I sent the manuscript of our next book, Country School Days: True Tales of a Wisconsin One-Room School, to the publisher last week. It will hopefully be out by early Fall. Ann and I are in the 11th year of retirement. I believe everyone asks themselves as they approach retirement, “What am I going to do in retirement?” I had personal, perhaps odd, things on my list: Learn to play chords on guitar, learn to fly a radio-controlled plane, and write a memoir of growing up on the farm outside of Seneca, Wisconsin. I’m still working on the chords on guitar, although I have played notes for a number of years. I learned to fly RC planes last summer, not a master aviator, but can fly without crashing most of the time. Have 5 planes for outdoor flying, and 2 for flying indoors. You can’t have too many radio-controlled planes! In the winter, we fly small stuff in the Barney Center in Sparta, basically a basketball gym. The farm memoir, Seneca Seasons: A Farm Boy Remembers came out in 2014.
We have a number of science books out there, a true-life 1926 murder story book, and now a memoir of attending Oak Grove School from 1948-1956. It is also an account of many rural one-room school in Crawford County.