When You Ride ALONE, You Ride With Hitler!

Most authors are either workaholics (the successful ones) or terrible procrastinators (the unsuccessful ones). I fall somewhere in between. I always had the desire and some ability to write, but my passion was tempered by a need to support and take care of my family. Family always came first and that was a trait I inherited from the characters of the non-fiction book you are about to read.

While I was looking for some public domain material to place on my web site the other day, I accidently came across a wonderful poster from World War II. It had a picture of a man driving a 1940‘s era car with a transparent figure of Adolf Hitler sitting in the passenger seat next to him. The caption beneath both of them read, “If you ride ALONE, you ride with Hitler!” The message was clear.

During World War II things like gas, meat and most vital commodities were rationed out to the public so that the Armed Forces of the USA could be properly supplied to fight what became war on a global scale. Gas rationing caused the government to encourage people to car pool or take public transit to work and school. Posters like the one I saw were very effective in getting the message out to people and a patriotic America responded by doing everything they could to keep our soldiers well supplied.

Now in my fifties, I am obviously far too young to have lived through World War Two. However, I was born late in the lives of my parents and that meant that most of my relatives tended to be older. Many of them lived through World War Two and some were as anxious to tell me about those days as I was to hear about them. Being an only child meant that by the time I was eleven years old my best friends were books, a set of encyclopedias that my parents bought for me and television. Those things ignited a spark of interest in me that has burned brightly all these years and resulted in the writing of this book...