The Bluebird Flower

 
Letters bring life to a collection of interestingly mysterious stories…
What would you do if you found a bundle of letters inside a trunk in an attic?
Find out what’s inside the letters written by a man named Chuck to a certain Mrs. Ainsworth in author Craig Downey’s The BlueBird Flower.

Open each letter penned by Chuck, a man with a questionable occupation (got an office in town and money to gad about, may be married or bachelor, and lives in some era), who addresses each letter to a particular Mrs. Ainsworth (who may be his aunt, sister, or perhaps just a friend).With a few exceptions, each letter is a story unto itself and mostly in or about Wetowannabee (a town in upstate that is not listed on modern maps or in past land records).

Discover more about the town of Wetowannabee and Chuck as you leaf through this letter collection. Learn about some incidents that he heard about or observed or that someone else has written. He takes no blame or credit for the story as some are merely his observations on a specific condition of life or after life…

Craig Downey

It was my good fortune to be born to a penniless man who’s father had 12 children, was a carpenter, taught school and many other things to feed his family. On the other hand my mother’s family were successful farmers. The great depression was not kind but somehow they muddled through.

I say fortunate because we lived in a pump handle house where the outhouse was a sufficient distance from the back door. Life was tough and I sat on the front row and watched as my parents struggled, I was no stranger to hard work.

Gary, Indiana was the place of my birth and home until I had a family of my own. We struggled but not like my father. Now a retired shuttle engineer I always managed to find a job. I hopped from job to job looking for what would be a job of interest to me. After college I took a job as electrician, then on to the Ford Motor Co. where I maintained the electronics that controlled the machinery that made cars, then it was Union Carbide where I maintained their instrumentation, on I went to General Manager and Head Instructor teaching radio and television and then to calibration of electronics instruments used in the missile launch division of the Air Force.

A year in Fort Yukon as a site representative for RCA and on to California where I worked on the Titan missile installations.

Next was Cambridge, Ohio in a calibration test set up engineer department manager for the calibration lab. Then I hit pay dirt and spent my last 35 years as a calibration engineer and later shuttle electronics design engineer. Just off hand I would say it has been a fun ride.