Trafford Publishing: Grand View

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Grand View

by John W. Hancock

249 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #04-1237; ISBN 1-4120-3409-4; US$25.00, C$31.00, EUR20.15, £13.96

Set during the Great Depression, it features a misunderstood man with a billion-dollar secret. Not gold, not silver, something worth a hundred times their value. His silence has a terrible cost.

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About the Book About the Author Excerpts Catalogue Information

About the Book

The picture on the cover of Grand View shows my great uncle, Wayman Redden, with one leg dangling over the precipice of a 2000-foot cliff in the New River Valley of West Virginia. It's no contrived photograph. He designed a homemade timer for the shutter and took it himself in the 1920s. By some accounts, he was insane, and this photo certainly doesn't help his case. However, others swore he was a genius, including the psychiatrists who examined him at a Virginia sanitarium.
Wayman allegedly had a secret: a billion dollar secret. Family legend holds that he discovered an extremely valuable mine on Redden land. Not gold, not silver but something worth a hundred times their value. Unimpressed with the potential fortune, or led by his lunacy or, perhaps, both, he takes his secret and moves to Detroit to work on the assembly line for Henry Ford. There, Wayman is swept up in the tidal wave of the Great Depression and finds himself and a lover caught in the middle of one of the most brutal labor union incidents of the young century, the Ford Hunger March of 1932.
Nine months later, he was dead. Trappers found his frozen body beneath a cliff in the West Virginia woods. Grand View is the story about how he may have died in those woods.

About the Author

John W. Hancock was born in Charlotte, North Carolina sometime in the 1950s. After high school, he spent twelve years in the design engineering industry. In 1979, he moved to Chicago where he met his wife of twenty-three years, Barbara Helen Turico. John and Barb moved back to North Carolina in the mid-1980s where John soon graduated with a B.A. in English and American History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. After completing his master's degree and further doctoral studies at the University of South Carolina, John spent fourteen years teaching American and Southern history at his alma mater in Charlotte. John left the university in 2003 to complete Grand View.
John is currently working on two new books: I Wake Up Screaming: The Autobiography of Sergeant Grit (a novel about Vietnam - coming in 2005), and Society Hill (an antebellum novel - coming in 2006). John and Barb currently live in Concord, North Carolina where they raise their two children, Annabelle, age nine and Dexter, age 6.

Excerpts
Prologue
Glen Hedrick, West Virginia
Wednesday, December 28, 1932
Undine sat at the kitchen table stirring her coffee and watching a soft morning snow settle on the windowsill above the sink. She had a few minutes left before she had to leave for work, so she took her time, sipping gently across the cool edge of her cup. She glanced into the front room at the Christmas tree and consciously reminded herself that it was the holidays, to be joyful, and that she had much to be thankful for. There were so many that had so much less. That's what her mother had always said to her as a young child, and by now she knew it to be true. She was just about to drift into a daydream of the close past when the front doorbell rang and jarred her back to the present. It was the newspaper boy.
"Here's your paper, Miss Redden. I didn't have any bags ready for the snow, and I didn't want it to get wet."
"Thank you, sweetheart," Undine replied. She gave the boy a quarter and knew his family would appreciate it. Twenty-five cents went a long ways these days. "Be careful on the slick streets," she said as he peddled off down the hill.
Undine went back into the kitchen, laid the newspaper on the table and put on her overcoat to leave. She took one look at the front page and sat back down. The news was not wholly unexpected.
TRAPPERS FIND REDDEN'S BODY BENEATH CLIFF
Glen Hedrick Man Missing 2 Months Found Dead on Fayette
Creek, Four Miles From Grand View
She knew someone would eventually find her brother's body, but she thought it might take much longer.
The body of Raymond Redden, the object of a frantic search by friends and relatives and sought for almost two months after his disappearance from the home of his sister in Glen Hedrick, was found yesterday at noon under a cliff on Fayette Creek, four miles from Grand View.
They don't even have the decency to spell his name right, Undine thought. It's Wayman-not Raymond-Wayman.
He apparently had been dead for some time. Identification was made by clothing on the body, which corresponded with that worn by Redden at the time of his disappearance.
Undine was certain he had been dead longer than that.
Redden was 37 years old. His unbalanced mental condition is held responsible for his wandering from his home. He labored under the delusion that night was day and vice versa, so his disappearance was noticed immediately on the morning of November 7.
She winced when she read the line about "unbalanced mental condition." She knew that many of the people in Raleigh County, and a good number of those out on Redden Ridge, would dismiss Wayman's death as "what happens to crazy people."
"He wasn't crazy," Undine whispered to no one.
Every effort has been made by relatives to locate the missing man, and a reward of $500 for his return, dead or alive, was posted throughout this section of the state by members of his family, but no trace of him could be found.
The family had looked-and looked. But where were you going to start? Everyone around here knew that you'd never find a body in these mountains if you were looking for it. It was understood that if you really wanted to disappear, or if you wanted someone else to disappear, it could be accomplished right easily in these parts. It was an uneasy power that the locals didn't like to share, or even talk about with strangers. For that reason, the search for Wayman's body had been halfhearted at best.
For some time he had undergone treatment in a Virginia sanitarium, and it was at first believed that he might have returned there, as he had developed a liking for his surroundings while an inmate. For the past few years he had worked in Detroit at the Ford Company, but he recently moved back into the home of his sister in Glen Hedrick.
A report of police in Roanoke, Virginia, Monday that a man answering Redden's description had been found there was made to members of the family and two of the man's sisters were in Roanoke yesterday when the body in West Virginia was found.
Pearl and Garnet Fay knew when they left that the man in Roanoke probably wasn't Wayman, but they had to make sure. He could have been anywhere. Someone called their hotel last night and left a message for them to come on back home, and they caught the next train back to Beckley to help bury their brother.
Ray Martin and a companion running a trap line along the creek found the body. The man apparently had not fallen off the cliff but from indications had sat down to rest on a log and had fallen backward. Heart disease, it was thought, may have been the cause of death.
Undine had never heard of Ray Martin, but she was relieved he found her brother. She was especially grateful that he alerted the authorities about it. Some people in these mountains couldn't care less whether a body was returned for a proper burial. In fact, she knew that many folks, including many Reddens, would say that dying in the woods was a proper burial.
She believed Wayman might say that, too.
The body was found under a small tree in leaves. It had been frozen, of course, during the past two months and was not entirely decomposed. Whether he had frozen or starved in the woods or had fallen over the cliff and been killed was not known.
Last night about 20 men including J. E. McKensie of the Rose Funeral Home here went to the place of his death and brought the body to Beckley. It was a long hard tramp of about two miles over rough territory to get the body.
No inquest was held although the party was accompanied by county officers. Deputy Sheriff R. E. Turner and a Justice of the Peace from East Beckley were among those who went.
It was learned this morning that the funeral services will likely be held tomorrow and internment made in the spring at the Kidwell cemetery at Table Rock.

Catalogue Information