" I'm always tickled to hear about Hokah on Michael Feldman's show and was intent upon buying your book when that show was recently rebroadcast. I received my copy in the mail last week and have my brother reading it first as he has the better memory. Yes it was hard to find and cost a bit, but to find familiar names and local history? Worth it! Well, the point is, my mother who passed away in December of 2005 at 81 years of age, spent a lot of time in Hokah as a child, especially after her own mother died, and I'm trying to consolidate her stories and sort out the names of her family. My dad is 88 and sharp but needs some prompting to remember these things. My mother's name is Ellen Elaine Borck Ortmann, though she went by Elaine, and she and her brother La Verne Borck (killed in the Pacific in WW2) and Marilyn Borck of Beloit, also now deceased, were children there, off and on in the thirties, visiting with their Aunt Annie, Aunt Louise, Uncle Bill and others whose names evade me at the moment. My grandmother was Mae Agnes Ormsby Borck.
My mother often told stories of picking wild strawberries, finding jack-in-the-pulpit, shooting stars and a nest of baby bunnies in the woods, fishing for sunfish (I believe with her grandmother,) getting a bottle of pop at her uncle's store, her brother getting scraped off the horse as it ran under a low barn door, two young cousins who were drowned in a whirlpool, a cousin who asked his little brother to put his hand out on a stump and chopped a finger off with a hatchet, an American Indian girl in her class named Clara who gave her two small finely woven baskets which my mother showed me not so long ago, and much more if I can go into hypnosis or some sort of regression to recall all that she said. I know there are Ormsbys, Sullivans, Marquardts, Enders, Senns, Steinkes and Gstalders involved, but I've yet to make a legible tree out of it all.
My parents moved to San Diego in 1952. Oh, how I wished for snow as a child. I'd squeeze into my older brother's snowsuit and literally go out to play on the beach. I remember this because my brother had to pull me out of a mud flat on Mission Bay where I'd sunk nearly waist deep when I was about 3 and I was wearing a dark green snowsuit. One of our playmates sank in the same day and lost his cowboy boots permanently in the muck. I'm not sure where our mothers were at the time, but probably doing laundry. My parents did not miss the snow, but hung onto those snowsuits. Every time we went family camping in Northern California I'd search and search for shooting star flowers or lady slippers. We visited Hokah in 1960 and 1964 and I remember a late in the afternoon visit to family graves at the cemetery across the street and up a hill from the house of I wish I knew who! And where exactly? I have flown over on Google Earth but am mystified. My mother made a serious point of our not stepping on the graves at that time and thus I always wonder at the careless customs of visitors in cemeteries today. We also visited one of her aunts and I was fascinated that there was pretty green moss growing in the otherwise very clean toilet.
While I have an awful lot of my own stories, I can't tell you how many ways these little memories of Hokah are woven into my everyday Southern California life of vast concrete and anonymity. I'm so excited to find that there is more to fill in the spaces and extend the experience. Our family has shrunk to only five alive as barely anyone had any kids. My two young adult children are the end of that trail, to date.
So, thank you for bearing the torch. I am so thrilled to have found you and I will keep looking for your stories!
"

" As Marla Stated above i also heard your interview about your new book on Michael Feldman's show this morning (1/19/08) and laughed so hard I had tears coming down my face. I certainly would like to find your book, but I seem to be having a difficult time doing so.
regards
Josh Moe
In the Northwoods of Wisconsin "

" Heard you interviewed about your new book on Michael Feldman's show this morning (1/19/08) and laughed so hard that I clearly remembered both why I loved my hometown (Washington, IL --near Peoria/150 miles south of Chicago) AND why I got on a plane to California when I turned 18.

I've been searching for the book, but can't find where to buy it --could you let me know how to get hold of it?

In the meantime, THANK you for storing up all those memories and stories and telling them now!

Best,
Marla Bodi
(Across the Bay
from San Francisco) "