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 Ticket Home
"The bestselling novel that proves some bonds can never be broken. An unforgettable tale of loyalty, honor, courage, and love takes us to the dawn of World War Two, in rural Oklahoma where identical twins Lucian and Norman Parker are bound by the tragic death of their mother, their railroad jobs, and an abiding well of brotherly devotion. But when both fall for the prettiest girl in town, they learn the hard way that they can't share everything. It is brash Lucian who finally wins her hand, while gentle Norman must learn to live without the woman he cherishes and the brother who betrayed him.
At last reunited, and reconciled in the war-torn South Pacific, Lucian and Norman fight side by side. But only one will return home for a bittersweet reunion, burdened with the heartbreaking loss of his brother--and the weight of a shocking secret that will haunt him for decades to come...”
“Another heartrending tale of love, loss, and redemption from a master of moral fiction." -- Booklist.
I got the seed for the story from a ninety-year-old woman seated in a wheel chair at one of my first booksignings when The Last Valentine was published. During a break in the signing I was able to turn to her and focus my attention. She said she had stayed up all night and had read The Last Valentine even though her son told her to go to sleep. The theme of The Last Valentine is a metaphor of the rose, the stem with thorns, and the risk of pain to own the rose. She said, “I’ll bet you can never guess my name.” I smiled and responded to this childlike aged woman with, “No I am sure that I cannot.”
“Well,” she said. “My first name is Ima.”
“That is a very pretty name, Ima,” I responded.
She grinned like she had a wonderful secret to reveal then said, “And my last name is Rose. So, Ima Rose,” she happily said.
What followed was both touching and dramatic as I listened intently to her story of how her two brothers joined the Marines together and fought side by side in the Pacific. How one of them had to rescue the other who was wounded. How he went against orders to keep his promise to his parents to bring his brother back. Of course she was tearful and I was caught up in the tale of desperation. I placed myself in the situation, having six brothers, and tried to imagine the fear I would feel for any one of them, and the willingness I would of course had to risk my life to bring him back. I knew I had the seed of a great story.
And so was born Ticket Home a tale of twins who go off to war together, fall in love with the same hometown girl, and how they struggle to bring each other home from the war.
People, places, and anecdotal items from my family history added into the story:
Not far from my home is a turn of the century rail road, a steam engine that takes tourist on runs up the Provo Canyon and the rivers and lakes in the surrounding mountains. It is a 1907 Baldwin Steamer and I was given the grand tour by the Heber Creeper Railroad on the workings of steam engines, their glory days and such.
I grew up near rail road tracks in Southern California and unbeknownst to my mother us boys spent a lot of time racing trains, placing pennies on the tracks, and walking along the rails for miles. The story has a setting of a turn of the century train depot in fictitious Warm Springs, Oklahoma modeled after the Santa Susana, California depot near our home and the depots that dotted the country and particularly the west. I mentioned several towns I grew up in and around, just for fun, and because it was proper to the migration and the work of Oklahomans to California in the 1930's.
Ventura County was were my happiest boyhood days were spent. Santa Paula and Somis are mentioned and are towns nearby Santa Susana (now called Simi Valley) where we lived. Santa Paula and Somis are still quaint small citrus growing towns in the rolling hills with the fresh Pacific Ocean breeze wafting through letting you know the pleasant beaches of Ventura County are not far away. The oranges, lemons, and citrus are terrific in this part of the country, and migrant farming was huge in the Ventura County just north of Los Angeles in the Great Depression times. The long tunnel through which Norman rides before entering the San Fernando Valley as described is one I poked my head in several times as a boy daring the fate of trains. And once again, as I used the place for a setting in The Last Valentine, I have the characters return to the grand Union Train Station in Los Angeles, a place my parents bade farewell to each other as my young father went off to war in 1942 and the place he returned from war in late 1944.
Boys and men have had a fascination for rail roads since the first steam engine. So it made telling the tale an even more enjoyable time for me as I rediscovered the boy in me, my love for trains, the days of playing along the track and such.
Norman and Lucian -- I have two uncles who served nobly in World War Two and were terrific examples of manhood who I wished to honor by using their names for my heros, Norman and Lucian Parker. Parker is a name in my family tree and I also wished to use that very strong and appropriate name. The characters seemed to really come alive and develop once I settled on those names. Funny how it goes as characters actually develop before your eyes on paper and whisper what they want to be and how they will say things. (Strange but true. Ask any fiction writer.)
Yo te amo, yo te adoro. Tu eres la vaca, yo soy el toro. Sometimes I’ll use funny personal anecdotal phrases used in our family to liven up dialogue in my stories. This phrase is found in the book as Mary Jane recalls an embarrassing incident when the young Lucian wrote her a love letter in school class.
My wife has always hated this one. I say it just to tease, as she and I both understand and speak Spanish as a second language. I brought it home from South America with me were I lived as a young man and learned to speak the Spanish language. It is poetic in Spanish but translated into English is: “I love you, I adore you. You are the cow and I am the bull.”
Keep the Faith and the ring My family has this thing. We all wear a ring with letters etched in the silver band that reminds us to choose the right things in life. When I was growing up I had this teenage friend who I really looked up to. He would part, after one of our outings together with the words, “keep the faith.” The last time I saw him alive he said that to me then we hugged and went our separate ways. He died in an accident in Central America while I was in South America and his final letter to me ended with, “Keep the faith!” That has had a tremendous impact on me over the years and now is a family motto.
Old man Harrison and the quail and pheasant hunt
I used the story as told to me by a man now in his eighties how he used to, as a boy during the Depression, supply meat for his family. He was the oldest of ten children and his father was deceased. The trick described by old man Harrison to a young Norman Parker was taken literally from a true tale. One side note. This real “old man” in his eighties is still energetic and when he was telling me the story tears welled up as he recalled those desperate days of the 1930's. He had contemplated suicide many times, he said, because he had wanted to relieve his mother the burden of one more mouth to feed.
When I honor this generation as one of the “greatest” this is why. They were hardy, self reliant, wise in their youth, and understood the needs of others. We have much to learn from them still.
Why I write on the theme of love and war
As found in the back of TICKET HOME as "Author's Afterword."
I am often asked how I come upon my stories and why I particularly choose the generation of my parents to honor. My stories are based first on strong personal beliefs and second on the fact that the years the World War Two generation lived were pivotal and transitional to creating the world we now enjoy. As such they offer an unparalleled backdrop for drama, romance, and tragedy–-all elements which combined make for interesting, believable, and engaging characters who can offer us insights no other living generation can.
I believe, for example, that love alone will save this world from a destruction to be caused ultimately by lack of it. I confess to being an incurable romantic.
I believe in romance in all of its dignity–-most cherished of all the soul’s dreams are to truly love and be loved truly and not merely, "used" for pleasure. My view of personal dignity in romance, the gentleman’s code of honor which includes how he looks at and treats a woman, may seem Quixotic to some. They would not be very far from the mark. What women would not want to feel valued, prized, and worthy of true love–-safe--a Don Quixote's Dulcinea?
I believe in virtues taught to me by my parents and so many others of their generation. They are timeless in their power to build healthy relationships and heal the challenges which confront us. Naive? If so I’m perfectly happy to skip through life believing wrongs can be righted with integrity and honor.
My stories are of love from the perspectives of a generation who has lived long enough to be authoritative about it, not from the scholarly, or therapist, but from those who said "I do" and did.
With this novel completed I have penned a trio of love stories. Starting with The Last Valentine, about timeless love and determination to keep promises, I chose to again take a step back in time with The Lighthouse Keeper, a tale of deep devotion showing how the flame of love gives us the brightest hope to deal with tragedy, loss, and come to terms with what matters most.
Finally this story, Ticket Home, takes us on a journey back to youthful days of innocence, loss of innocence through war, and the power of love to salvage dreams. Different in focus from the previous two, our heroes discover love’s immense power to cure sickness of the mind and heart. It is a tale of healing and redemptive powers.
All three novels in a series honor the triumph, tragedies, and loves of a generation which News Anchor Tom Brokaw has coined and introduced to us as, The Greatest Generation, the title for his national bestseller. I personally feel driven to show them my respect and gratitude in fiction as he has in non-fiction.
With Ticket Home I hope to entertain, inspire, and inform, using the back-drop from this generation’s days, months, and years which most closely mirror the complete history of our Twentieth Century than any other generation. In some measure, and with profound respect, I hope to keep this "greatest generation" alive in our memories through my writing.
They are looking back now, often wondering what happened to "time." They entertain grandchildren who have no concept of a devastating universal economic "Depression," a world at war, making do or doing without. We still have much to learn from them.
They lived both in a violent time and a gentler slower paced world. They saved a world engulfed in wars created by madmen in the center of a century, and united they reshaped forever the map of the world and destinies of nations.
There are many in their generation whose stories of life never fully blossomed. They were cut short by the most destructive war ever to have occurred in the history of the mankind. These brave souls cut short in their youth were neither given a lifetime to fill with love nor were they given years to train the next generation.
A very few readers have complained that the stories include so much war. One reader recently wrote: "You lost me when you started into the war stories." To which I wrote back, "Sorry."
It is intentional that I include the war years and I do feel sorry for any reader who wishes to remain uninformed about those dead and living to whom she or he owes the right to choose what they will do each day with their freedom. It is a shame that some will choose to skip over character cultivating history. The main characters and protagonists are from that generation for all the reasons previously ascribed. So I do feel "sorry" if a reader loses interest.
To understand how the character representing our parents and grandparents develops, becomes, changes, one must view his or her life from that character’s point of view, dilemmas, historical perspectives, and so on. Find anyone of the "Greatest Generation" who has not been significantly affected emotionally, spiritually, or physically by the war years and you find someone who lived in a shell or on another planet.
There were more than sixteen million American men and women in uniform during World War Two and over one half million dead and missing. There were more than one million wounded, some so severely their lives were altered forever. We talk about Vietnam’s MIA’s still in the realm of 2,000, and the Korean war with some 8,000 MIA’s and what a tragedy that is. It is a tragedy for one to be missing in war. From World War Two there are still over 73,000 MIA’S! Each missing man’s life has a story behind it!
All three of my novels to date honor and remember those courageous men and women who faced the steel of two brutal militaristic empires so that we may enjoy the freedoms we all too often fail to recognize, including what to read, think, do with our lives, enjoy. These freedoms cost someone his or her blood.
More particularly I have placed this story’s heroes among the more than 80,000 American and Filipinos taken prisoner in the fall of the Philippines in April and May 1942. They were the first to fight against the sea, air, and land forces of the Japanese Empire in World War Two. Why did I chose this group of fighting men to honor?
As a young boy I was both fascinated and filled with terror reading about the tens of thousand would not return from the battle for Bataan, the Bataan Death March, then Corregidor, the prison camps O’Donnell, Cabanatuan, Bilibid, the forced labor for coal and copper in the mines of Japan, China, and Manchuria.
Thousands died at sea in cramped, stifling, miserable, unventilated holds of "hell ships" without food or water in transport from the Philippines to Japan and other labor destinations as prisoners of war. Each had a love, a life, a personal story to tell.
What happened to these men represented among the worst deprivations, most heinous acts of brutality and barbarisms suffered by men at war. I do not recount in detail the trials of these captive Americans of World War Two but the heroes of the story necessarily are placed in the brutal circumstances and their lives and loves are forever changed.
By even briefly exploring their descent into what you or I would consider the very depth of hell they represent what that great generation endured, and thus we may explore even love, in a way we might not have ever appreciated it otherwise.
While Ticket Home is a work of fiction, many of the places described, times of battles, units who fought there, are real. Some are fictionalized to represent a mosaic of experiences endured by our fighting men and those who waited for them.
To these living survivors and dead we owe a heartfelt debt of thanks and love for surrendering their youthful lives to brutality and a loss of innocence so others might live. They suffered and died in the belief that democracy, honor, and duty were values as real as the hearth taught values of home, family, freedom, and God.
This is not a story about war, nor has it treated the battles and history of those times in an exhaustive manner. But it is a story illustrating the effects war may have on altering personal history, the lives of the characters, and creating in them the crisis and resolution, offering a window into their "decisions" that forged in them men and women of heart and steel.
In the end all of us face crisis in life and in one way or another will come to resolutions which change us forever. Perhaps in examining these characters and what they faced we may find meaningful answers of some of life’s most challenging questions.
No attempt has been made to connect true names of combatants with the fictional characters or the places they fought. Rather, the composite experience of all the combatants and prisoners of war studied in preparation for the war scenes can be summarized in the lives of the heroes of this story. While only those who lived it can truly comprehend the bravery, courage, and unyielding honor it took to survive, days, months, years of war as combatants and prisoners, we may be able to imagine it in someway and by so doing honor them.
The costs are finally memorialized in thousands of homes, at cemeteries, in the hearts of millions, as they realize their beloved brothers, husbands, fathers, while dying nobly, still died and are not coming home.
To benefit from this and all stories with elements of war, (including "love stories" which my trio of books claim to be) we look into the abyss of hell, the darkness of man’s meanest spirit. We must not glorify it, but we must render it awful, in all its brutality, so that we may abhor it, then eliminate it, and never act the part of aggressors in it.
Love and peace necessarily, are the antithesis to war and hate. Dramatizing the contrasts of love and hate, war and peace, through storytelling allows the reader an extraordinary journey of the mind. It is an opportunity to vicariously live through the characters and thus grow and draw conclusions from the actions portrayed.
Finally, we must be true to the details of war and its terrible consequences as it is so briefly treated in this and my other novels. This so that we may remember it required the ultimate of those who only wanted to be in their loved one’s arms again and find their Ticket Home.
Facts About Ticket Home:
- Released nationwide in February 2001 as a hardcover. 65,000 first printing.
- Twenty city national book tour. USA TODAY Bestsellers list.
- National radio campaign.
- Audio rights sold to Brilliance Audio.
- The Literary Guild and DoubleDay Book Clubs purchased Book Club rights and featured it as an Main Selection.
- Foreign rights sales have begun.
- Mass Market edition to be released nationwide March 2002.
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