My Book: 85 Days

I’ve written a book.

If you’ve been reading my stories you know that they are about life as I remember it. But for the last eight years I’ve been writing a book about someone else:  my grandfather.

The story is about only one chapter in his life, but it affected him and his family greatly.

In 1924 my grandfather mysteriously disappeared. No one knew what happened to him. We wouldn’t know either except for one thing—he wrote a diary.

John and Helen Olson lived in Kootenai, Idaho at the time—a small town near Sandpoint. He worked for the Northern Pacific Railroad, but had taken a leave of absence to try his hand at selling fire extinguishers. After some success in the Sandpoint area, he decided to take a trip to Spokane to sell his product to some larger companies.

That’s when he vanished.

According to the diary, he had amnesia. His first recollection was coming to consciousness in a boxcar when he received a swift kick in his side from a train brakeman. He was thrown off the train near the town of Edwall, in Lincoln County—about forty miles east of Spokane. In the diary he recounts how he wandered the northwest, searching for his identity. He could not remember anything personal: his name, whether he was married or had children, where he grew up—nothing.

He was afraid to go to the authorities, figuring they would take him as some sort of lunatic and have him put away in an asylum. Visions of straitjackets, experimental drugs, and lobotomies kept him from going to the police with his crazy story. Instead, he kept his secret to himself and tried to find someone that might know him.

The most remarkable thing about the diary is how sad it is. Over and over he laments about his family—if he has one. Not only did he not know anything about his past, but he feared for his future. Would he ever find himself?

Meanwhile, my grandmother was going through her own personal hell. She was left at home alone with six children to raise and no income. Having no idea what happened to her husband, she did everything she could to find him. Scandalous rumors about his disappearance spread, and the local newspapers helped disseminate them.

The Spokane Police Department took on the missing person’s case, but soon gave up, believing that he probably ran off on his own. On top of everything, her seven-year-old son came down with a deadly illness.

85 Days is a captivating tale filled with doubt, despair, and ultimately hope. I’m not going to tell you the end, because I want you to buy the book once it comes out.

I wrote it as historical fiction, so there are scenes that are conjured up by my own imagination, and the dialogue is almost completely made-up. But I have stayed true to the diary, and have not strayed from what I know to be historically true.

I am in the process of looking for a publisher and I will let my loyal Allegedly True Stories readers know about the progress. In the meantime, I’ll keep sending my short stories your way. Happy reading!

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