parrot Who Saved the Mission, also set in San Juan Capistrano, and Romance in the Time of Social Distancing.

Larry’s collection of short stories is entitled Lakeview Park. His sci-fi series is called The McGregor Chronicles. He has completed nine books in the series and is working on number 10. His latest book is a work of historical fiction, The Road West, based on his family’s journey from Wheatland, North Dakota to Long Beach , California in 1925.

Their most recent joint venture is The Memory Keeper, a historical novel set in San Juan Capistrano, California in the 1800s, told from the point-of-view of a Juaneño Indian. They are working on the sequel, Becoming the Jewel.

All their books are available on Amazon, their website (www.lornalarry.com) and other online book outlets in ebook and print formats. Many are also available as audiobooks. Follow Lorna’s blog at http://lornacollins-author.blogspot.com.

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Links to Ron, Larry & Lorna’s websites, blogs, books, #ad etc.:

Amazon Kindle: https://amzn.to/3YySm2L

Amazon Audiobook: https://amzn.to/4hyOIyA

Amazon Paperback: https://amzn.to/3NRwpqQ

Amazon Hardcover: https://amzn.to/4f9HbVk

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Thanks, Larry & Lorna, for sharing Ron’s and your book with us!

Don’t miss the chance to read this book!