Life is . is a roller coaster ride. It has peaks of exhilaration and valleys of despair. The author will make you happy and at times he will tug at your heartstrings. When he feels that the reader may be stretched a little, he will take you off the roller coaster. He will take you on a trip, tell you funny stories, and philosophize about life in general. He will quote scriptures to support his feelings about why things happen as they do. But rest assured, he will put you back on that roller coaster. When I finished the manuscript and laid it down, I had a hard time letting it go. I started thinking about what life is to me. As I compared the author's ideas to my own, it occurred to me that is what the author intended. If it is, he accomplished his purpose. Charles R. Brown Ray Rouse was born on a farm in Lenoir County, NC, about five miles west of the City of Kinston. He was born in 1924, the youngest of nine children-seven boys and two girls-including two sets of twin boys. His father was a renter of farms, having lost his own farm through fiscal difficulties in 1918. The family moved off the farm and into Kinston when Ray was six years old. Those were hard times in which family members dropped out of school in order to find jobs to help support the family. After surviving the Great Depression and thirty three months in the US Army during World War II, he married Annie Phillips after a courtship of two years-and became father of a son and daughter. He retired from the insurance profession at age seventy. He and his wife live a quiet and enjoyable life in Kinston, NC, a city of about 23,000 population.

Through a series of illustrated vignettes, Doodlebug Island chronicles the lives of the slightly off-centered folks who live on the island's scenic shores. Separated from the rest of Arizona by the waters of Oak Creek, Doodlebug Island provides a haven for the inhabitants and their eccentricities, which mix, clash and create a multitude of comical-and usually chaotic-situations. Written with a slightly acerbic but definitely humorous edge, Doodlebug Island challenges the status quo on a variety of issues and engages readers in the triumphs, trials and frustrations of its characters' daily lives.

When Doreen "Dodo" Bussey's family moves to a new home, her mother gives her a blank notebook in which Dodo documents her new life, from the move and first days in a new city, to her new school and friends.

Don Hofsommer chronicles the twentieth-century history of a transportation giant. Here is a story of divestiture and merger, Sunset Route, and Prosperity Special. " . . . a treasure house of information about the Southern Pacific Company . . . . This book is a joy to read."--Richard C. Overton, from the Foreword

Frank C. Brown organized the North Carolina Folklore Society in 1913. Both Dr. Brown and the Society collected stores from individuals—Brown through his classes at Duke University and through his summer expeditions in the North Carolina mountains, and the Society by interviewing its members—and also levied on the previous collections made by friends and members of the Society. The result was a large mass of texts and notes assembled over a period of nearly forty years and covering every aspect of local tradition. members of the Society. The result was a large mass of texts and notes assembled over a period of nearly forty years and covering every aspect of local tradition.