For book lovers, the Tucson Festival of Books is a marvel! For starters, it’s FREE. And for the most part, it’s outside on the beautiful University of Arizona campus where, on a single weekend, 100,000 bibliophiles from all over the world can wander at will under sunny skies.
But this past March, a cold wind and unrelenting rain quashed plans to set up our New Mexico Book Association booth on Friday morning, the day before the Festival. The only thing we could do, having driven nearly eight rain-fraught hours to reach Tucson, was unload NMBA Book Chair Paula Lozar’s Toyota 4Runner. After carrying boxes of books, banners and a table into our rain-swept booth, we threw a protective tarp over everything and left with a fervent hope for clear weather.
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Billy the Kid (1859-1881)
We were a couple of hours south of Santa Fe when we found ourselves driving through Fort Sumner. A one-time military fort that imprisoned thousands of Navajos and Mescalero Apaches in the 1860s, Fort Sumner today is a dusty nondescript village punctuated with billboards advertising the grave site of famed outlaw William H. Bonney known as Billy the Kid. “Let’s take a look,” Frank said. I was game. According to one account, the federal government closed the fort in 1868 and sold the buildings to a prominent New Mexico landowner, Lucien Maxwell. Maxwell’s son befriended Billy the Kid and it was in his house that Billy was fatally shot by Sheriff Pat Garrett in 1881. |
Author BLOG
I'm Shirley Melis. You may know me as Shirley M. Nagelschmidt, Shirley M. Bessey and now, Shirley M. Hirsch. Each reflects a particular phase of my life. Banged-Up Heart is a slice of my life's journey and in telling my story, I'm giving voice to my long silent "M" by reclaiming my maiden name, Shirley Melis. Archives
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