Title: No Heroes
Description: A book about a boy, born on a hard scrabble ranch (The Lone Pine) near Ada, Oklahoma.  He ran away from home and joined a circus, being the "wild boy" who bit the head of snakes.  His storied career included working as a runner at a house of some ill repute in Alaska, a rum runner in the days before auto racing became the thing it is today, a young man who entered WWII before the bombing in Hawaii - by joining the Canadian Air forces, running guns to the Chinese military forces to stem back the Japanese, Own and operating a chain of Restaurants in Oklahoma City, his being charged and exonerated for rustling how own heard of cattle,   his work as a set designer and painter for a major movie studio, and all the way into his fight with cancer - loosing one lung and portions of the other.   I would speak of smoking here:  this just enforced my decision against ever starting to smoke - seeing him suffer, yet continuing to light one cigarette right after the other.  He was put on heavy drugs and of course become addicted to them.  His fight with that was won when he took his boat out  to deep water and quit cold turkey, but sadly, sometime later, he collapsed from further lung problems, and when he awoke he was laying in the hospital, with tubes in his body, including painkillers.  The book doesn't cover his last year when he finally succumbed to the killer disease.  Indeed, as he said, there are no Heroes, just people that do what they have to ,in order to eat and have a place to sleep.   He wasnt around much when I was a kid, but there are memories of the horse  (Star) he showed up with, and a brand new saddle - when I was about 6 years of age.  My visits to the grandparents in Oklahoma, with a stop over in Oklahoma city for short visits.  After a decade of no contacts, I received an unexpected telephone call, while living In Tacoma, Washington, with an invitation to come down to California and go to college, and live in he and his present wife's pool-house.  Alas, I told him of my impending marriage and new employment which would take us around the world for the next few decades .  He showed up for the wedding a month later, and from that visit, and our traveling back to the states every couple of years,we became better acquainted in his later years of life.  He handed me this book, explaining he had left me completely out of it, "so as not to cause you trouble- in your job".  It is a frank talk about drugs, the under-life and doing what one has to do to survive .  Subjects and language are not for children, and I didn't show it to my own children until they were in their late teens- but at least they met and were able to visit with "grandpa"on occasion.   Thanks dad.