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Inglenook Book Club July News

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The Inglenook Book Club met in June at Lakeside Assisted Living Center with Suzanne Russell and Gaye Rowan as hostesses. Members enjoyed a delicious frozen congealed salad called “Champagne Sally” made by Suzanne and Gaye, along with snacks and beverages.

Tables were brightly decorated with a July 4th theme.

President Carolyn Moore called the meeting to order and thanked the hostesses. Members recited the Pledge of Allegiance, the club aim and motto.

President Moore announced she delivered 83 glue sticks for the school teachers. Members brought boxes of Kleenex tissue for today’s meeting, and next month’s donation is wide-ruled spiral notebooks.

Members wished a Happy Birthday to Victoria Ard and Shirley Martin.

After the business meeting, Elaine Williams presented the program on author Stuart Woods, best-known for his Stone Barrington novels. Barrington is an ex-NYPD detective who now works as a lawyer who takes on shady cases.

Stuart Woods was born in Manchester, Georgia, attended local public schools, then graduated from the University of Georgia with a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology. After college he moved to New York in search of a writing job. The magazines and newspapers were not hiring, so he got a job in a training program earning $70 a week. “It is a measure of my value to the company,” he says, “that my secretary earned $80 a week.” He spent the whole of the sixties in New York, with the exception of two months of basic training for what he calls “the draft-dodger program” of the Air National Guard. With the guard, he spent ten months in Mannheim, Germany, according to him, “driving a two-and-a-half-ton truck up and down the autobahn.” He notes the truck was all he ever flew in the Air Force.

At the end of the sixties, he moved to London working for various advertising agencies. In early 1973 he decided the time had come to write the novel he had wanted to write since the age of ten. He moved to Ireland and worked two days a week for a Dublin ad agency while working on the novel. Then he discovered sailing and about a hundred pages into the book, all he wanted to do was sail, and the book fell by the wayside. During this time he participated in several races, one of which was a trans-Atlantic race from Plymouth, England, to Newport, Rhode Island, in 45 days.

The next years were spent in Georgia, writing two non-fiction books: Blue Water, Green Skipper based on his sailing experiences, and the second called A Romantic’s Guide to the Country Inns of Britain and Ireland, a travel book he wrote on a whim. In the meantime, a New York publishing house, W. W. Norton, offered an advance of $7,500 to publish his novel called Chiefs. This is the first book in his Will Lee series.

Though only twenty thousand copies were printed in hardback, the book achieved a large paperback sale and was made into a six-hour television drama for CBS-TV starring Charlton Heston at the head of an all-star cast including Danny Glover, Billy Dee Williams, and John Goodman. Chiefs established Woods as a novelist, winning an Edgar Allan Poe prize from the Mystery Writers of America. Woods has since been prolific, having published more than sixty novels with more than fifty best sellers.

His Stone Barrington novels seem to be the most popular, and Woods writes about three books per year. Barrington cruises the world of the rich and famous. One of the latest takes us to Florida where Barrington’s vacation is interrupted when something falls from the sky.

He teams up with a detective to investigate the issue when the evidence seems to disappear.

Before he knows it, Stone is drawn into a web of deceit and crime that follows him wherever he goes—along with old and new enemies who just can’t leave him be.

Woods married for the first time in 1984, but the marriage ended in 1990. He said, “I married too young—I was only 47.” After 15 years in Atlanta, he moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he met his second wife, Chris, who was working in a bookstore while trying to write her own novel. He now divides his time between Florida and Connecticut and travels widely with no plans to retire.

Shirley Martin, the club’s Chamber of Commerce representative, reported attending the new Magnolia Mercantile store’s grand opening and also gave the schedule of remaining “Nights on Broadway.”

Suzanne Russell stated the Carroll County Humane Shelter is currently selling Georgia peaches.

Next month’s meeting will be hosted by Zia Locke and Sally Sutton.

Members present were Victoria Ard, Linda Edge, Juanita Finley, Carolyn Goodwin, Suzanne Howell, Geneva Johnson, Shirley Martin, Jean McKinnie, Sandi McMahen, Carolyn Moore, Mary Newman, Carolyn Potts, Shelia Rogers, Gaye Rowan, Suzanne Russell, Genia Sherwood, Sally Sutton, Donna Ward, and Elaine Williams.