Wouldn’t it be great to have a time machine so you could revisit your childhood back in the 60s and 70s?
When every day, from dawn to dusk and even later, you and your best friend played ball, rode bikes, chucked rocks, and played with turtles and horny toads and every dog in the neighbourhood, while constantly annoying you siblings and testing your limits?
At least that’s what happened if you grew up in Norman, Oklahoma (Middle America), population 35,000.
But since nobody has a time machine, self-styled “Okie Boomer” Bill Moore went exploring inside his own head, opening dusty file cabinets and rediscovering a motherlode of very funny memories. Then he wrote stories that are so descriptive that they put you right in the middle of the action and mischief.
The result is his three-book series on Okie Boomers.
“Hot off the press” (or at least “Hot off Amazon”), is Memories of an Okie Boomer 3: Growing up in Norman in the 60s and 70s”. It’s a rollicking good read, aided by super short, energetic and entertaining chapters.
Bill wrote “the sequel to the sequel” for two main reasons.
First, he likes to make people laugh out loud. And his books sure do that – sometimes causing great embarrassment on airplanes, and concern at home, like when one spouse shouts to the other, “What exactly are you doing back there?”
Second, writing his humorous and sometimes emotional stories (especially about his grandparents) allowed Bill to pass on his most important childhood memories to his musician son, Eli, who also serves as his editor.
“We immigrated to New Zealand when Eli was 4, so he doesn’t remember much about Oklahoma. And, until the Okie Boomer books, he never really understood all the stuff we got up to, or why his Dad needed so many stitches during a ‘very active’ childhood.”
Thankfully, Bill’s funny and relatable books are prompting other Baby Boomers across America to write or record their own childhood memories, or just “gather their chillens and grandchillens” around the fire for some old-fashioned storytelling.
“If we, and I mean all of us Baby Boomers, don’t tell our stories in the very near future, they’ll be lost. And that would be such a tragedy.”
At 68, Bill has only been an “author” for a few years. But he’s been writing “forever”, having spent four decades as a newspaper reporter and P.R. consultant in Texas, Washington, D.C., Singapore and NZ. He’s now retired on a wee farm in Northland, NZ, where he spends his time writing humour, trekking with his German shepherd, Kasey Girl, and building projects for his Singaporean Missus and her menagerie of pet sheep, alpaca and chickens.
For more information, check out https://amzn.to/3xL5cBW and www.billmoorewriter.com
All images: Bill Moore
This is a sponsored article produced in partnership with Bill Moore.
