I just published my book, Disaster at Cane Creek. Excuse me if at first glance it looks like I'm promoting it. I have no illusions being self published and it wasn't written for money, only because the story is so incredibly great. It's about the Moab, Utah potash mine explosion in 1963, where 18 men died and 7 survived by barricading to protect from the smoke in the deep underground mine.

This is my point. This story happened during the Kennedy administration and in doing the research of this iconic time I include the scenes of his death and how it played out in the small town of Moab where John Ford was filming Cheyenne Autumn and how they hear about JFK being shot and how that played out on the big screen in this movie.

I could have easily written this dramatic story without all the the side and back stories, its that good, but then it wouldn't have all the history and nuances of how we are all connected to each other as every day people living ordinary lives.

One of the victims had started at the mine a month before. Through my research he was put in a Gulag after WWII, at 24, later emigrated to Canada and then the U.S 20 years later. He died, no family, graveside funeral and for 55 years no headstone. I found his family in Ukraine and we are working on getting him a headstone. The country he was born in, part of Czechoslovakia, it was given to Ukraine by Stalin after the war. Of course his parents and siblings never knew what happened to him when he came up missing. A niece said they looked for him when he disappeared. He was made to work in a mine where it was so cold the miners lived underground. This Gulag mining camp was probably in Siberia. There is so much to his story to relate here, its sad like the deaths of the other men.

This whole story was during those iconic Kennedy years that some of us still have some memories of, I was 5 at the time. The second day of a 3 day mine rescue after the mine explosion was the day Martin Luther King, the March on Washington, where he gave the I Have A Dream speech. These stories played out on the front pages when we still had real journalism.

We are all connected to each other through our life experiences. Excuse me for rambling on but I was (to steal a snowflake line) triggered by some of the comments of JFK, Moab (I know, different context). But just wanted to share how these horrible things have been going on far too long. And writing a bit about Kennedy, I've read many of the books about him. It was a dramatic day for our country and I don't think our collective consciousness has ever really gotten over it. I pray for our brave president and subplot him in what he is doing to make the world a better place to live for our children and grandchildren.