Lucile Morris Upton landed her first newspaper job out West in the early 1920s, then returned home to spend half a century reporting on the Ozarks world she knew best. Having come of age just as women gained the right to vote, she took advantage of opportunities that presented themselves in a changing world. During her years as a journalist, Upton rubbed shoulders with presidents, flew with aviation pioneer Wiley Post, covered the worst single killing of US police officers in the twentieth century, wrote an acclaimed book on the vigilante group known as the Bald Knobbers, charted the growth of tourism in the Ozarks, and spearheaded a movement to preserve iconic sites of regional history. Following retirement from her newspaper job, she put her experience to good use as a member of the Springfield City Council and community activist. Told largely through Upton’s own words, this insightful biography captures the excitement of being on the front lines of newsgathering in the days when the whole world depended on newspapers to find out what was happening.

"Newspaperwoman of the Ozarks is a long-overdue study of Lucile Morris Upton, one of the region's best-known reporters and local historians. A longtime reporter and columnist at Springfield Newspapers during a time when the remote Ozarks was reshaped from backcountry into a national vacation hub and the role of women in the United States shifted drastically, Upton not only reported on these rapidly changing times but also personified them in her own life. In this significant contribution to the historical research of Ozarkers' daily lives, author Susan Croce Kelly traces Upton's life, from teaching school to covering the news to governing her city and raising awareness for historic preservation, and paints a vivid picture of Ozarks culture over nearly a century of change"--

From The Notebook Of A Roving Newspaper Correspondent.

If it weren’t for Cy Avery’s dreams of better roads through his beloved Tulsa, the United States would never have gotten Route 66. This book is the story of Avery, his times, and the legendary highway he helped build. In this engaging biography of a remarkable man, Susan Croce Kelly begins by describing the urgency for “good roads” that gripped the nation in the early twentieth century as cars multiplied and mud deepened. Avery was one of a small cadre of men and women whose passion carried the Good Roads movement from boosterism to political influence to concrete-on-the-ground. While most stopped there, Avery went on to assure that one road—U.S. Highway 66—became a fixture in the imagination of America and the world. Father of Route 66 transports readers to the years when the United States was moving from steam to internal combustion engines and traces Avery’s life from his birth in Stevensville, Pennsylvania, to his death more than ninety years later. Avery came west in a covered wagon, grew up in Indian Territory, and spent his adult years in oil-rich Tulsa, where fifty millionaires sat on the Chamber of Commerce board and the builder of the Panama Canal dropped in to size up a local water project. Cy Avery was a farmer, teacher, real estate professional, oil man, and politician, but throughout his long life he remained a champion for better roads across America. He stood up to the Oklahoma Ku Klux Klan, hatched plans for a municipal airport, and helped build a 55-mile water pipeline for Tulsa. The centerpiece of his story—and this book—however, is Avery’s role in designing the national highway system, his monumental fight with the governor of Kentucky over a road number, and his promotional efforts that turned his U.S. 66 into an American icon. Father of Route 66 is the first in-depth exploration of Cy Avery’s life and his impact on the movement that transformed twentieth-century America. It is a must-read for anyone fascinated by Route 66 and America’s early car culture.

Time is the Great Depression.1930’s.Unmarried teen-ager chooses life for her unborn son despite many difficulties. .Cross-eyed and pudgy, he is teased a lot (hence book’s title) .Mother must give him up, elderly grandparents are only choice. They proceed to raise him through trials and errors, some serious, some humorous. Conservative farm folks from the Ozarks, they apply old fashioned rules of character which shape his life, while others in the little Ozark town keep him on the proper path. At the end of the story he is on his way to college, first person in his family to do so and is reunited with his mother in the night of her death.