The story of Baby Doe Tabor has seduced America for more than a century. Long before her body was found frozen in a Leadville shack near the Matchless Mine, Elizabeth McCourt “Baby Doe” Tabor was the stuff of legend. The stunning divorcée married Colorado’s wealthiest mining magnate and became the “Silver Queen of the West.” Blessed with two daughters, Horace and Baby Doe mesmerized the world with their wealth and extravagance. But Baby Doe’s life was also a morality play. Almost overnight, the Tabors’ wealth disappeared when depression struck in 1893. Horace died six years later. According to the legend, one daughter left home never to return; the other died horribly. For thirty-five years, Baby Doe, who was considered mad, lived in solitude high in the Colorado Rockies. Baby Doe Tabor left a record of her madness in a set of writings she called her “Dreams and Visions.” These were discovered after her death but never studied in detail—until now. Author Judy Nolte Temple retells Lizzie’s story with greater accuracy than any previous biographer and reveals a story more heartbreaking than the legend, giving voice to the woman behind the myth.

In her pulchritudinous prime Baby Doe was called the Silver Queen of Colorado by journalists and "that shameless hussy" by the proper wives of the men who eyed her. Flirtatious, adventurous, ambitious, Elizabeth McCourt Doe gave everyone a lot to talk about when she met Horace Tabor, the Silver King of Leadville, in 1880. Three years later they were free to legalize their passion. Although thirty years separated them, they were well matched in romantic recklessness. If The Legend of Baby Doe is the lowdown on the high jinks of two public lives, it is also the story of a love that survived spectacularly good times and bad. Before bad times came, Baby and Horace went on a spending spree. They built an opulent opera house in Denver and bought an Italian-ate villa. Baby Doe went out bejeweled and ermined, and sat at home alone, snubbed by the social dragons. John Burke has written about the giddy rise of a bonanza king who dreamed of entering the White House with Baby Doe on his arm and about the disastrous fall they took together. Wiped out by unwise investments and the Panic of 1893, Tabor soon died, leaving Baby Doe and their two daughters penniless. Reportedly, his deathbed order was to "hang on to the Matchless," a played-out mine filled with water. She managed to do that for almost four decades, struggling heroically against loneliness, poverty, and heartbreak, and becoming one of the great legends of the American West.

The laws of survival always trump the rules of etiquette. Every age has its iconic blonde bombshell. In the 1880s, it's Baby Doe, America's original gold digger. At a time when genteel ladies could politely starve to death, Baby Doe seeks her fortune the best way she knows how-marrying a rich man. She joins the rush to the Colorado silver bonanza and meets millionaire mine owner Horace Tabor. Baby Doe enjoys the high life as his paramour, but Tabor's wife and his business manager plot to get rid of the new girl. Baby Doe, however, has schemes of her own to upend Horace's old relationships and become the one and only Mrs. Tabor. But fate sweeps in and avalanches Baby Doe's dreams. What price will she pay for becoming The Mrs. Tabor? Based on a true story, The Mrs. Tabor seduces with a scandalous tale of love and fortunes found and lost.

Chicago Public Library Best Informational Books for Younger Readers 2021 The Best Children's Books of the Year 2022, Bank Street College STARRED REVIEW! "An artful blend of language, illustration, and science."—Kirkus Reviews starred review You can almost feel the wind in this explanation of the Beaufort scale, with science and rhythmic verse. The stages of the Beaufort wind scale, portrayed with precision and also with poetic free verse, style, and imagination. It will stretch readers' imaginations as we see the wind pick up from a kiss of air, to a gentle breeze that shivers the shifting grasses, to a roiling hurricane that makes tree roots shudder.

It has, most definitely, been A Beauuutiful Life for Bill Grigsby, a Kansas City icon and Grand Master of Ceremony. No one can paint a more illustrious image of Midwestern sports and its famous and not-so-famous participants than the man affectionately known as Grigs. From humble beginnings during the Depression through his war years as a code breaker to his development as a colorful broadcaster in Major League Baseball and the National Football League, Bill Grigsby is the supreme storyteller who crosses the generational timeline. He was there when Mickey Mantle took his first professional swing, when a brash entrepreneur by the name of Charlie Finley bought the A's, and when a reserved dreamer named Lamar Hunt came to Kansas City. Along the way his path has crossed with a virtual Who's Who of several Halls of Fame: George Brett, Lenny Dawson, Tom Watson, Whitey Herzog, Joe Montana, Dan Devine, Dick the Brusier, Phog Allen, Marcus Allen, George Toma, Roy Williams, Hank Stram, and even Baby Doe, the women's world champion midget wrestler from South Africa. Even Grigs himself is in two Halls--he Missouri Sports hall of Fame and the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics. Grigs has had not one single full-time job during his life, but more than 40, from fertilizer salesman to federal deputy to big-league broadcaster. His loyalty and longevity, through, are legend. He was there for the beginning of the Kansas City Sportshow, now more than a half-century old, and the Kansas City Chiefs, who came to town in the 1960s. To this day he remains a vital part of both organizations. No one, in fact, has longer tenure as an NFL broadcaster than Grigs, who first began to imagine himself asa sportscaster during the 1930s in Lawrence, Kansas. Bill Grigsby grew up in a desperate time, but it forged a man who, along with Fran, his wife of more than 50 years, created a beautiful family and A Beauuutiful Life.

This is a fascinating autobiography of Baby Doe Tabor, the second wife of pioneer Colorado businessman Horace Tabor, whose rags-to-riches and back to rags again story made her a well-known figure in her own day, and at one time hailed as the “best dressed woman in the West.” It was during Baby Doe’s final years of her life living in a shack on the site of the Matchless Mine, enduring great poverty, solitude, and repentance, that fellow Coloradan Caroline Bancroft met Baby Doe, who had known Bancroft’s father for many years, and became fascinated by her “smile, the manner, the voice and the flowery speech [...] despite her diminutive size.” Following Tabor’s death in the Matchless Mine cabin on March 7, 1935, Bancroft was commissioned to write her biography, her greatest source of information provided by Sue Bonnie, who had discovered Tabor’s body. This book, originally published in 1955, is the result: “Baby Doe Tabor tells us of her life in nearly her own words—many she actually used in talking to Sue Bonnie and others I have imagined as consonant with her character and the facts of her story.”