NEW BOOK: LOLA'S BUFFALO NICKEL

Lola's Buffalo Nickel: Katherine's Special Family Heirloom Edition
by John Allen Kelly

Naco, Arizona, 1913. Bullets are flying across the border, and an eight-year-old girl is selling meat pies to the soldiers.

One of them, a smiling Buffalo Soldier of the 9th Cavalry named George, rides up to buy a meat pie. He pays with a brand-new Buffalo nickel, one of the first ever struck, handed to an Indian chief at Fort Wadsworth months before and spent on its way west. Lola keeps it for the rest of her life.

From that dusty border town, Lola's story runs straight through the American century: tent revivals with Sister Aimee Semple McPherson, girlhood days when she and her friend Verdie were nicknamed the Sin Twisters, a teenage marriage, and wartime San Diego, where she riveted airplanes and raised her children on her own. She became a coin collector, chasing the nickels and dimes that marked her years.

Through all of it, Lola had one gift above every other: she made people feel loved.

Based on family letters, memories and history, this is the story of a girl, a nickel, and the long life she carried it through.

This book is about my grandmother, Lola May Fischer, born Lola May Gibson on June 11, 1904, in Carlsbad, in what was then New Mexico Territory. She died in Eugene, Oregon, on December 9, 1992. In between she walked behind a wagon, fed soldiers through a war on the Mexican border, was promised at fourteen and married at fifteen, raised four children, set rivets on bombers through the night, and rode more city buses than anybody I have ever known. She could make a person feel loved inside of a minute. Most of us never figured out how she did it.

This is a biographical novel. It blends real family history with imagined scenes.

The history comes from three places. First, Lola's own writing: the life story she wrote by hand because her oldest son asked her to, along with her letters, her diaries and her poems. When her words appear in these pages, set apart or inside quotation marks, they are hers, with her spelling and her missing commas left alone. Second, family memory: what my mother, Evie, saw and told; what my cousins remember; what I remember myself, the bear hugs, the secret half dollars, the yodeling. Third, the records: census pages, draft cards, a birth certificate, a gravestone.

The rest I imagined. Where nobody wrote down what was said at a dance in Phoenix or on a night shift in San Diego, I have written the scene the way I believe it could have gone, from what I know of these people and of their times. I have told those scenes straight, as story, without stopping to apologize in the middle of them. The dialogue is mine, too, except where Lola set it down herself.

The history around the family is real, and I have tried hard to get it right: the battles at Naco, Sister Aimee's road trip through Arizona, the coins and when they were struck, the war plants and the ration books. Where the records and the family disagree, I have usually followed the family, because the family was there. One thing I have kept strictly as family legend: Lola believed she was part Cherokee, through her great-grandmother Julia Ann Lankford, and the family always said that a Confederate soldier marrying an Indian wife was common back then. The census takers wrote the Lankfords down as white. I have set down both, the legend as the family told it and the paper as it reads, and left the reader to hold them side by side, the way we always have.

For more information, or to order, see:
Lola's Buffalo Nickel: Katherine's Special Family Heirloom Edition (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HN9BRF68)

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