LOCKIE OF OWENSBORO: A Life of Grit, Grace, and Iron Wheels

For fifty-six years, the cedar box sat in a closet. Inside: four letters tied with a faded blue ribbon, a soldier's crucifix scratched and dented from the First World War, and the truth about the most remarkable woman their family had ever known.Mary Lockie O'Bryan was born in a Kentucky winter in 1888, lost her mother at four, was sent to be raised by Dominican Sisters at six, watched her school burn to the ground at sixteen, and was denied her diploma by a single missing credit. She buried the man she loved in 1918, a casualty of the flu epidemic who never came home from the Army. She never married. She never complained. She simply went to work, signing her shipping manifests "M.L. O'Bryan" so the customers of the Owensboro Wagon Company wouldn't know the department was run by a woman — then greeting them in person with more grace than any of them deserved.And somewhere between the losses and the ledgers, she became the iron spine of a family that now numbers in the hundreds.Two brothers — both retired judges — set out to tell her storyWhen Joe Castlen opened the cardboard box his Aunt Lockie had left behind, he expected genealogy charts and DAR records. He found those, of course — Lockie filed everything. But beneath them, carefully hidden, was the love story she had carried silently to her grave. Joe called his brother Steve. The two of them, now retired from the bench after a combined century in Kentucky courtrooms, did what judges do best: they weighed the evidence, cross-examined family memory, and built the case for a woman history forgot.Lockie of Owensboro: A Life of Grit, Grace, and Iron Wheels is the triumphant, witty, and deeply moving result.A biographical novel that reads like the best kind of front-porch storytellingExpect Kentucky winters that bite through wool, wedding breakfasts with a fire department escort, a dog named Pat who attended Mass, Blue Andalusian chickens, and a thoroughbred that was supposed to be a plow horse. Expect a woman whose raised eyebrow could correct a nine-year-old's posture from across the room. Expect a family of seven children, a wagon factory turning out six thousand wagons a year, and the hardest-working secretary the Daughters of the American Revolution ever saw.Expect — above all — to fall in love with an aunt you never met.What readers will find inside:The 1888 birth of a January child who arrived "with opinions already formed"The Dominican Sisters of St. Catharine Academy, and the fire of 1904 that changed everythingThe romance and heartbreak of Lockie and Charles Steele — reconstructed from four letters she never let anyone readLife inside the O'Bryan house on Clay Street: five girls, one beloved stepmother, and the aunt who held it all togetherWorld War I, the 1918 influenza pandemic, and a crucifix that came home when its owner didn'tSmall-town Kentucky at the turn of the century, rendered with the texture of truth and the pacing of a novelIt is entertaining, fascinating, witty, and finally triumphant — the kind of book that makes you call your own aunt, or wish you still could."If it were not for Aunt Lockie, we would resemble Neanderthals." — Joe CastlenShe raised four girls who raised more than thirty children who raised more than a hundred grandchildren. No street bears her name. No textbook records it. This book exists to change that.Perfect for readers of Kristin Hannah's The Women, Delia Owens's Where the Crawdads Sing, and anyone who has ever suspected the most extraordinary lives are the ones no one thought to write down.Sit up straight. Hold your fork properly. And turn the page. Read more