Connie Wooldridge (right) with Joanna Duncan (left), Education Director at the National Road/Zane Grey Museum
One of the joys of writing nonfiction is that your books take you places in the research phase and take you places again when people start finding out what you’ve written and want you to come and talk to them. So I was on the road or, more precisely, on The Road last weekend.
Just Fine the Way They Are took me first to the John and Annie Glenn Historic Site in New Concord, Ohio (boyhood home of astronaut/senator John Glenn who lived right on the National Road) where I spoke to a group of education students from Muskingum University. The next day it was on to the John McIntire Library in Zanesville, Ohio, and, finally to the National Road/Zane Grey Museum.
I first stumbled on the National Road in an old issue of Cobblestone Magazine and my
The National Road / Zane Grey Museum staff with their copy of "Just Fine The Way They Are"
initial thought was A whole magazine issue about a road? How boring is that? But as I told my audiences, it always seems to be the exciting topics that fizzle and the seemingly boring ones that grow into a book.
The Road connected people back in the 1800s and it’s still connecting people today. A writer named Connie Nordhielm Wooldridge (who lives in Indiana two blocks from the National Road) met some brand new friends who live in Ohio – just down The Road apiece.
Note to teachers: Click on the icons below to see some great lesson plans for Just Fine the Way They Are
