RED RIVER RIFLES IS A FINALIST FOR THE WILL ROGERS MEDALLION AWARD!
“A man only learns by two things, one is
reading, and the other is association with smarter people.” –
Will Rogers
I am thrilled and very honored to learn that my book RED
RIVER RIFLES has been selected as a finalist for a 2020 Will Rogers
Medallion Award in the Western Romance category. The Will Rogers Medallion
Award honors, “those books that represent an Outstanding Achievement in the
Publishing of Western Media. Your book exemplified the combination of excellent
content, high production values, and honoring of the Cowboy Heritage that the
Award was created to acknowledge.”
If you are too young to be familiar with Will Rogers (November
4, 1879 – August 15, 1935), he was a
respected writer as well as a cowboy entertainer and philosopher who did much
to embody and demonstrate western traditions.
The award was created to help expand the “Heritage of Literature which
honors the traditions and values of the American Cowboy.”
He was also an American stage and film actor,
vaudeville performer, cowboy, humorist, newspaper columnist, and social
commentator from Oklahoma. He made frequent use of puns and terms which closely
linked him to the cowboy tradition. From about 1925 to 1928, Rogers traveled
the length and breadth of the United States in a lecture tour. He began his
lectures by pointing out that, "A humorist entertains, and a lecturer
annoys."
In the mid-1930s Rogers was hugely popular, the leading
political wit in the United States, and the highest paid of Hollywood film
stars. He died in 1935 with aviator Wiley Post when their small airplane
crashed in northern Alaska during bad weather.
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| His Hollywood Star |
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| Will Rogers's tomb from the Will Rogers Memorial in Claremore, Oklahoma |
Perhaps Rogers most famous saying was, "I never
met a man I didn't like.” He has many famous quotes that can be found at. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Will_Rogers
and https://www.willrogers.com/.
Three of the ones I liked the best are:
·
“Lord, the money we do spend on Government
and it's not one bit better than the government we got for one-third the money
twenty years ago.”
·
“What the country needs is dirtier
fingernails and cleaner minds.”
·
“We are here just for a spell and then
pass on. So get a few laughs and do the best you can. Live your life so that
whenever you lose it, you are ahead.”
Like the characters in my novels set on the American
frontier, Rogers believed in hard work in order to succeed and realize
individual success. He symbolized the self-made man and woman. He believed in
America and the American Dream.
So does Samuel Wyllie, the hero of RED RIVER RIFLES. In
1818, the bravest of the brave settled a narrow strip of land along the Red
River in Texas. A place where death and life held equal strongholds. For Samuel,
his family’s land south at Pecan Point was a nearly sacred place, as beautiful
as heaven must be. He has big plans for the future and will do what it takes to
carve a new life out of the wilderness.
2 comments:
Congratulations, Dorothy!!!
Congratulations, Dorothy!! That's wonderful.
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