What’s in a name

Hi everyone,

Early in my career I had about twenty titles published by Western Publishing, a mass marketer that specialized in keeping the cost of books down and placing them in grocery stores and other shopping areas where busy parents might buy a book to satisfy restless children. The editors there liked my work and I was soon kept busy with multiple projects going on at once. One of my editors suggested that I provide a second name they could use. I chose my wife’s maiden name — Kennon — and the last name of the professor at Drury who urged me to become a writer — Graham. The pseudonym Kennon Graham appeared in a dozen or more books over the next several years. One such book was written on request in 1971 and called Smokey Bear Saves the Forest.

Yesterday I received an email from a man in Pennsylvania who told me the story of how he got his first name. When he was born in 1974, one of his 3-year-old brother’s favorite books was Smokey Bear Saves the Forest. His parents liked the author’s name and their new son became Kennon. Although my grandson, TYLER WILLIAMS’s middle name is Kennon, that’s a family thing. I don’t remember meeting anyone else with that name. My new friend in Pennsylvania has found three in his searches.

I was delighted to hear the story, 53 years after its publication, of how my book and SANDY’S name became connected to a family across the country!

Dreaming up the back story

Hi everyone,

Three skulls rest near my keyboard: a sabertooth cat and two kinds of bears — a black bear subspecies and a short-faced bear. The cat and the big bear have been extinct for thousands of years. The black bear skull is real. Billy Pauly and I found it in a cave when we were kids. The other two skulls are skillfully made replicas. (I’ll save the lizard mummy, python skull, and rattlesnake skull for another day.)

I look at this trio of skulls beside many times a day. They give me great pleasure. The fangs (canine teeth) on the sabertooth measure seven inches long. The short-faced bear skull is a foot wide. Traces of both kinds of these carnivores were discovered in Riverbluff Cave. I wrote about them in CAVE DETECTIVES. That’s why for Christmas one year Sandy and Jeff surprised me with the bear skull and Jeff followed the next year with the cat skull.

Writers look at a museum piece like any one of these skulls and begin to consider the living animal they represent. The short-faced bear could weigh 1,500 pounds, maybe more. It could sprint 45 miles an hour. It could stand on its hind legs and reach 14 feet above its massive head. It was a great, hungry beast that killed its own prey, stole prey from others, and probably ate carrion as well. The teeth of the fearsome creature represented beside me once ran red with blood as they crushed bones and ripped chunks of meat from its catch. The canines of the sabertooth punctured throats, rode victims to the ground, hung on until they died. My cave bear probably ate its share of meat, too, but no doubt supplemented its diet with berries, fish, insects, larvae, and even grass.

Our job is to gaze, dream, wonder, see things that might have been, and write about what we see. Anyone want to try a couplet about any of my desk companions?

Okay, I’ll go first.

Short-faced Bear

The hills echo back the roar, the growl.
Let all beware, the bear is on the prowl.

Saber-toothed Cat

The cat sizes up the pig-like prey,
Leaps, sinks its teeth, will eat today.

Black Bear

The cave mystery here is how and when
The black bear’s head alone somehow got in.