Red Gauntlet , SASS 60619

If story lines weren't repeated, with variations, there'd not be many movies. Westerns, especially..... Think this: Stranger with an unknown background comes to town. The town is dominated by a land/cattle baron. He's sqeezing out the last of the smallholders. The land baron is a widower. His son is weak and no account. But the ranch foreman is strong. But he's not blood... The stranger falls for the schoolmarm, or the storekeeper's daughter. He'd like to move on, but now can't, because of her, and because he needs to confront the unjustice in the town. Turns out he's a gunfighter, wanting to leave the past behind. But now he has to stay. The rest of the townsmen are afraid. But a few take heart from the brave stranger. You can write the rest....

My grandfather, Edward F. W. Winskill, was a Royal Air Force officer in the First World War. He was born in Vancouver, B.C. in 1895 and raised there. He was an artilleryman in the British Army, then promoted to pilot in the Royal Flying Corps, which became the RAF several months before the war ended. He flew as an artillery spotter (the first combat function of aircraft), went down behind German lines and evaded capture. We still have his RAF uniform with wings, with a Canada patch on the shoulder. He told me that when they made him a pilot officer, he had to grow a mustache and carry a swagger stick... My dad was born in Ladner, BC, on the Fraser River delta. I hunted with my grandad as a boy in the filbert orchards and farms of the Puyallup valley in Washington. I was 29 when he died; I was in the middle of a jury trial at the time, so he got to see me grow up, have kids, and enter my profession. My dad chose US citizenship at 21, and had to carry his papers traveling to Canada and back all of his life. My grandma was a teacher in Point Roberts, which well tell Canadians a lot. She was born in Elizabethtown , Kentucky in 1898. Back then, a woman lost her US citizenship when she married a foreign national. She used to get a kick out of showing us her 1947 naturalization papers (the same year my granddad was naturalized), with its 'born in Kentucky, USA' notation! Oh, Canada! I have many relations still there.