Play 'Red Wing'!

the long version

A biographical novel that traces four generations of the author's family. It chronicles their lives and migrations from Prussia to Austria, to Ohio, to the Oklahoma Territory, back to Europe after World War I, then once again to America, finally settling in Pratt County, Kansas. Each move was for a different reason. The saga runs from 1862 to 1938, highlighting the fourteen years in which they homesteaded in the Oklahoma Panhandle. There, the third generation son is a musician at the "all night dances" held on ranches and homesteads. The story also relates the impact of major events on the family: the Austro-Prussian War (1866), World War I, the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl and the rise of Nazism in 1930's Germany.