By

VICTOR K.

RAY

ISBN  1-931948-86-0

 2009

 The setting of Bootheel Diary  is the Bootheel of Southeast Missouri.  It is the story of Joe Mayes, a successful building contractor of Los Angeles, who is brought back to his birthplace by the death of his aged parents, and finds that problems from which he fled are still there. 

The story occurs during a six or seven month period following September, 1972.  The Vietnam War is coming to an end. A presidential campaign is in progress.  Harry Truman dies.  The big problem demanding solution is the ruination of the land of a farm at the base of Crowley's Ridge by Wesley Walker Banks, a descendant of John Hardeman Walker, who is said to have created the 'Bootheel' when Missouri was admitted to the Union in 1821. He persuaded the Congressional survey team to extend the southeast corner of Missouri between the St. Francis and Mississippi River down into Arkansas.

  VICTOR K. RAY was born in Southeast Missouri and graduated from college with two majors -- Music and English. He became a writer, selling stories to the pulp mystery magazines, such as Black Mask; Dime Detective; Street and Smith Detective Stories; Thrilling Detective; and other magazines. Victor K. Ray was a reporter, then a Managing Editor, then a publisher.  He was a prize-winning editor of both weekly and daily newspapers.

When Victor K. Ray was asked at one time to become the Director of Public Affairs in the National Farmers Union, he accepted.  He became Vice-President later.  He never got far from the typewriter though, and he wrote extensively, including a book titled, The Corporate Invasion of American Agriculture.

           'Having grown up in southeast Missouri very close to Crowley Ridge, I read Victor K. Ray’s novel with much interest. Ray has a great deal of experience as a writer of fiction and also as a newspaperman. I found his story highly readable and richly evocative of life in a part of Missouri that I knew well as a boy and young man. Victor K. Ray makes a serious point about the land as a “living organism,” and his work should attract the attention of environmentalists and others with similar interests. Moreover, his novel is so gracefully and engagingly written that it will surely attract the attention of many other readers who are simply looking for a good story, one with a historical flavor that captures an important part of our past.'

Stephen Vaughn
Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication
University of Wisconsin, Madison

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