Wesley E. Hall Books

The Hall Tree begins with John and Mary Hall, who were born in colonial South Carolina in the late Eighteenth Century, and ends nine generations later with the great-granddaughter of the author, Miss Courtney Lea Grimes, who was born in Springfield, Missouri, on August 19, 2001. It is not merely a listing of births and deaths, with names attached, but a compilation of family legends and stories, records, and a great deal more. It is an attempt to compress into a single volume the story of a family that grew as the American nation grew, enlarged as it enlarged, and today is truly a prototype family of the American salad bowl. Today, we are Native Americans, Latin-Americans, Irish-Americans, Scotch-Americans, German-Americans, Dutch-Americans, French-Americans, Spanish-Americans, Armenian-Americans, and Italian-Americans; and our name is now Herron, Knuckles, Johnson, Pearson, Hanson, Allred, Prestwich, Van Wagoner, Anderson, Holinsworth, Smith, Lloyd, Wright, Gragg, Hales, Hoenshell, Hendrickson, Domyan, Nelson, Helton, Browne, Lanphear, Beard, Peak, Landers, Cardona, Ramsey, Schornick, Kandarian, Papagni, Swann, Potter, Finley, Terrill, Sheppard, Holmes, Bernard, Ceccarelli, Williams, Patterson, French, Mellow, Randolph, Robinson, Aquilar, Bell, Lawyer, McKay, Brown, FitzPatrick, Cannon, Harris, Hyder, Burney, Crisler, Dawson, Sisemore, Rainey, Hines, Thomas, Rogers, and Tobias-as well as Hall.

The Hooligan Navy is about a Coast Guard that had just gone through a world war as part of the U. S. Navy. The story focuses upon the experiences of a young radio operator who served on the CGC Alert, the CGC Bramble, the CGC Chautauqua, the CGC Escanaba, the CGC Storis, and the CGC Taney. The action begins on the West Coast, moves to Baltimore and the Coast Guard Yard, travels down to Norfolk and Panama, and ends up back on the West Coast and in Alaska. It is a humorous book about a young ex-Navy sailor who found out the hard way that the Coast Guard is a very small outfit where the officers all knew each other and shared what they knew about recalcitrant swabs.

Wesley Hall, after retiring emeritus professor of English at Southwest Missouri State University, in Springfield, moved to Dragon Fly Cove on the Lake of the Ozarks, where he resides with his wife, Sharon, and their Persian cat, Malcolm. There he writes a newspaper column and surfs the Internet.

The River Bend is a collection of fifty-six boyhood reminiscences about growing up in the River Bend country of south-central Oklahoma, in the first decades of the Twentieth Century. These little stories first appeared as a weekly column in the Konawa Leader, a Seminole County, Oklahoma, newspaper owned and published by Ed Gallagher. This book is my response to the mountain of correspondence from readers of the column who almost invariably began their letters "Have you written a book about this wonderful place?"The "Bend" is twenty-five square miles of rolling hills, scrub oak, and briar patches separated from the rest of the world by the wide and sometimes cantankerous South Canadian River. The nearest town, located in the mouth of the horseshoe bend, is Konawa, which has one paved street and whatever was left standing after the tornado of 1966.The eleventh and last child of a very poor dirt farmer, I grew up thinking I was rich. My family owned a one-hundred-sixty-five-acre farm in the center of the Bend, and on all sides of us were neighbors who seemed like kinfolks. The Great Depression and the Dust Bowl were words no one ever used in my presence.

Hard to Kill is a Western set in the Wind River Country of Wyoming during the dacade before statehood. It is based upon a brief period in the life of John Wesley Hardin, one of the West's most famous gunslingers. Suffering from amnesia, Hardin wakes up in an alley with a hole in his head and, just in time, is rescued from certain death by a girl who is herself being chased by a mob on horseback. In time, going by the name of Slim, he learns (but keeps to himself) that he is very much at home with handguns; and since a bloody range war is in progress and his pretty rescuer is in serious trouble, he resolves to do what he can to stop Bowker, the man who is responsible for starting the war. Slim falls in love with the girl and asks her to marry him--as soon as he finds out who he is. This occurs at the end of the story when the infamous Bill Longley, another professional gunslinger brought in by Bowker, refuses to draw against Slim. In front of hundreds of spectators, Longley reveals that the man before him is none other than John Wesley Hardin.

Kilroy, Home from the War is a true story about an ex-U. S. Navy sailor returning to a small town in Oklahoma at the end of World War II. After three years out of circulation, most of it aboard a wooden subchaser participating in island invasions, Wesley Hall returned to a small town in Oklahoma to find that almost everything he could think of was free for the asking. He had gone overseas at the age of seventeen, having never dated a girl or driven an automobile; and suddenly he was home a war hero at the age of twenty. The home folks were so grateful to returning veterans he found it extremely difficult to pay for anything, and to go someplace all he had to do was stick out his thumb. However, picking up where he had left off was complicated by the fact that he couldn't remember much about what it was like to be a civilian. He still had no bad habits, such as drinking and smoking, and he was paralyzed at the thought of asking a girl for a date. That all changed quickly after he bought a '35 Ford sedan and named it Kilroy.

Cain McGee, Junior G-Man is a biographical fiction comedy about a precocious kid growing up in the wild and woolly River Bend of Seminole County, Oklahoma, during the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. Elmo Hall tells his own story, how he became a published short story writer at the age of eleven and signed on as a correspondent at the Konawa Leader newspaper when he was twelve. At a time when no one he knew had any money, Elmo became a successful salesman of Grit newspapers, Collier's magazines, Garrett Snuff, and Cloverine Salve. From the sale of his mother's delicious turnover pies (his school lunch), he began a number of U. S. Mail Order businesses and became the youngest recipient of the Organizer's Award in the history of the BSA. He was the youngest of eleven children, the first in his family to complete Bugscuffle School (a first-through-eighth grade, one-room school). His beloved River Bend was a community without telephones and electricity and, consequently, radios and television sets and computers ("The list of what the Bend did not have would have filled a Sears and Roebuck catalog"), the most wonderful place in the world for an energetic boy.

The Splendid Five is a true story about five wooden subchasers participating in island invasions in the Pacific during WWII. The U. S. Navy converted these small ships to LCC's in the summer of 1944 in New Caledonia and turned them over to General Douglas MacArthur for his island-hopping campaign. This mighty armada, variously called "The Splinter Fleet" and "The Donald Duck Navy" (because of the Walt Disney logos on the bridge of each), participated in the invasions of Peleliu Island, in the mysterious Palaus, Leyte Gulf (the first invasion of the Philippines), and Lingayen Gulf, on the island of Luzon. Life aboard a subchaser was not at all like life aboard an aircraft carrier, battlewagon, cruiser, tincan, DE, PC, pigboat, or, for that matter, PT-boat. It was unique. And yet its story has never been told. The rumor was that only volunteers would be assigned to these coffins, and that the maximum length of service aboard one of them would be nine months. In the case of the SC-995 I was the only volunteer aboard, and no one, even big John Leavy, who had many physical ailments, including open sores had chronic seasickness, was ever rotated to the States.

Jason Rhodes, convinced that he is the favorite of a lesser god, whose name will remain anonymous, has two driving ambitions. He must become a famous writer (He wisely does not ask for any prizes) and he must have Stephanie Howorth, a young Mississippi girl so endowed with attributes, both physical and mental, that Aphrodite would have wept at the sight of her. Jason's first ambition suffered major setbacks early on because he and Stephanie and three other service personnel become marooned on an island in the Fijis. This is just after WWII, when young aristocratic women occasionally gave the time of day to commoners like Jason (if they were handsome enough). Jason was not only handsome he was practically the only man around, and so his second driving ambition made great progress up until a Fiji chieftain decides to give them a ride to the nearest airport. By this time the baby has been born and is learning Fijian. In the States Jason's fortunes switch quickly. He loses Stephanie because of one part hardheadedness and two parts stubbornness. But his books, produced late at night in an attic, begin to sell like hotcakes....Click here for more.