Yeah, this is going to be like 60 minutes. Yeah, I'm going to leave the room crying when I got done with you.
You never want to step back. Do you ever have a sketchy kid when you were growing up? You ever know somebody who got stuff? You don't know how he got it, but he got it. You ever know?
I knew somebody similar to that. It was like he always seemed to get stuff. You know, he always had stuff and you're gonna ask how he got it.
And he made sure he had the right friends.
Oh, where would it go? It's something like that in school. Carol G and 14 years here now. She's not here with Jim Bessier today.
When I talking about the history of receipt, we're talking about the history of Carol. She wrote a book. My heart leads me home with daughter's memoir.
I learned one thing right off the cover. Your middle name is borrow. That was my maiden name.
Oh, over that your maiden name. I chose your middle name. Carol Barrow. Oh, so that was GM Fortes, your married name.
And that's a picture of you and your dad on the cover. That is. And that was taken right here in Racine on Carlisle Avenue.
1418. 1418 Carlisle. The house is still there. I did something stupid. I'll talk about it in a minute.
But you wrote this, but what made you write a book about your life growing up in Racine? Because you're a local Yoko. You're from Racine.
And what made you write a book about it? Well, it was a slow process done. So I'll just touch on some of it.
It really started probably in my mind of just being sentimental about parents, my parents.
Another sentimental thing was that 1418 Carlisle that was the only home my parents ever owned. I grew up in that home.
And for 45 years, it was, it was like a character in the book practically. It was our home. Yeah.
But I think coming back to Racine in retirement, my husband and I met in high school.
But we raised our daughter, lived elsewhere, but we raised our daughter due to my dear girlfriend who had moved to West Bend, Wisconsin.
We're way over there. So we raised our daughter, Lisa in West Bend. And then retirement was coming.
And so we chose to come back to Racine. And it wasn't like, oh, we can't wait to get home to our hometown.
My husband's parents were still fine, but maybe needed future help. So the coming back to Racine does figure into writing this book.
Because even though we had, I mean, West Bend was 45 minutes away. So we did visit Racine.
But it was very different to buy a condo and to think now we are in Racine for a good amount of the time plus Arizona.
And so it was believe it or not, like an adventure. And maybe some people like they move away there in California.
And they think, oh, would I ever move back to Racine? Yeah, I think I would know I would never do that.
You know, so here we were. And it was very adventurous.
But you didn't get this house back.
No, but thank goodness I know who owns it. And I'm thrilled about that.
Not good. Yeah, yeah.
So coming back with a storehouse of memories of my parents and being in Racine, that catapulted me in.
But there was one event with the Racine Journal Times. Should I go into that now?
Well, coming back, my husband and I came upon this idea.
My dad had loved playing as a hobby in the Racine band, the city band.
And so those musicians at least at the time were paid.
And so my husband and I thought that second summer here, we will provide that concert for the band on their schedule.
Well, this was about 20 years ago.
And so I had to go down. I went down in person to the Journal Times with a letter to the editor.
And it said that due to our coming back, we were going to provide this concert.
And please come. It was over the 4th of July time.
So the woman says to me, but your mailing address is Arizona.
And I say, yes. And she said, well, you know, we're going to do a feature on people
that keep their ties to Racine.
Do you want to write something?
Now, isn't this amazing?
So I went home and I don't know, excuse me, maybe for a week.
I worked on this story and it was called, you can go home again.
And I didn't know it was even in the paper.
And then people started tracking me down.
I liked your story today.
That's how this all began.
Then the stories I went back to the Journal Times offered my services free of charge
and started being accepted several times a year.
And then that became a collection for a book.
And that's how the book got started.
Now, it's tough to ask people their age, but I'm going to have to do it in a sort of way.
What year were you born in Racine? What year were we talking about?
1947.
Oh, no.
No, 1947.
That's not too old.
Well, I think I'm getting close to it.
I can't believe it.
Not only kidding.
So this is basically growing up in the 50s.
Yes.
Okay.
In 1960s, I graduated from Harvard in 1966.
So you have thrown in those teen years, those crazy teen years.
You write a lot about your neighbors coming in.
See, when I grew up to my neighbors, they were there from the day I moved into the house
of the day, I moved out.
Except for one house next to me, they had several people come and go.
It was one of those things.
But you write about your friends and then they eventually have to leave.
And what do you talk about some of your friends who live next door to you?
Well, that was in the era where for so many of us, people didn't move often.
And on Carlisle, the 1400 block, there were grandparents owning the houses
with the young families living above.
That was a wonderful development.
But then the young families eventually moved away.
But we knew everybody on that side of Carlisle.
Now, what is interesting is a young child.
Carlisle has a boulevard down the middle.
We didn't know that many people across the boulevard
as a young child that was way over there across the boulevard.
But on our side of Carlisle, so I know you and your wife have read the book
and that's such an honor for me.
Every page.
I know you have.
And I'm thrilled about that.
So one of the people that lived next door, Philip and Jeanette Weiler,
that was such a blow.
We got along so well with this young couple,
because my parents were older.
My mother married when she was 42 years old.
So here came Philip and Jeanette as a second generation into that block.
And it's magical sometimes with neighbors.
You're like meant to be.
And then when I think I was in sixth grade,
out of the blue, they announced that they were moving.
And they were going to Arizona.
And we were heart sick and Arizona.
I mean, this was not back to Burlington where they were from.
But what was so wonderful was my father, especially stayed in touch with them.
And Christmas and New Year's, he would always call them.
And they would laugh at his jokes.
But then my husband and I were in Arizona.
And I was able to keep that friendship in their last years.
And my book shows pictures of when they left Carla Lavano
and a picture of Jeanette when she was a widow.
I was visiting her in her facility.
So they became lifelong friends.
But yes, there were the wonderful times in the sad times.
You know, it's funny.
I say I read the book.
I didn't read it.
My wife read it to me.
I think it's so unusual and so great.
She should do it like all to go book.
She reads them so much.
She never flubs on a word.
She just keeps going and going and going.
And I could picture stuff when she's reading it.
Because she's such a great reader.
So she reads all these books to me.
And yours was one of, I think the first book.
Now we're working on a different book.
But we're going to talk about some of the places you went to and were seen.
And my wife and I retraced that route.
Because I didn't know what you were talking about.
So we actually got up one day.
And we said we're going to start at her house.
And we're going to trace her walk down the block down the hill to the parks.
I have this.
Yeah.
So we're going to do that.
Carol T. N. Fortay is my guest.
She wrote her book.
My heart leads me home.
A daughter's memoir by growing up.
And we're seeing.
I guess everybody's got a book in them, huh?
I think they do.
And just the problem of sitting down and writing one.
And you have to know.
You know, you have to know how to put a book together.
That's true.
It's not easy to know how to put a book.
Your grammar has got to be perfect.
Because everyone's going to pick it apart if it's not.
Did you have an editor?
I certainly did.
Yeah.
I want to give her credit.
Yeah, go ahead.
Because after being having stories in the journal times,
I got an email from Genevieve Cesto.
And I'd heard about her.
Quality person and author herself.
And she wrote and said she had been following my stories and would love to have coffee.
And that led to her just gently saying,
I could help you put these together.
And then I thought that an editor may be meant scratching everything out.
And then you'd have to be terrible.
But it wasn't like that at all.
She...
She helped you tell the story.
Yeah.
But she changed hardly anything.
Yeah.
But she guided me and then to how to get something published.
My confidence about getting an agent.
I mean, I never did make it to the New York Times bestseller list.
It didn't make it done.
So...
You made it to the Penny Saper bestseller list.
So I just knew from the beginning not necessarily what she said,
but self-publishing.
I would self-publish this.
But you still need to go to the Library of Congress.
You have to get the price because you want it in bookstores.
You want it on Amazon.
So there is guidance needed.
But you can self-publish.
And...
But you do need an editor to make things look better.
And they have to go over it.
Grammar's got to be correct.
Yeah.
I never did learn who and whom or anything like that.
I turned that over.
It's to whom it belongs.
It's who it belongs to, but it's to whom it belongs.
You have to know how to put them in the order so it makes sense.
You look marvelous.
You look marvelous.
And one thing that I'm so grateful for as we got into this,
and she was very laid back in general.
But she said, but Carol, this should be a quality book.
And what did she mean by that?
Written well, correct grammar,
done in a conscientious way.
And I'm so glad of that.
Because any one of us can publish anything,
even with misspellings.
And that in a way is wonderful.
Self-publish.
But I'm glad I do believe this became a quality book because of...
It is.
I will say it's a quality book.
Well, thank you, done.
It is.
And I don't read many books.
Again, my wife rated to me.
I consider me reading the book that.
Yes.
But it is.
It's...
I didn't grow up here.
People know that by listening to me.
I didn't grow up anywhere near here.
But it made me think about growing up where I did grow up.
Yes.
And I lived in the house from when I was just about two years old
up until my mid-twenties.
I lived in the same house.
So everything.
The house is a character.
Yeah, everything.
And most of my friends are gone.
But I did have one kid I grew up with from a little boy up until my twenties.
And I just spoke to him the other day again.
Excellent.
What's his first name?
There was Johnny Carris.
He lives...
I think he lives in New Jersey now.
But he lived in his parents' house.
They passed away.
All the parents are gone.
Yeah.
That is my fact.
A lot of the kids I hung around with they were all gone too.
Which is...
That is sad.
That is sad.
Because you're younger than I am.
You're a kid.
Yeah.
I consider you a kid.
But these kids were all two years older than me.
I was the youngest in the group.
They were still younger than I am.
Yeah.
They...
The different reasons why they passed away.
Yeah.
And...
But they did so Johnny and I out of the six.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Oh, gee.
We're the last two standing.
Yeah.
And we're both doing fine.
And these lives...
I think he lives...
He just sold his parents' house.
Mm-hmm.
And his sisters, I think, live in Florida or somewhere down there.
I think one lives in New Jersey and he lives in New Jersey too.
Well, I was going to tell you before you had a break and now to continue.
I was telling you about Philip and Jeanette because you were saying we knew people on the block.
And so, this collection of stories, it doesn't go in chronological order.
It doesn't start out.
I was born on such and such a date.
It's more just vignettes about important people or things that happen to me.
And I can report that one character in the book, Gary Larson, who was a teen when I was in grade school.
They can know him.
He's in Florida now.
Oh, we don't know him.
Oh, gee.
Well, he was just full of antics and our quiet house needed something like that.
And he and my dad bonded on looking at cars, buying cars all over.
He had a fine set of parents.
Well, anyway, one time Gary climbed our TV tower.
That was in the book, right?
And suddenly, while you walked through the upstairs quietly and he appeared in the kitchen.
And my gentle mother, we looked at him.
I was there too.
And she said, you have to leave the way you came.
By the way, we are still in touch.
In just a moment, we're going to talk about how you got your first TV.
Not everybody, you know, kids growing up today say, well, everybody's got a TV.
But everybody didn't have a TV back when you were growing up.
And your father went halfway across the planet to go get a television.
At least a lot of sounds like that to be in the book.
He just went to Middle East.
Jefferson, Wisconsin.
You know, that was the technological capital of the world.
Anyway, we'll talk about that.
And we'll talk about how my wife and I retraced her roots.
We retraced her little pathways when she used to go with her friends.
Even went to your old friend's house.
Probably called the police on us.
Got people staring at our house.
Anyway, so we'll talk more of the Carol G and Forte.
She wrote the book, My Heart Leads Me Home.
A Daughter's Memoir.
And we'll tell you how you can get the book at the end of the show.
In case you want to buy it, got it?
Conforcing is a morning.
вRGA.
Talking to Carol G and Forte.
The real cost of a series.
There's a call on the process.
Angeles.
It was called but the book went red by the way 9 years ago 9 years ago.
Some people do that for their main living.
They've got to sell a million copies to be on the New York Times bestseller list.
You wrote it because you wanted to write it.
And anybody who reads it like we did.
Just gets the benefit from it.
My husband and I were going to move to a mansion that was our original thought.
Based on the book.
Yes.
We're still at the same local address.
But it has sold a couple thousand copies.
Well, that's great.
Yeah.
I wanted to talk here because I don't want to run out of time before I get to these topics.
In the book, back in the 50s, not everybody had a television set.
But your dad said he didn't want a TV at first, right?
My parents worked too hard.
They read books.
They looked up words and dictionaries for.
They were very studious.
And they weren't on a soap opera.
A soap box about televisions were terrible.
But I was brokenhearted.
But they let me go to the neighbors to watch Disney.
A land once a week.
But I had no hope.
So we spent a lot of time in Jefferson County.
Jefferson and the county were my dad had grown up.
Relatives, friends, business people from my dad.
And so it was always a treat for me to go out to Jefferson with my parents or with him.
So yes, we went to Jefferson alone with my dad on a Saturday.
And we went to the Milky Way restaurant, which had, of course,
in memory the best melted milks possible in the entire world.
But next door to it was a storefront, you know, about the size of 10 feet wide,
called the Jefferson Radio and TV clinic.
And the man that ran it had been a big high school star in Jefferson, younger than my dad though.
His nickname was Moose.
Every high school's got a guy named Moose.
So my dad said Moose was a big technological expert, you know.
So my dad said, let's go in here.
And he said to Moose, I think Carol should have a television.
I think we're here to buy a television.
And I almost died.
But anyway, Jefferson was the capital of the world for TV buyers.
So Moose drove all the way to Racine to check out what we would need.
And that led to the TV tower that Gary Larson climbed up and down.
Which is still there, I think.
Is it still there?
I know the house and I know the owner.
I don't think it's there.
Well, I snuck on to the property a little bit.
Maybe it is. Maybe it is there.
I'll go back and take a check.
Me too. I've got a look.
You know what though?
I have a picture of your house.
You keep talking. I'll bring up a picture.
Well, we touched on each chapter is of the net.
It does not go from birth to middle age or anything.
But other neighbors that have a chapter, Colleen Cox.
I read to her on our front porches.
And years later, we reconnected.
Colleen was in Chicago.
She's back and received.
At your house.
Yes.
And I don't see a talk on that.
Well, wait a minute.
A different picture is gone.
Keep talking.
So Colleen and I are just close friends with another sister of hers too.
Joe and May are known live next door to us.
Long deceased.
But I'm still in touch with Lou, their son, and Joan, and Dave and Nan,
they're the next generation.
And Jackie Olson, where I went to see Disney Land.
Jackie Olson, she's in Florida.
And we talk on a regular basis a few times a year.
So those neighbor chapters and neighbor people live on.
But what has been contained, you know, was the growing up stories together.
But I think, too, you were saying just everybody have a book in them.
And so many people say to me, oh, my family wants me to write one.
Well, when I began this, or even when it first came out, I was self-conscious.
Who do I think I am that my stories should be put into a book.
It sounds very self-serving.
But the wonderful thing that I found with this nostalgia is if I would be giving a talk about the book,
maybe reading a chapter or two, people would stay after they'd linger.
And they'd say, you know, your chapter on So-and-so reminds me.
And they would tell me their story.
Like, yeah, it reminds me of growing up.
That's the gift.
I mean, everybody grew up basically the same way you did.
Well, not everybody.
Somebody had a heart.
Little class.
But people had a heart of time.
Same era.
The same era.
Some people have bad parents.
And they grew up poorly.
Let's talk about my wife and I retraced your root in the book.
You talked about going down, walking down the block.
Let's start at the house.
You walked down the block.
There was school.
Yes, this began at Lincoln School.
Okay.
School at Lincoln School.
I got an invitation from the new girl.
There was a new girl in third grade.
And a few weeks went by.
We liked each other.
And her mother wrote an invitation to my mother that I should come for lunch on a Wednesday.
So it was so exciting.
So we started at Lincoln School.
But, you know, Carlisle Avenue was on one side of Lincoln School.
So I followed Andrea.
We went across State Street.
Now, there was a grocery store there.
Mm-hmm.
Yes.
Lincoln Super.
Is it still there?
The building is in.
It still says Lincoln Super.
And it's an empty for 50 years.
But we did see that.
Yeah.
And then you went down the road to a stairway that led down.
This was so fascinating.
This was the chapter is called walking through my world.
And it takes us from the first invitation.
Now we're leaving school for lunch because we went home for lunch.
Here I am in an entirely different world.
Carlo was one street street.
Yeah, four locks away, by the way.
Yeah, Carlo was one straight street.
Summit that paralleled it.
Blake that paralleled a straight street.
This was an angle and little dead ends and almost topsy turvy.
Now give us the so people know what we're talking about here.
It's at the corner of Carlisle and State Street.
What's the state state and Harriet or state and prospect?
You can take either one.
Okay.
But we come to this.
You had to go down these stairways.
Well, I'll tell you.
Okay.
So I'm following Andrea and looking at all this.
It was amazing.
And I felt so important because I was a guest.
I mean, this was a big deal to me.
So we get to this yellow brick three story building right in the middle of the houses.
And I found out later it had to do with Lincoln Lutheran home.
But what we did was right next to this kind of closed up brick big building.
Was you could just make out some handles as there was a woods right there in the block.
So we start down.
There were like a hundred steps down through the woods cement with a railing hidden.
I couldn't get over this.
So we get down to the bottom.
And now we're in the sun.
And there was the root river and a little white footbridge crossing this narrow part.
And across the footbridge was her beautiful white colonial house.
Which it now give people an idea of where it is.
If you know where Lutheran high school is.
It's right across the street and down a half a block.
It's right across Lutheran high school.
Yeah.
And down about it.
You can see it from.
You can see it from space street.
From space street.
Yeah.
A white Dutch colonial kind of house.
So my wife and I.
We found the steps.
But you can't go down them now because at the end there's a gate and it's blocked off
because it's nature took it back.
So we went around to where the actual gate is down below.
The footbridge you took is gone.
Oh, yeah.
It's gone.
That's long gone.
But the actual path you took to get to the white.
We could see it from that point.
Yeah.
So we followed your path to this white house.
Now you look at it today and you go by car.
It's not that big a deal.
But how old were you?
Third grade.
Great.
So that's what say six seven first.
Eight years old, maybe eight nine years old.
Yeah.
It must have been like a million miles away.
It was like walking through my world.
It was like into another world.
And to read this in the book is really.
It's the way you tell it.
It seems like you were in a like an enchanted forest.
But you're not.
You're right.
Yeah.
Right.
Of course, I'm Lincoln from Lutheran high school.
It just shows how experiences for a child can be so magnified.
So brand new.
So unexpected.
And that certainly was the case.
And then we got across.
We got to her house.
And my mother's all rarely worked.
And they had house dresses on.
And Andrea's mother was all dressed up.
They'd come from New Jersey.
So anyway, so we go in there that he doesn't mind.
She served us a thing called Welsh.
Rare bit.
Now, OK, now based on reading that in the book.
My wife and I brought up an old Gomer pile episode.
Oh, really?
A Gomer pile goes to a restaurant in these Welsh rare bit.
And the legend is it gives you horrible nightmares Welsh rare bit.
And it's like a cheese type of thing.
Yeah, it gave me a terrible stomach ache.
OK, it's like a cheesy thing.
Now based on reading that, I brought and I have the Gomer pile episode.
Yeah.
And I brought it up.
And we watched it.
And I put it out in the second place on Welsh.
Rare bit.
My wife said we've got to make that sometime.
Oh, this is amazing.
And in the Gomer pile episode, Sargent Carter followed Gomer.
And he had the Welsh Rare bit, too.
And they both had a nightmare.
And they come out and Gomer became screaming.
And like Sargent Carter would scream.
And Sargent Carter was like subservient, like Gomer.
I followed him, I'm sorry.
Sargent.
It was Gomer.
And so we want to try based on this story.
Welsh Rare bit based on Gomer pile.
But now I don't do restaurants even serve that.
I don't know because it's not something I would order.
Yeah, it's not Welsh rabbit.
It's rare bit.
No, rare bit.
Right.
Right.
And people say, oh, it's Welsh rabbit.
No, it's not a rabbit.
It's a cheese.
Well, what I try to do in the book, though,
I hope it's not too serious, too sentimental.
But I try to find meaning in these episodes.
Or thank like with Gary Larson and the crazy antics,
thanking him for bringing fun into our serious house.
And this episode of being this guest,
I say it really did last for me with more confidence
about being a guest and being invited places.
It really was a growing up experience for me.
And it never quite left me.
So this was in the newspaper.
And then I say, sadly, we lost touch.
It was just a short time later that the Richardson's moved away again.
And we lost touch.
And someone found her who was a reader of the paper.
And we've reconnected and we have met.
And we now send Christmas cards.
And I think she was shocked that this meant so much to me.
But it was, it warranted an entire chapter
of growing up, growing up.
And you write some sad stuff in there.
One of your friends went to Arizona.
And then they lose their son.
That was the, that was Philip.
That was her.
Okay.
Yeah, they ended up with one child who passed away.
That's a horrible thing to lose a child.
Yeah.
My brother lost two children.
And it's very difficult.
It's not like losing a parent because that's the natural order of things.
Yeah. Yeah.
When you lose a child, it's not the order.
And your mind has trouble dealing with it.
And you know, going back to them,
she also died because from the hundreds of injuries we gave.
It felt like us came to her to visit Jeanette,
because she had been deaf.
Pavetta, I'm retired.
So Bygie.
I'm very interested in this world.
Cause she had been privy as a child of her own family.
I don't know about that.
She was toen enquired about this.
But she was freaking out of this world.
And loving it makes a Christian profile people say,
just ridiculous things like,
I'm going to introduce some deeper meaning
to simply writing anecdotes.
She was a great, great role model.
There we are.
You went Jeanette in that picture.
The book's got some of your pictures in here too.
Let's talk about Ryle Wisconsin.
Now, was it a farm out there you went to visit?
You had relatives who lived out in Ryle.
Ryle is halfway between here and Wisconsin Dells.
It's in the middle of nowhere.
Well, this, this chapter that is called the Christmas cactus.
And my mother had grown up in Ryle.
My mother was born in 1903.
And it's not pronounced real like Rio de Janeiro.
Yeah, you would think so.
It's a Ryle.
Ryle.
Yeah.
Well, and my father who never drove more than 45 miles an hour,
I don't know how he ever got to Ryle.
But we would go once in the summer and for sure many Christmases.
So I write about the home that my mother grew up in.
She and her two siblings just loved their mother,
who had come at 17 from Norway all alone, braved the voyage with no trouble, married,
and then my mother's father died of appendicitis that read appendicitis when my mother was three.
So they had a farm, but they kept that and moved into town.
And when you passed this house on the street,
you know, it was a typical Midwestern, clean and kind of house.
No mansion.
There were a few mansions in Ryle.
But it was big enough to have two hidden staircases.
They would be, you know, you might have a grand staircase where you can see it.
So these were hidden.
You opened up a door in the master bedroom,
or you opened up a door in the parlor,
and each had a staircase to the upstairs.
Well, it was such a beautiful house because my aunt and uncle Andrew and Elva,
they were very stately, remarkable, kind, educated people.
They were, I had them on a pedestal.
They had been to Norway.
They spoke in Norwegian.
They were both 100% Norwegian.
And so it would be so fun for me.
Their sons were older, so they were often at Christmas gone, like in the Armed Services.
So my aunt, Elva, would say, Carol, you can explore.
So I would take one hidden staircase up, come down the other one,
and I would see all these artifacts, you know, the trunks from Norway.
The stereopticon where you put the postcard into it, you know, they look bad on the table.
And when I would come down the second hidden staircase, I would end up in their parlor.
And I never could figure it out because there was this enormous plant in that parlor.
And my grandmother had it.
It was called the Christmas cactus.
And so it kind of bothered me.
Why would that, that be a cactus?
Well, the ears went by.
Andrew and Elva had to leave the house with old age.
My grandmother had died.
The Christmas cactus came to a scene.
Now it became quite the heirloom because how old was this?
And this is all in the story.
It's tracing of the history.
And then my parents died.
I very carefully took this Christmas cactus to West Bend.
And it was the first Christmas without them.
Now this Christmas cactus, you know, most of you know what it is,
drooping kind of a chain of leaves.
And I never saw anything unusual about it.
I thought it was kind of unattractive.
Well, that first Christmas I was walking through our living room in West Bend
where I placed this family heirloom.
And I stopped.
I thought, did I see something there was one blossom.
And so I felt, again, introducing meaning into these anecdote type of stories,
I felt that my mother was there.
So we had that Christmas cactus.
And there's a poor picture of it, but a picture of it in the book.
And long after the book was written, we lost the Christmas cactus.
Oh.
That is bad.
I was so superstitious by that time that I thought it's got to last another hundred years,
or there's going to be bad luck.
And we tried very hard with nurseries and all this, but yeah, we lost the Christmas.
There's a picture of it.
Yep, we lost the Christmas.
It doesn't look like you cack this like from Arizona.
No.
Doesn't look anything like that.
It's a drooping leaf.
A lot of droopy leaves on it.
Well, so some people have told me that is their favorite story in the book.
The Christmas.
Mine is just when you, when you travel the streets to get down to your friend's house.
Yeah.
As a matter of fact, we couldn't find something.
And I called Carol with my wife and I were in the car.
We can't.
Could you get over here in the, you have to get to take your husband to the train station.
Yeah, that's right.
And you say, I'll be right over there a few minutes.
I said, you got to show us what this path is.
Because we're, we're stuck halfway between, because we followed your journey.
Well.
I was stuck after that.
I thought to myself, if I only write one book in 10 years, I don't think I can become a
mystery author.
But that is like a mystery.
It is because we were looking for the pit.
We found the mystery and we found the steps, but they're so overgrown with vegetation.
We didn't know we were standing in front of it.
And then we found the gate.
It's locked up because I don't want people getting hurt.
But that's, and then the actual footprint is gone too.
Yeah.
And then we found the park.
It was like a fairy tale.
We did find the park nearby.
There was a footbridge there.
And I said, I don't think the entry is talking about it.
I don't think she's talking about it.
There was a little white wooden footbridge.
They have one there, but it's not the same one.
Not that one.
Now, I want to also say we're running out of time here.
As I was writing this, for me, finding a title was next to impossible.
And so with friends that I would have coffee with now and then, they asked, well, how's it
coming?
And I must have said, well, what do you think about that?
What do you think about a couple of title ideas?
It was silent.
And then my friend Tony, Chris Savaglio, said, well, how about my heart leads in the home?
So Tony is responsible for what I think is a beautiful title.
I just saw her last night at a church.
You mentioned it.
We mentioned you're going to be on this morning.
So it's a very sentimental journey.
And now, Don, I am after nine years on my Christian counter right now.
Book number two.
I think it might be.
Can you believe that?
A book for Christmas, if I can have it ready for next year.
And along those lines, Jim Rossir, who you're so kind to us about a reminiscing, he has said,
if I get that book done, when he does his museum tour next year at the business center,
I'll be out, but.
And then he'd backtracked and said, he's inviting me for this year with my.
He mentioned that right.
Yeah.
And another friend, Doug Fossay, a friend of his.
So we're horning in on the museum tour.
So when you get to do the audio book for this, actually read the book into like a podcast.
Can you help me do that?
I never did.
You just have to read it into a microphone.
There's nothing more to it than that.
I've listened to Jerry Seinfeld.
We listened to one of his audio books when we traveled.
I actually would like to do that.
Yeah.
You just have to sit in front of a microphone.
You can do it at home.
But then who's going to listen to it?
Other than you?
Well, then you do.
You market it like a book.
It's the audio book version.
And you sell it on Amazon, just like you sell this book.
And by the way, let's talk about that.
If somebody wants to get a copy of the book, how can it?
Rather than having to know you and get a free one.
Yeah.
If they want to really pay for what?
How do they go about doing it?
Yeah.
It's on Amazon.
Also, Barnes and Noble carried it for a long time
under biographies.
But they don't have it anymore.
But they would order it.
It's definitely still in print.
Let's look on Amazon just to make sure,
because I have an Amazon.
Okay.
Double check.
Amazon thing here.
And the Amazon is already for Black Friday.
My heart leads me home.
Carol, G and forte.
They're making the movie come out.
Oh, isn't that something?
Am I starring in it?
I always spell.
It doesn't spell right here.
Hold on a second here.
It's got you spell with a K and it's a spence.
Yeah, hold on.
I'd better be there.
Well, hold on.
You know what?
Because I get a lot of royalties from that.
I get like two or three dollars a month.
