It's been one heck of a month so far, in a bad way, so we've delayed the debut of our new book cover a little bit. But in the meantime it remains Christmas season! Or so the Elf on the Shelf tells me. How did that little so and so get in, anyway?
My labor of love was a book that I spent a quarter of a century working on, and boy, are my researching eyes tired. But I think it appeals not only to the locals around my home town, but to anyone who has an interest in firefighting, history, or firefighting history.
Smoky Days and Sleepless Nights: A Century or So With the Albion Fire Department, covers the first hundred years of a small town fire department that I've now been a member of for almost forty years.
For those of you who like to support a good cause, profits from the book go to the Albion Volunteer Fire Department!
For those of you who like a good deal, the e-book version price just dropped from $2.99 to $1.99! Not to mention the illustrated print version is just $9.95
Here's the blurb:
Smoky Days and Sleepless Nights chronicles the hazardous early days of Albion, Indiana, which like many small towns of the time tended to burn down – a lot. The story follows the efforts of townspeople to organize themselves into a firefighting force, and the personalities that stepped in along the way. It moves into modern times along with the volunteers, who face not only danger and death but changing technology and new threats. Using newspaper accounts, official records, oral stories and the fine art of digging for details, Mark R. Hunter shows how hand drawn apparatus and desperate bucket brigades turned into the trained, organized and well equipped department of today.
Smoky Days and Sleepless Nights is well illustrated with historical and firefighting photos. It’s also spiced with the humor that Hunter, the author of a novel and short story collection in addition to his column, “Slightly Off The Mark”, has become known for.
Find it on our website: http://markrhunter.com/books.html
Or on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0058CL6OO
Or Barnes and Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/%22Mark%20R%20Hunter%22
Along with many other e-book platforms.
Remember, every time you pass on a book, a tiny little elf house catches on fire! Which I suppose is how they end up hanging out on shelves.