WESTINGHOUSE PATENT Pend. and Friends

by Adam Dumphy


Formats

Softcover
£12.80
£10.50
Hardcover
£19.89
£16.25
Softcover
£10.50

Book Details

Language : English
Publication Date : 26/05/2004

Format : Softcover
Dimensions : 6x9
Page Count : 336
ISBN : 9781418436391
Format : Hardcover
Dimensions : 6x9
Page Count : 336
ISBN : 9781418436407

About the Book

The morning of his eighteen birthday Westinghouse Patent Pend. Ainstruther hears his Ma say, “Wes, break a leg.”

He realizes it is carnie talk telling him to leave the desolate homestead to go out in the world to make his fortune and send it back, that the other eight kid’s ration of corn meal mush and goat’s milk not be permanently interrupted.

Unschooled he is well read from his Uncle Abernathy, an English Remittance Man’s, library.

He is then a Victorian minded American youth dropped into the bucolic glitz of San Diego, CA of the Thirties.

His first acquaintance is Alyse, rambunctious daughter of an oil tycoon. Smitten she offers to help his quest but her mind is more on long white dresses and bridal bouquets.

At Alyse’s admission of her love of antiques they mine the defunct Ensenada Hotel, once a posh beanery, of its furnishings as items to sell on Antique Row in San Diego.

They are astonished to find in the various armoires exotic birds and reptiles being smuggled in for the San Diego Zoo, and finally a defunct Mafia gunman.

They over come to make it, in Wes’ own words, “A typical American Horatio Aglae (sic) Success story”.


About the Author

In the 30’s Adam’s Father was Superintendent, Medical Services, San Diego County. Money was tight and while they had an ambulance it could not attempt the back county roads.

Then his father would take the family car to bring to the hospital patients with broken bones or diphtheria or gunshot wounds. When it was a prisoner from the Work Farm, Adam would ride in the back seat with a shotgun.

On one of these he encountered abject poverty and a family who held off that ogre with only courage, patience and good nature.

Here was gist for his story mill. But it seemed unfair to the family to paint it in the black of reality but better to write it as a cheerful comedy