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Life is chock full of surprises. On Saturday when Luanne returned from the bank, she handed me a slip of paper with two names on it. I immediately recognized them as being old classmates.

I trotted myself off to the bank to make contact with Kendra yesterday, taking her a copy of the Journal-Topics newspaper article to send to Melody. It was good to toss names and memories at each other. Somewhere along the way, she mentioned Bill Madden, who had also graduated with us from Maine West. She said that he’d written lots of books. Sure enough, Amazon has quite a list for him!

Since writers are always looking for publishers, I checked one of Bill’s books. It was Indianapolis: In Vintage Postcards (Postcard History Series) from Arcadia Publishing. Evidently they specialize in history, even small towns. Which set me to thinking. At the Joliet Library Authors Fair we saw a book about Joliet that had just been published. I did a search for it on Arcadia’s site and found it! It’s by Marianne Wolf.

What were the odds that Kendra would still live in Des Plaines? Or that she would be in contact with Bill? Or that Bill would be published by a company who also published a woman who was at the Joliet Authors Fair that we attended?

P.S.

I’m adding this a day later because I wrote to W.C. Madden saying that I hadn’t seen him on the Maine West Alumni Authors page. Since he has written extensively about baseball (Amazon says “he chairs the regional chapter of the Society for American Baseball Research”), I thought he would be curious to know that someone else from high school had written about baseball. Joel Hawkins ‘82 wrote The House of David Baseball Team.

Bill wrote back:

“I met him a few years ago in South Bend and purchased his book then. Nice guy. I didn’t know he was from Maine West. Small world sometimes. Interesting book. We write for the same publisher then.”

See? I’m not the only one who thinks it’s a small world.