Tom Martin's memoir: Growing up in Old Town
</element><element id="paragraph-1" type="body"><![CDATA[Retired Shawneetown physician Tom Martin will be signing and selling copies of his new memoir, "In the Shade of the Big Oaks" this Saturday morning from 9 to 12 a.m. on the grounds of the south mall in Shawneetown.
"It's primarily a memoir of Shawneetown back in the day," he described earlier this week.
"The day" in Martin's book isn't the city's grand history as a 19th Century river town, but his experiences and the stories he grew up with in middle of the last century.
It's also not about the big folks that might have ruled in their day, but the common men and women who remained in the decades following the disastrous 1937 flood that forever changed the city's course.
Many of the characters are ones he met in his dad's place of business, the old Woody Martin's Tavern back in the 1950s.
"I had a lot of fun with it," he said of the six-year effort to bring the book to fruition.
The book isn't one long account, but a series of stories, poems and photographs of and about the community as well as the neighboring Shawnee Hills where he lives north of New Shawneetown.
Martin said the project started as a "temporary escape" and an opportunity to write down the stories he knew and wanted to preserve.
Since 2009 Springhouse magazine has published a number of Martin's stories.
Earlier this year in his blog Springhouse Publisher Gary DeNeal described the stories in the book as "about men and women who celebrated their individuality in a town with more than its share of local color."
The $17 paperback is available at Shawnee QuikMart in Shawneetown, Medicap Pharmacy in Eldorado, the Book Emporium in Harrisburg and the Bookworm in Carbondale.