Book Reviews
I’ve read the book, and I loved it. I’ll just keep it and go back and read it again from time to time. Thanks for placing the new road names. I’ll have to pick up a new map so I can follow where the community is. Susan Eley
Unbelievable! Delightful! The book is great. Johnny Dixon
Wow! Great reading. Well researched and written. Very interesting and informative. Bobbie Schroer
The most in depth historical review on my hometown I’ve ever read. Scott Sadler
The book is more like a story told in an old fashioned way. My husband is amazed at the information. Mary Godsey
It was such a pleasure to learn the names and the history of so many places in Mathews. Although my family roots are there, I left to go to college and never lived there as an adult. The history of the postmasters and post offices was thoroughly researched and interspersed with many family stories. I particularly enjoyed the quotes and the postcard wit at the beginning of each chapter. However, there is a misstatement on page 99 in the book. “In 1939, Mathews High School became home to all high school students in Mathews County.” There was, in fact, another major high school in the County that all of the African American Students attended. Sylvia W. Keene
Brooks represents that 15 percent of the population over 60. Her life was very different from ours, so different that we are amazed at how the world has progressed since the 1920s. History tells us that technology jumped ahead after the First World War and changed how people lived.
Catherine’s parents, Maywood and Grace Callis had known each other in the way that everyone in a small town knows everyone else. The times called for brief courtships and youthful marriages.
But Catherine uses words to describe the truth behind the sixty photographs. The story includes details regarding hog killings, everyday walks of miles at a time that sound intolerable to us today were the norm to get the doctor, to go to school or church or to occasionally visit friends and neighbors. While Grace was keeping busy, Maywood was oystering, fishing pound nets, feeding the cows and chickens, planting and plowing the fields, and repairing the shingles or fence.
Catherine is more comfortable telling her story in the second half of the book when it becomes her memoir. Catherine’s “Mathews voice” shines. Many readers will enjoy references to Popeye and “Peter and Peggy” readers, Herbert Hoover and May Day. Her stories of special school lunches lost and being nearly drowned by an incoming wave reverberate because everyone of a certain age can relate.
Stories roll from Catherine’s mind as she thinks about her life as an adolescent. The stories are filled with facts and emotions that make them especially good reading. The day that they piled into the car and went to the Washington Zoo is a priceless bit of memorabilia.
Catherine tells us that she hasn’t stopped writing and invites her others to share their stories and pictures with her for her next book about the World War II period. Catherine can’t stop writing, we can be sure of that.
A good student, Catherine began writing to pen pals and then writing to her fiancé during the two years that he was away in the Navy. Later, she took correspondence courses from Moody Bible College. But in at a time when she had electricity, but not running water, it took time to keep house and raise children. As she and her husband built their business, The Craftsman Shop, there was little time to write. During that period she enjoyed telling stories and conversing with her coworkers. After her husband died in 1973, Catherine began to take correspondence courses again. She was determined to improve and enjoyed attending writers’ conferences. A positive attitude, curiosity, and a work ethic inspired by growing up an earlier age fuel her work and her words.