Bruce C Fisher

Good People Bruce C Fisher

"Good People" begins with a small boy marveling at the stories his father tells him about his grandfather and great-grandparents who came to American as Lenin led Russia to revolution. The journey began when Russian soldiers entered a small hamlet of German farmers to "escort" the soon-to-be new Russian citizens to free Russian land deep inside Russia where those settlements flourished despite the brewing unrest in the cities. To escape the final clutches of "Repatriation" which allowed drafting their sons for war, Johnny Fisher with his parents and 20 other families traveled by ox cart to the European port of Bremen, by ship to the Gulf of Mexico and on foot to the Little Georgia Colonies in Vera Cruz, Mexico, where the Russians had embarked on an experiment with Mexico to colonize and farm swamp land reclaimed with dikes and levees. The land proved unfit for farming and the climate perilously humid, so their trek turned northward to the Oklahoma Territories. From drawing a homestead in an Oklahoma land lottery, to becoming a legal American citizen and building a new life, the sweat and grit is textured by church and traveling carnivals; tested by the Ku Klux Klan, the Depression; and epitomized by the "Widow Wagon." These "Good People" brought a nation through two world wars and the Great Depression by taking care of each other. Ironically, their desire was not to write history, but simply to survive and see their children prosper. Yet, those endeavors formed the very soul of the greatest free nation the world has ever known.