Fiction: Panhandle is setting of 1940s tale
Panhandle is setting of 1940s tale

Published: May 20, 2007

Robert Boyd Delano's "The Happy Immortals” (Prairie Hill Press, $12) tells what it was like growing up in the 1940s and becoming an adult on a wheat farm near Guymon in the Oklahoma Panhandle. This poignant Tom Bristow love story is a nostalgic flashback to that time but is also a timeless coming-of-age story.

Bristow came home after the war and enrolled in medical school. Now in his third year, he is having second thoughts about dedicating himself to that life. His hard-working, tough-love father is incensed, having always wanted Tom to be a doctor.

Intertwined are Tom's struggles to find true love and happiness with one of three women, although none of the relationships seems to work out.

The author, born the seventh of nine children to Oklahoma Panhandle homesteaders, grew up during the Dust Bowl days. He fought in South Pacific battles during World War II, including Leyte, Luzon and Okinawa. He attended Oklahoma State University, then earned a journalism degree from the University of Oklahoma and planned to become a foreign correspondent. This novel was birthed during that period but was set aside for career and family responsibilities, gathering dust more than 50 years. Now in his 80s and retired, Boyd has vivid memories of the '40s, which he has replicated in his first novel.

— Margaret Collins