The
Road to Delano
by
John DeSimone
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GENRE:
Historical Fiction
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BLURB:
It’s
1968, and a strike by field workers in the grape fields has ripped an
otherwise quiet central California town down the middle. Jack Duncan
is a Delano high school senior who is on his way to earning a
baseball scholarship, hoping to escape the turmoil infesting his
town. His mother has kept from him the real cause of his father’s
death, who was a prominent grower. But when an old friend hands Jack
evidence indicating his father was murdered, he is compelled to dig
deeper. This throws him and his best friend and teammate, Adrian
Sanchez, whose father is a striking field worker, into the labor
conflict led by Cesar Chavez. Road to Delano is the path Jack and
Adrian must take to find their strength, their duty, and their
destiny.
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Excerpt:
1933
Sugar
Duncan was known around Lamoille County as a gambler who could farm,
but Sugar called himself a farmer who understood a sure bet. He grew
up a plowboy on a hardscrabble patch of Vermont hill country and had
calluses before he knew he had brains. It was in the seventh grade,
in Pete Colburn’s barn, waiting out a driving rain that he found
his power. While playing seven-card stud he could see the patterns,
he understood the odds. He lived by the bluff, and he lived well as
far as a child of the Depression could. Before he reached high
school, they were calling him Sugar because he was sweet about taking
their money.
While
his college buddies baled hay and slopped pigs to pay their way
through Ag school at Vermont U, Sugar found it more profitable to
relieve the hooligans and rumrunners of their easy fortunes at the
card table above Markham’s Grill over in Providence. After four
years of playing cards and a new degree, he left town to farm where
the land hadn’t been wiped clean of its strength.
Sugar
rode west to California’s Central Valley in a Pullman with a new
pair of tan and white brogues stuffed with cash packed in the bottom
of his steamer. FDR had just signed the Cullen-Harrison Act ending
Prohibition, and a fifth of whiskey was now as cheap as an acre of
California farmland. He hadn’t any choice. Returning to Vermont
would mean he’d starve. With gasoline a luxury, his father had
resorted to using mules to plow his hundred acres. Milk and corn
prices had fallen so sharply, a farmer could live better by killing
his cows than by selling their milk. California was the place he
could make a living. And he intended to make that living as a farmer—
eventually.
A couple
of weeks after arriving in Frisco, Sugar stood on the running board
of a dusty Model T on the road leading into Delano and surveyed the
flatlands of the valley planted in golden September wheat. He removed
his hat, wiped his brow with the sleeve of his seersucker suit, and
his instinct told him there was a sure bet.
He
ensconced himself in the Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill. Each night
around six, he made his way downstairs to a back room where he took
up residence with a fresh deck of cards and a new bottle of Jim Beam,
thankfully back in production, and waited. It didn’t take long for
his table to fill. About a year later, he bought his first section of
land.
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AUTHOR
Bio and Links:
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GIVEAWAY
INFORMATION
John
DeSimone will be awarding a signed copy of The Road to Delano (USA
ONLY) to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour.
