Traveling With Living Gold Press and Adventuresome Women
We happened on The Living Gold Press library of history and travel books that highlight, among other landscapes and characters, some adventuresome women. The page, What Phillip Marlow Saw Along Highway 99, makes the introduction to one of them:
"Now oranges had been around since the mission days, but those were seedy and sour. In 1871, Eliza Tibbets, one of the very early colonists coming to Riverside, brought west with her (besides her husband Luther) cuttings of the Washington Navel orange. The navel orange came from Brazil by way of the US Dept. of Agriculture in Washington DC, hence its name. In their new home, the fruits of these cuttings were found to be meaty, sweet, and seedless. They were an immediate sensation."
And then we make the acquaintance of Mary Arnold and Mabel Reed In the Land of the Grasshopper Song: "A classic tale of two women school teachers in the early days of the rough and remote Klamath River country of northwestern California. Hired by the Indian Service to teach for the Karuk tribe in 1908, on arrival they found themselves to be the only white women in sixty miles."
"Everyone loves the story of Dear Mad'm, an 80 year old woman, Stella Patterson, who decides she will leave city life behind to live by herself in a cabin on a remote mining claim along the Klamath River. She writes of her adventures and misadventures humorously and unassumingly. "
Finally, the book, Recollections From My Years in the Indian Service, 1935-1943 and Maria Martinez Makes Pottery: "Thrilled at last to begin her depression-stalled teaching career, Freda [Maloof] stepped off the Pomona, California train platform and on to the eastbound train one February morning. Leaving a closeknit family life behind, her destination was Santa Domingo, New Mexico where she had been hired to teach second and third grades in the remote Indian Pueblo. Recollections, a biographical sketch of Alfreda Ward Maloof, recounts the unforgettable years she served in New Mexico and Montana. Also included in this book, Maria Martinez Makes Pottery is the primer Alfreda created for her young students."
With women's history month upon us soon, these books could be an little known glimpse of women rarely referred to and an introduction to a small publishing company: "Jill Livingston and Kathryn Golden do the majority of the writing, photography, drawing, design, layout, and marketing themselves. They are part of a growing cadre of small publishers committed to quality and independence."