RedPubPod #032 A Husband And Wife Team Co-Author a Book About a Husband & Wife

[00:00:00] This is what's in the name again? RedPubPod. RedPubPod.

[00:00:07] The podcast.

[00:00:08] From RedHop publications.

[00:00:11] RedPubPod.

[00:00:12] Three times for that.

[00:00:15] Welcome to RedPubPod. My name is Richard Eller, and with me today is a man of many talents, who I am very proud to have as part of our group today.

[00:00:26] And that is our editor extraordinaire. He's also a historian. He's also a poet.

[00:00:31] He's written on Catava County History, Baseball History, sometimes together, and many other things.

[00:00:38] Tim Piggler.

[00:00:39] Thank you.

[00:00:40] Thank you.

[00:00:41] Thanks for being here.

[00:00:42] And maybe he's also serving as referee today because the other guest is my co-author in a new book that we have written who also happens to be my wife, Claudia Ward.

[00:00:54] How are you?

[00:00:55] Hi. How's it going?

[00:00:56] It's going great.

[00:00:57] Okay. If it gets ugly, Tim's going to intervene.

[00:01:00] Alright.

[00:01:01] The book that we're going to talk about is a new thing called Marcella's, the Thorns of Harbourhouse.

[00:01:10] The first thing I wanted to ask you about was how you sourced up from material.

[00:01:15] Where did you find this story?

[00:01:18] And it's really an amazing story.

[00:01:21] As an editor, it probably kept me reading as much as anything that I've come across in a while.

[00:01:27] Well, it kind of comes from the people who lived at Harbourhouse.

[00:01:33] And I had done something previously on the shivers that got who built it.

[00:01:38] And so I knew I wanted to move on to the second iteration of the house and that was Marcella's story.

[00:01:44] And I knew that he had done a couple of books which I had read.

[00:01:49] I don't know that I could recommend them as reading material, but you know, they're what they are, they're novel of their time.

[00:01:56] And so I started researching them and began to find out all this incredible stuff about him.

[00:02:02] And just took it from there.

[00:02:05] The first one was the coil story.

[00:02:07] And then I sort of chronologically followed him.

[00:02:11] And unfortunately there isn't a whole lot written about his wife Elizabeth.

[00:02:16] So I kind of had to follow her where I could.

[00:02:21] And then Claudia began to discuss this thing and she kept saying,

[00:02:25] Well, we're a she.

[00:02:26] And she's very much hidden.

[00:02:28] So when she came in on the project, she decided that there needed to be as, as makes sense, right?

[00:02:35] More about her than I had at first gathered, right?

[00:02:39] Right.

[00:02:40] Because how many times are women voiceless when men speak for them?

[00:02:44] Hmm.

[00:02:45] I don't know.

[00:02:46] I'm going to try to be quiet as much as I can here today.

[00:02:51] But that's a 19th century.

[00:02:53] And honestly a 20th century thing is that the husband, even though he may not be the real breadwinner of the family, he speaks for the family.

[00:03:04] And so there was all this stuff that came in from him.

[00:03:07] And she, every now and then would appear.

[00:03:10] And so we had to like develop that as far as we could given what we knew.

[00:03:15] And you might want to give the listeners a time frame.

[00:03:18] Oh, they were talking about he should tell us about Elizabeth.

[00:03:23] Well, Elizabeth was born in on September 26th and 1828.

[00:03:28] So we're talking about the 1800s Victorian age.

[00:03:32] So very, if you can imagine traditional times that's when we're really talking.

[00:03:39] Yeah. And then he's born 1848, which is 20 years after her.

[00:03:43] Right.

[00:03:44] And that made them an unusual couple for the Victorian era.

[00:03:49] But she was pretty well to do.

[00:03:50] I mean, from what we now and in one of the ways we found this out is again going to the mail and the family finding out about her father.

[00:03:57] Right. You can look up and find out that she's from seconds Harbor,

[00:04:01] New York family was fairly wealthy.

[00:04:04] They had a comfortable life with their family,

[00:04:09] Scunner business, they ship things back and forth.

[00:04:13] And so she had done pretty well with the family.

[00:04:16] Yeah.

[00:04:17] And we don't really know how she got to Arkansas for her first husband.

[00:04:22] But she does.

[00:04:23] And really in one of the things caught up with it out.

[00:04:26] The other night when we did a presentation on this about her not marrying until 30,

[00:04:30] which is another thing that goes against Victorian custom.

[00:04:34] Right. She sort of blew that stereotype right up because to be that old and living, you know, she's in Arkansas.

[00:04:43] She's far away from her family.

[00:04:46] And then she meets a man who was a widow or his wife had died and their daughter.

[00:04:54] And then ultimately his other child son does leaving one stepson.

[00:04:59] And they married and it was just a very fast wedding.

[00:05:05] But that is something that with doing research to try to find where is this woman's voice?

[00:05:11] What a woman be doing at that time.

[00:05:13] It was very common for people to remarry that quickly, particularly men because they felt like they needed, you know, somebody to help with the children.

[00:05:22] So that wasn't as odd as are not marrying before.

[00:05:29] Yeah, as out of the box and then he dies within what six years of their marriage.

[00:05:36] Right.

[00:05:37] And she stays on to take care of Chester the son for a while.

[00:05:42] And then answers an ad.

[00:05:46] And so she answers an ad.

[00:05:49] This is really kind of fun for an elicutionist.

[00:05:53] And I just loved that term, you know, looking up an ethicutionist.

[00:05:59] Someone who could read to him and she married, she answered the ad for her.

[00:06:06] John, rather for junior.

[00:06:09] And he was actually a very wealthy, very wealthy and influential man at one time I believe owned what most of her county.

[00:06:17] Everything from the western side of Morgan to the arm of Bridgewater and thousands and thousands of acres.

[00:06:24] But he'd never married until Elizabeth came along.

[00:06:28] Right.

[00:06:29] And so he's 80 years old.

[00:06:31] He had four sisters who probably cared for him.

[00:06:36] He must have, over him.

[00:06:38] But he liked Elizabeth's style and her mother of delivery enough that they ended up marrying.

[00:06:45] And actually we're married for 10 years.

[00:06:48] He lived to the age of 90 which is pretty amazing.

[00:06:53] And from all accounts she had a good time with, you know, being with John Rutherford.

[00:06:59] But that speaks to your question about research.

[00:07:02] You almost have to find out about her by going through the men in her life.

[00:07:07] Did you find anything that you might call a primary source for this or was it solved source from newspaper articles databases?

[00:07:17] Yes, it is mostly from there because there's very few things of a primary source nature.

[00:07:25] Other than his handwritten copy for one of his novels.

[00:07:31] So he's got his own handwriting.

[00:07:34] And since he was a newspaper man, he would put little tidbits about himself in the paper and other newspaper guys love to write about him.

[00:07:44] Because apparently, you know, he was that kind of peacock.

[00:07:47] Sort of a guy.

[00:07:48] And so when he would make a mistake or he would give, you know, a bad speech or something, they all reported on.

[00:07:55] So most of it came from that.

[00:07:57] Some of it came from hearsay because there's this famous phrase that comes from Elizabeth.

[00:08:02] Now we've gone through the first two marriages. What did she have to say about them?

[00:08:06] The great thing about Elizabeth is she says, and I'm going to give the more polite version of that is attributed to her.

[00:08:14] And she says, I married the first time for love.

[00:08:16] And so that would be with oral Jennings and I got it.

[00:08:20] And the second time for money. And I got it and that would be with John Rutherford.

[00:08:24] And then she said, and the third time for nothing and I got it.

[00:08:29] So that's for ourselves.

[00:08:30] Yes, referring to more silliness.

[00:08:33] And you tell about a whirlwind marriage.

[00:08:36] She married him very quickly after meeting him.

[00:08:40] And like you had said earlier, he was 20 years her junior, which again is not your stereotypical Victorian trophy husband.

[00:08:48] He was a trophy husband.

[00:08:50] Exactly.

[00:08:52] And so that's why I just kept being so intrigued with this lady and you know, how strong and powerful to go so far away from New York first of all, marry a man,

[00:09:05] and then answer a letter and take that and go somewhere else, come to North Carolina and just,

[00:09:13] and then she moved to DC to be with her sister.

[00:09:18] And that's where she met Marcelus.

[00:09:20] And you could talk about some of his fun things that were going on before he met her and he depaid.

[00:09:27] He's a Georgia boy and was part of the Atlanta newspaper movement after the war.

[00:09:33] And so he was out there with Henry Grady and those guys.

[00:09:37] And he must have been the cub reporter that they all wanted to like, you know, see if we can do this.

[00:09:44] Yeah, I go get Marcelus.

[00:09:45] He could do that because they went on challenge them to eat a coil a day for 30 days.

[00:09:50] And so he does and they were the newspapers and there's newspapers in Boston and since an adi that are reporting what, you know,

[00:09:58] what this quest is because there was really only like a couple hundred dollars work, you know, of a bedding.

[00:10:03] But it took on a life of a tone as kind of a celebrity event, even though he at that point hadn't wasn't a celebrity.

[00:10:09] But, you know, they fricaceted and they barricaded and they fried it and all this sort of stuff.

[00:10:14] And so at the end of the 30 days, everybody was wanting to know, Bitty Eat One for 30 days.

[00:10:20] This was February March of 1876.

[00:10:23] And he did.

[00:10:26] He actually ate two on the last day.

[00:10:28] One to prove to the second one to prove to the newspapers that he did it because, you know, the first one happened out of sight and they didn't believe it.

[00:10:38] He had a hard time getting that one down.

[00:10:41] He supposedly had to go chew a little tobacco and swallow the juice to sell his stomach to make sure that he could, you know, finish it off.

[00:10:49] And so that sort of put him on the, I guess you'd say, minor celebrity map.

[00:10:54] He was, you know, he was at one time in both parties, democratic, sometimes he's a Republican, sometimes he's really an opportunist, as what he was.

[00:11:02] But when he didn't get elected in Georgia and got into a few celebrated fights with people, he decided to go to DC and join the Garfield administration.

[00:11:12] Well, they, he met with President Garfield but they didn't give him, offer much of a job.

[00:11:17] He was a clerk at the patent office when he met Elizabeth in that summer of 1881 and by September they were married.

[00:11:26] Yes, talk about a whirlwind wedding.

[00:11:29] And then he began to use her money.

[00:11:32] Yeah, she, she, she, you know, she had a lot of it.

[00:11:37] And so they came down to Atlanta and bought a couple newspapers which he proceeded to ruin.

[00:11:43] In order to, he was going to create a newspaper empire and he just, I don't think was business minded enough to be able to do that.

[00:11:49] And he had actually borrowed money from her.

[00:11:53] And we don't want to give away everything but it's quite fascinating to see how this woman can mostly unspoken.

[00:12:01] But how does she grow this man through their marriage?

[00:12:07] And she does.

[00:12:09] And in some ways that are fairly 21st century and, and handling them.

[00:12:17] And so yeah, like I said, we don't want to give it all away but it is, it was fascinating enough for me to keep me intrigued and inspired to get this woman's story.

[00:12:30] And I'm so glad to be able to get part of it out.

[00:12:34] I think that makes, you know, it's important to get words out.

[00:12:39] And how did they end up in Hickory, North Carolina?

[00:12:42] I mean, to me, that's a pretty amazing story in itself.

[00:12:46] You know what, and what's weird about it is always luck.

[00:12:49] I'm always timing that makes some of these things happen.

[00:12:52] I mean, how, how which EBNDC at the same time she was, you know, to get married in the first place.

[00:12:57] But after he sent a couple of those newspapers into ruin, they went to Kentucky and the Board of Tennessee Kentucky and bought a coal mine.

[00:13:07] And ran it successfully for a couple of years until the dewponds tried to outstem because one of the deposits heard that there's money in coal mines.

[00:13:17] And got him fired as the manager and her taken off the board of directors.

[00:13:21] And then a year, not quite a year later, they ousted the deposits.

[00:13:26] And they made real serious money with this coal mine.

[00:13:30] And that's how they recouped all of the losses that he had made during the Atlanta newspaper days.

[00:13:37] But after that, when they sold them on, they came back to John Ruth for Tassauver and Bridgewater.

[00:13:43] And I think they were planning to stay there until she found out about what we call the Harper House, it was the Schueler House at the time.

[00:13:50] And the Schueler's were Daniel had maybe died, maybe not.

[00:13:54] And the rest of the family had moved out so the house was for sale. She liked it, she bought it, they moved there.

[00:14:01] And then she, he came in about a year or so later and took over the local newspaper, the Hickory Pres and Carolinian.

[00:14:13] And gave him something to do and newspaper to play with.

[00:14:17] And that's how they ended up in Hickory.

[00:14:20] And that house is beautiful. If you haven't seen it, it's really worth going to see. It's a jewel. It's purchased on a hill.

[00:14:27] And I can just imagine it being this jewel and a bit of green, all the pastures around it as a turret room.

[00:14:35] I mean, it's a very beautiful house. And I could see how someone would be swept away to move to it.

[00:14:45] At that time, it included a barn and horses and everything.

[00:14:49] Right. Yes. Yes. Really a spread. Right. Yes.

[00:14:52] And then she changed the architecture of it. She not based upon the relationship.

[00:14:58] She did. It's quite interesting when you come to the Harper House as it is called now, which I recommend.

[00:15:07] Please notice that there are two front doors, not just one.

[00:15:14] And there's some conjecture as to why would you want to front doors? That's not traditional. That's not normal.

[00:15:22] Not very Victorian either. Right. Right. It's kind of odd.

[00:15:27] But there's conjecture and thought that she was so tired of his shenanigans by the end.

[00:15:35] Yeah. That she refused to let him come in the same door. So he had to come in the other door so she wouldn't have to look at his face every day.

[00:15:44] Because we think she banished him to the downstairs area and he had to use one door and she lived upstairs, so to avoid him when she went out and went to town.

[00:15:53] She had another one placed at the front of the house so that she could exclusively use that and keep him away from her.

[00:16:02] And one thing we do know about her is that she was seen the only description. We don't know how tall she was or what color hair was, but that she had.

[00:16:11] It was too white horses that she liked to ride a carriage and she was likened to queen Victoria.

[00:16:19] So we don't know if that meant because she was legally waving or tiny. We don't know. Yeah, that she physically resembled her. We don't know.

[00:16:28] Because again, she's very mysterious. He's all over the place and given his opinions and swearing that the town wants him to run from here and all this sort of stuff.

[00:16:40] She is really a hidden figure but she carries a lot of weight. I don't mean that physically, although that makes you know, that made it big.

[00:16:49] Right. He really kind of follows in the footsteps of the Schuillers because a Daniel Schuiller had started the first electric company and when he comes to town,

[00:16:58] he decides that he needs to be electrified and he takes it over by his it puts a power source out at the river and runs it for a couple years.

[00:17:07] There's a stonent power in light. And again, we don't know how much of that business acumen that it took to do that is his and how much is hers. He was president of the company but she was the secretary treasurer.

[00:17:22] And what I've noticed in researching some other companies, that's the real power position because that's the one that holds all the purse strings.

[00:17:29] You know, a president is can be kind of a ceremonial job but she knew how it worked and she, you know, she, he, they ran it until they sold it to what became do power.

[00:17:42] And it is interesting, there's a book Abernathia reminisces by Elizabeth Abernathia Irwin, different Elizabeth.

[00:17:50] And her quote was, it was his wife who held the purse strings and was considered to be a wealthy woman. One sentence that says a lot.

[00:18:03] So how did the people from Hickory react to Marseilles? What did they think about him?

[00:18:11] I think he was largely accepted because Hickory was such an accepting town of newcomers, you know, it wasn't very clanish like other towns are.

[00:18:23] So I think they were willing to accept him on his own terms. Now did they, did they laugh at his bombast?

[00:18:31] Yeah, probably. He also got a reputation around town for being an anebrate because he liked to drink.

[00:18:41] And so that was in the era when Hickory was going back and forth between Vienna, a dry town and a wet town.

[00:18:48] And when it was dry he would go to the drugstore and order, tincture of ginger, I think it was as a way to get his alcohol.

[00:18:56] That's some harsh alcohol to drink but that he gained a reputation for stumbling home because that's one of the things Elizabeth Abernathia Irwin talks about his him walking by the house

[00:19:10] and being kind of a wobbly sort of guy. And there is one story that Connor tells in his Connor looks back book that he asked him to say, how do you get home?

[00:19:21] He says, I just like my cigar and follow the light. So that's the way he tumbled home.

[00:19:27] But you know, in his defense he was a fairly prolific writer. He had had one book that he'd written when he was in Atlanta called Silvestre,

[00:19:39] Silvestre Lester, he made the mistake of making one of his characters not so distant, look alike to a real person.

[00:19:49] And that real person came and threatened to beat him up. So we don't know whatever happened to that manuscript if there even really was one.

[00:19:57] It never got published. But while I was in Hickory he wrote, my buddy and I and the lady from New Orleans.

[00:20:04] And my buddy and I is about coal mining and coal mine owner, which he was. So it gives us some kind of indication of what it was like to run a coal mine because he tells some some factual stuff about how the coal was extracted and how it was weighed and all this sort of stuff.

[00:20:19] So we get an idea that he knew enough about it to be able to write about it. Now the lady of New Orleans is a book about race, about the ladies racial background.

[00:20:33] And so you know he's a little edgy there and that he's willing to talk about something that was pretty taboo around turn to the century.

[00:20:40] And these two were both written downstairs we think at the Harper House and one was published in 1989 and the other published in 1991.

[00:20:49] Did he also have a book of poems? I remember correctly.

[00:20:53] He did. He kept calling it an epic. And he, you know in his later days when he didn't have as much money, he needed funds to help him publish it.

[00:21:03] And I don't think that ever got published and when he died, he, you know, he was penniless.

[00:21:11] And he, a lot of that stuff got like sold off. So somebody may have that or it may have just gotten trash because maybe nobody bought it.

[00:21:21] But yeah, he wrote because he would write letters to the editor at the paper and that's another way that we get an understanding of just who he was at any given time.

[00:21:31] He was not he did not hide his candle under a bushel.

[00:21:35] And so he, he was trying to get it published but we don't think he ever did or if it was it is an under his name.

[00:21:44] Yeah, I remember reading some poems in the manuscript and I think they had been published in newspapers.

[00:21:51] Yeah, little bits of one, yes.

[00:21:54] So there's probably no way to collect all of that into a volume at this point.

[00:22:00] Probably not enough of it out there.

[00:22:02] Yeah, I think I found about three or four of them.

[00:22:06] And when it was with past because she died before when she died, he wrote about her.

[00:22:14] And then just a couple other things but yeah, he's where he had a whole lot more that we've never seen.

[00:22:20] Would be interesting to read because he has a very interesting very fun boy at character.

[00:22:26] Yeah, and it's hard to know whether or not he was so flamboyant. He just put people off and they said, you know, oh there he goes right again.

[00:22:34] There he goes portraying himself as an author again.

[00:22:38] And because the books neither of those books sold very well but the amazing thing is they've stayed in print or enough copies were made so that we, you know, we have them now.

[00:22:48] You know, 120 some years later.

[00:22:51] Could you describe for the listeners what he looked like?

[00:22:56] He was a, it was a dapper sort supposedly.

[00:22:59] He always walked with a, he was dressed up and at the time it was one of those morning coats that was a cutaway.

[00:23:07] And he always had a cane and he had a mustache and a go-tie and more top hat.

[00:23:14] And that's one of the ways that he was identified around town as something of a dandy.

[00:23:20] And he was always well-capped, it's kind of a close horse.

[00:23:25] And those are really the way, that's the way that people around Hickory, what few that described it.

[00:23:33] Because one of the things said he was, he looked like an old southern gentleman.

[00:23:38] And that he was even in a parade in Charlotte one time where they were trying, on the float where they were talking about the old south.

[00:23:45] And since when he was a young man, he was in, he served in the Confederacy.

[00:23:50] His father was the guy who kept the defenses of Atlantic going.

[00:23:54] His father had directed his son to go around and procure food for the defenses for the soldiers there.

[00:24:01] And it would be, make him 15 or 16, he was going around to the farms in Georgia outside of Atlanta and telling them they need to give them food which they probably didn't.

[00:24:12] But he used that when he was here to talk about what a veteran of the war.

[00:24:18] And something we didn't believe in, they thought he was too young to have done that.

[00:24:21] So I think he felt he had a reputation to upkeep as editor, as author, as civil war veteran, as owner of the power company.

[00:24:30] He's a lot like Daniel Schueler in that he, when he came to Hickory, assumed a lot of robes.

[00:24:35] Could you explain how he came to be called Colonel?

[00:24:39] I mean, and that whole tradition which I think was very much alive right after civil war.

[00:24:45] Yeah, it seems like.

[00:24:46] I can't really because he just started calling himself that.

[00:24:51] You know, at 16 year old kid being a Colonel is, I mean, there are stories in the civil war about boy kernels but he wasn't one of them.

[00:24:59] But after the war, he began to refer to himself as Colonel.

[00:25:03] And you know, his political opponents would use that against him because he ain't no Colonel.

[00:25:07] But he used it long enough and vehemently enough to where the people just used that title for it.

[00:25:14] He liked it apparently.

[00:25:15] And apparently, you know, from what I remember in your furniture book, there are a lot of the people that owned furniture companies who had similar titles who had been in the war.

[00:25:25] Yes, I remember that was pretty common.

[00:25:28] Yeah, most of those are legitimate.

[00:25:30] We just don't think it is with Thornn.

[00:25:32] But he liked that term.

[00:25:34] Yeah.

[00:25:35] He was a guy in some ways very much of his time.

[00:25:39] But he was also occasionally ahead of his time because he was a lawyer by training and apparently not a very good one because when his father died accidentally on the railroad line,

[00:25:50] he botched his mother being able to get a decent settlement.

[00:25:54] But when he came up here, he partnered with legitimate Colonel, silly, who was from Minnesota when the congressional metal of honor was something of a carpet bagger but moved to Hickory and gained the respect of a lot of people.

[00:26:08] He was a judge in Catavac County and Thornn partnered with him.

[00:26:13] He had stature in the community of one sort or another.

[00:26:17] Well, I just mime opinion he's one of the most interesting characters that I've come across in local history.

[00:26:25] And one thing I would say is if it happened before World War II, most people don't know about it.

[00:26:32] and you really have to go dig for it to find out what happened.

[00:26:35] And I think this is a definitely one of those cases.

[00:26:39] Yeah, it's a fun story.

[00:26:41] And he's not consequential.

[00:26:44] But the one thing I'm just going to say about him being a civil war veteran was when there was

[00:26:49] a young African American man who worked at the Hickory Inn that was killed by a white man from

[00:26:55] Alabama.

[00:26:56] Thornton joined as a lawyer, joined the prosecution to try to help convict the

[00:27:01] white owner now when it went to the jury they acquitted the guy.

[00:27:05] But on that side of the ledger, he was very progressive.

[00:27:09] Yeah, let me ask you one other thing and I hate to back up.

[00:27:12] But on the quail eating, was there such a thing as like a world record book,

[00:27:18] Guinness or anything like that?

[00:27:20] I don't think so because it never gets mentioned.

[00:27:23] You know?

[00:27:24] He was a trail of said or even at that, out there, a setting record where there were none.

[00:27:30] Yeah, I think the newspapers were always looking for one of

[00:27:35] like a stunt like that.

[00:27:37] And I don't know how it got started that you know, he must have been bragging or something.

[00:27:42] You know, how can he 30 of those with no problem?

[00:27:45] And they said okay, young fella, let's see it.

[00:27:47] Yeah, and put him to the test.

[00:27:49] But he rose to the occasion.

[00:27:52] Yeah, and like you said when they met, he must have been a charmer because she took to him

[00:27:57] and she never divorced him.

[00:28:00] Right?

[00:28:00] She might want to kill him, but she never divorced him.

[00:28:04] Maybe.

[00:28:04] And she lived to be 88 so they were together a good file.

[00:28:08] And they're together again because they're both buried over it,

[00:28:12] would cemetery.

[00:28:13] Both went to the Episcopal Church of the Ascension,

[00:28:17] which again follows the Schuillers.

[00:28:21] He really seemed to have come to town to feel what Daniel Schuiller couldn't.

[00:28:26] And he didn't run a banker or anything, but he was a pretty, you know, well known guy.

[00:28:33] And you know, it's funny how in those papers you come across all these little stories that

[00:28:37] you don't think is much, but it really speaks volumes about him.

[00:28:40] He apparently had been drinking one night and got into a fight with a guy.

[00:28:44] And they took the case to Mayor's court, which they used to have.

[00:28:48] The guy got so mad at him that he threw, I figured,

[00:28:52] I think he threw his cane or something at Marcelo's, he didn't even know he had and caused a gash.

[00:28:58] And there was such a melee there that the Mayor had to like pull his pistol and shoot it

[00:29:03] to bring water back.

[00:29:05] So you know, I get from that that he was something of a polarizing figure,

[00:29:09] you know, either loved him or you hated him.

[00:29:11] Yeah.

[00:29:12] It's been a fun thing to write.

[00:29:14] Very fun.

[00:29:15] Yeah.

[00:29:15] It's very interesting to me.

[00:29:18] And so yeah, that's the theme.

[00:29:20] The takeaway for me is particularly women, but anybody who wants to be,

[00:29:26] you want your story told, you better tell it and you better leave it in a format that can be shared.

[00:29:32] And this comes with its own cliffhanger.

[00:29:35] And I will say this about his writing that when in his novels he was very good at making sure

[00:29:42] that when he ended a chapter there was a reason for you to go to the next chapter.

[00:29:47] I don't know.

[00:29:47] You know, it's like a figure.

[00:29:49] It's like a figure.

[00:29:49] What about Katherine Reed?

[00:29:52] Yeah.

[00:29:53] And he could, I mean, again, if you look at him as the person, the protagonist in all those books,

[00:30:00] he paints himself very, very well.

[00:30:02] He doesn't have a wife who is 20 years older than him and either of those books.

[00:30:08] Although in one of them, the second lady of New Orleans, she's the one with the money.

[00:30:13] But she's young and fair, and you know, they have children together, which he and Elizabeth did not.

[00:30:17] But if you think about her, she had husbands that spend 60 years.

[00:30:23] Her story is incredible when you think about it.

[00:30:26] Oh yeah, she's just not out front.

[00:30:28] Yeah.

[00:30:29] Right. It's just sort of, and we try to weave in little things throughout.

[00:30:32] I mean, you can't write a whole book about her, but you can certainly surmise from events that happened.

[00:30:40] Okay. She would have been this kind of lady and so it's been very fun.

[00:30:45] Yeah, yeah. I guess we're going to have our own cliffhanger when we talk about her death and what that meant for him.

[00:30:53] Yeah, if you'll have to find out when you read the book.

[00:30:55] Yeah, that's right. That will keep you reading.

[00:30:57] Yeah, to me, that's probably the weirdest and best ending to her life even though she would no longer be there to see it happen.

[00:31:06] That comes as part of this.

[00:31:09] Is it a justice?

[00:31:10] I guess so.

[00:31:11] Yeah, I'm sure he didn't think so.

[00:31:15] So that gives you an idea of what this whole thing is.

[00:31:18] But to call it his right, take a tour of the Harper House and you can see the Thornin's influence on there.

[00:31:25] But he's like you said before or war too, if something happened.

[00:31:29] Nobody knows about it.

[00:31:30] Yeah, yeah. There was a whole other era in Hickory that does not see the light of day

[00:31:36] anymore. And maybe it's because it was crowded with so many things happening after the war,

[00:31:40] but they just didn't have, you know, it was a sea change.

[00:31:43] Because when she'd go around Hickory, she'd go around in a couple horses and a carriage,

[00:31:49] which is so far into what we do today.

[00:31:52] And her wealth, I mean, if you could gauge the amount of money that she had,

[00:31:57] I didn't want anyone else in Hickory have that much money at the time.

[00:32:02] There's no way.

[00:32:04] No woman.

[00:32:05] I guess the shoefurt's A-shoot for it was building his cotton nails and that sort of thing.

[00:32:10] He would have been, he and maybe the Abernattis would have been like the only real rival to her.

[00:32:17] Because he was a massing his fortune, you know, and that sort of thing.

[00:32:21] And actually there was connections between them because when Thornin restarted the power company,

[00:32:28] he worked a deal to supply power to A-shoot for its cotton nail.

[00:32:32] They would have known each other.

[00:32:35] As a guy older, he would go to the city council meetings and say,

[00:32:38] I'm going to buy back the power company and then everybody would make a profit back.

[00:32:41] I don't know about that.

[00:32:42] Yeah, it's a nice way to, yeah.

[00:32:44] They, they, they embellished him.

[00:32:46] I was put it that way.

[00:32:47] So if you want to copy of the book, I, you know, since Robert's not here, I feel,

[00:32:51] do you bound to say this, redhoughtpublications.com and get your copy because it's fun.

[00:32:58] And who knows where this story is going from here?

[00:33:00] I got, I got ideas but you know, I got, I got to get everybody else on board.

[00:33:04] But thank you.

[00:33:05] And I appreciate my wife being here and we live to tell about it so we're doing all right.

[00:33:11] Thank you, Tim.

[00:33:14] Point for both of you.

[00:33:16] Okay, this marriage counseling session is considered as success.

[00:33:20] It's completely.

[00:33:21] Only one thing we got left to do.

[00:33:23] The name of this program is Redpupod.

[00:33:28] Can you say that?

[00:33:30] Redpupod.

[00:33:31] Redpupod.

[00:33:33] Whoops.

[00:33:36] And you're ready to go on this.

[00:33:39] Want to give another shot?

[00:33:40] What's the name again?

[00:33:42] Redpupod.

[00:33:43] Redpupod.

[00:33:45] Is that three times fast?

[00:33:46] Well, that's, that's the trick.

[00:33:48] Thanks for joining us.

[00:33:50] We'll see you soon.

[00:33:50] Thank you.

[00:33:51] Thank you.

[00:33:53] This has been

[00:33:55] All right.

[00:33:56] All right.

[00:33:57] All right.

[00:33:59] All right.

[00:34:00] From Redhawk Publications.

[00:34:03] What's the name again?

[00:34:04] Redpupod.

[00:34:05] Redpupod.