About the Author Patricia Averill has a BA in history from Michigan State University and a PhD in American Studies from the University of Pennsylvania, where she also studied folklore and business history. Her dissertation, Can the Circle Be Unbroken, used country music to examine outmigration from the rural white south and its effects on families. Product Description When is a zinnia not a zinnia? When the woman who plants it defies the canons of good taste. Add family squabbles, religious conflict, small town snobberies. A dash of the exotic, witches in Salem, gangsters in the streets. Mix with the pacing oa novel, the read-aloud style of Our Town, and you have Cameron. It grew in splendid isolation. Sure, it felt every economic downturn, and depended on outside technology to revive it. Yet, Cameron developed a main street, industry, and identity of its own. Then came the economics of scale, Racial, ethni, religious tensions escaled into confrlicts. Conglomerates brough unemployement. One more statistic in the deindustrialization of America. Michigan history, 1830 to 2006 Patricia Averll has a BA in history from Michigan State Univerisy and a doctorate in American studies from the University of Pennsylvania. To contact her, go to xlibris.com/averill.html. From the Back Cover When is a zinnia not a zinnia? When the woman who plants it defies the canons of good taste. Add family squabbles, religious conflict, small town snobberies. A dash of the exotic, witches in Salem, gangsters in the streets. Mix with the pacing of a novel, the read-aloud style of Our Town, and you have Cameron. It grew in splendid isolation. Sure, it felt every economic downturn, and depended on outside technology to revive it. Yet, Cameron developed a main street, industry, an identity of its own. Then came the economics of scale. Racial, ethnic, religious tensions escalated into conflicts. Conglomerates brought unemployment. One more statistic in the deindustrialization of America. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Opening Paragraph Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, a boy child was born. Or, so it seems, looking back on my childhood. In fact, sometime toward the end of World War II, in a middling sized, middle western town, a son is born into a family of girls. He's not going to be president, or a movie star, or anyone else who'd warrant a biography. He's simply going to sojourn with his body and peers, like most from that day and year. Sometimes, he'll reflect, and wonder, how did this happen? This is not what I intended, was raised to expect. The Final Paragraphs Our boy child's now a man who's left behind the family mausoleum on the river. He thinks about his classmates, but won't return. He has a wife, a new home. He declines the path of Roosevelt and Rockefeller, refuses the temptations that snag his old employer, CMS Energy. He doesn't need the past. He wants to know, what's next? Frederick Jackson Turner told us "From the conditions of frontier life came intellectual traits of profound importance...that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyance and exuberance which comes with freedom." Our second stories bear witness.