Review
Jeannette Walls has the blessed curse of a debut smash-hit. With her memoir
The Glass Castle selling more than 2.5 million copies, the heat must have been on while working through
Half Broke Horses: a True-Life Novel. Well, fear not. Hearing her readers cry for more family lore, Walls returns with the irresistible tale of grandmother Lily Casey Smith.
Born in a dugout on hard country, Lily Casey might as well have popped out with her sleeves rolled up and her boots on. High Lonesome, as the area of Texas was known, wasn't a "place for the soft of head or the weak of heart," and maintaining the Casey homestead took about all the energy a person could muster, let alone a young girl. While her mom worked hard at being a lady, it was up to little Lily to keep the place from falling apart. Poor enough for wax paper windows, Lily developed a no-nonsense, eccentric...
Beyond the Book
S&H Green Stamps
Chances are if you’re under 40 you might not remember S&H Green Stamps, but since I’m one step over that hill, I clearly remember licking those sticky little stamps and dreaming of all the possibilities they held as I carefully pasted them onto the enticing matching rectangles. For those of you who can recall pressing those little postage stamp sized tokens into their respective booklets, you’ll know just what Lily Casey Smith was talking about when she used those very same stamps to purchase a few choice items to furnish her home.
S&H stands for Sperry & Hutchinson, the stamp distributor who began offering Green Stamps back in 1896....
