AUTHOR TO SIGN BOOK ABOUT RIDDLE HILL COMMUNITY

Glenn Tompkins is a man whose life spans what seems like two different epochs. A 69-year-old retired security guard in St. Louis County, Tompkins grew up on a farm in Dunklin County north of Campbell.

He remembers growing up with no electricity or indoor plumbing, with horse-drawn plows and sewing machines with foot treadles. Those were days when people thought lard was good for them.

Tompkins captured the times in a book he wrote about his ordinary life. Southeast Missouri State University has published it as The House on Riddle Hill. Tompkins is scheduled to sign it from 1 to 3 p.m. today at Hastings Books Music & Video in the Town Plaza Shopping Center.

Tompkins wrote a book about a family trying to make a living out of the clay soil of Crowley's Ridge in the depression and the relentless regimen of work and good, homemade food that filled their lives.

"A whole generation could write books like this one," said Frank Nickell, director of the Center for Regional History at Southeast Missouri State University.

Tompkins, with his eye for detail and his simple prose, is well suited to the task. He lived on Riddle Hill with his family from the time he was 3 in 1930 until he left to fight in the Korean War in 1950.

He moved to St. Louis after the war.

For years all he wrote were the incident reports required by his job as a security guard at the General Motors parts warehouse in Hazelwood.

"Once in a while, somebody would say to me, `Glen, you really write a long report. You don't have to write a book,'" Tompkins said.

After he retired in 1989, Tompkins said, he was reading a Reader's Digest, "my wife was crocheting on the couch, and I started to laugh. Their short stories -- they're good, but I thought I could write better."

Tompkins wrote a few stories from memories of his childhood, sent them to the magazine, and got a polite rejection slip.

In 1991, Tompkins wrote a brief story about an incident he heard about from his brother, R.E. In 1937, R.E. worked sandbagging levees and was on a poorly maintained barge that sank on the Mississippi.

As he recounted in the book, "Twenty-six of his fellow workers lost their lives that cold winter night, drowning in the flooding water. He said he knew he would never make it in the river as he couldn't swim. So R.E. stayed on the sinking barge until the water was up to his chin when someone threw a rope to him and pulled him to safety. ...

"Men were screaming, `Help me, Help me!' and some were trying to board the motorboat, but someone on board had a hatchet and was hitting the men's hands, even chopping fingers off as they desperately tried to get on."

The story goes on to tell how another boat came out of nowhere and rescued the few who remained on the barge.

"I felt like this is history and somebody should know about these things," Tompkins said.

Tompkins sent the story to the Missouri Conservationist. It didn't print it, but someone there suggested he send it to Nickell.

Nickell said he was impressed and wrote Tompkins back. "He said, `Do you have any more stories like this? Did you ever think about putting them in a book'?" Tompkins said.

So Tompkins set to work.

"I explained things that happened," Tompkins said. "Some are good and some are bad. It was just a different kind of life."

Nickell edited. A few stories are combined, he said, and some grammar corrected.

The result is a book that documents a life typical of a whole generation, of a time that seems so distant today.

This is the Center for Regional History's second book of local history. The first was Backwoods Jazz. Nickell said the center is working on "five or six" more.