Welcome to the Windsor Book Club website where readers of My War at Windsor School can gather. This book’s setting was a real country school called Ritter Elementary in Springfield, Missouri, which is pictured to the left.
CLICK TO ENTER THE SCHOOL
Sally Listerman, the main character in the story, did not want to go up those steps that day in 1944. She couldn’t believe how things went from bad to worse on her first day back at Windsor after her awful horse accident the year before.
If you have read this book, you’ll want to walk up the steps into the foyer of the school (Click the picture above). Once inside, you’ll find out how to enter Miss Simmons’ Little Room or Mrs. Arthur’s Big Room. If you have not read My War, you’ll want to go inside and find out how to get a copy.
Marilyn
Estes
Quigley
Author's Note
Hello, readers! Windsor School is based upon Ritter Elementary School in Springfield, Missouri. When I attended Ritter, it looked exactly as it does today and in the website picture.
If you live in Springfield, you can have your parent drive you there using GPS. It’s no longer used for classes, but it still holds its own memories of all the things that happened to my friends and me. Though Sally, Lavender, Donny, Gertie, Nancy, Darlene and the others were not actual Ritter students, they become real to readers, and they are involved in many actual events I remember.
I hope you like school and reading as well as I did at your age. I was so eager to start school that on the morning of December 22, my fifth birthday, I came downstairs dressed for my first school day. When Mother said, “You’ll need to wait about nine more months,” I cried and said, “You promised I’d start school when I’m five. Well, I’m five!”
The next September, I finally walked to start first grade three months before I turned six. Learning to read was my favorite activity. In elementary school, we got our books from the “bookmobile” truck that visited once a month. I also loved writing poems and stories. When I was about 12 years old, I told my mother I would write a book someday. I think I knew it would be about my interesting years at Ritter Elementary.
After I attended Reed Junior High, then Central High School, I graduated from Hillcrest High School. In Southwest Missouri State College, I studied to become an English teacher. Three years later, I was married and began teaching English at Central High School in a room where I had sat in class only four years earlier. At 20, I was often mistaken for a student in those years.
I began writing short stories, and during the 1980s typed the first copy of My War at Windsor School. It was finally published in 2024—forty years and many changes after that first draft.
While this book was resting in attics and on computers, I was busy being a mother of two young sons, then teaching English at Evangel University for 34 years. I also wrote a children’s musical (From Pit to Palace) and two other books (Hell Frozen Over: The Battle of the Bulge and Journey to Elsewhere).
If you enjoyed reading this the book and bought it on Amazon, ask someone to help you write a short review on Amazon. If you want to order other copies of this book, and if you want to read special notes each month from me, join the First Edition Club explained on the bulletin board in the foyer of this website.
Books
A spunky 12-year-old girl, humiliated by falling behind a grade and relentless bullying, makes choices that go against her conscience as she struggles to survive her battles. Sometimes her personal war at Windsor School seems worse than World War II raging across the ocean.
“In 1944 the whole world was at war, and my uncle was drafted to fight against Hitler’s German army. When school started at Windsor that September, I never expected to fight my own war against Rusty-the-bully and Gertie, the World’s Worst Classmate. When a school-wide war broke out, fought with rocks and nasty words, even my teacher joined in. With my life a combat zone, my mind turned into a battleground of worry. My uncle’s letters stopped coming, and I worried he’d come home in a flag-draped casket. I worried about Lavender, who sometimes cooked snake for supper. What was that family hiding in the woods behind the school? Finally, having made one horrible decision after another, I feared I’d be court-martialed and grounded for life when my parents found out. Or worse!”
Europe's "winter of the century" (1944-1945) occurred during the conflict of the century--World War II. On December 16, bitter weather and brutal warfare tragically met in Southeastern Belgium's rolling hills of the Ardennes where the 106th Division had arrived only five days earlier. The well-trained, but inexperienced, soldiers were soon overwhelmed by Hitler's tanks and troops surging into Belgium. Hell Frozen Over describes the personal experiences of sixteen men--most of them in the 81st Engineers--who were caught in Hitler's final grasp to strangle the continent. More than half of the men interviewed were among the 7,001 in the Division who were taken as prisoners of war. Scattered in camps throughout Germany, the POWs willed themselves to survive as deprivation and even slave labor threatened their lives and sanity. Their comrades-in-arms who escaped capture and remained to fight in foxholes had other hells to endure, as did the civilians of every town in the area. That winter war permanently stamped its cold, dark memories on the souls of America's young men who found themselves in the Battle of the Bulge. Their stories, many of them told after many decades of silence, will inspire Americans to realize that the human spirit can survive even the worst circumstances. The torturous experiences of that dedicated generation will remind both present and future generations that freedom from tyranny has come at a horrible price.
Twelve-year-old twins, Leon and DeeAnn, and their little brother, Caleb, are devastated by the mysterious disappearance of their beloved great-uncle Azer. The grieving siblings are determined to be content with cherishing his left-behind mementos. But one evening, those items summon an antique express train into Union Station, Washington DC.
The kids' decision to board strands them on a farm near West Chester, Pennsylvania, where they're thrust into the secret Underground Railroad system transporting escaping slaves in 1854. Removed from the twenty first century into a time without electricity, antibiotics, and cars, they struggle to adjust. Fitting in and hiding their time-travel secret, however, are not their most difficult tasks. They must drive a wagon with a false bottom to trick the slave catchers and run at midnight on dark streets in search of a doctor. Even worse, DeeAnn must walk in broad daylight on a road with escaping slaves. Through it all, they're determined to work against nineteenth-century racial prejudice.
The kids' worst fears materialize when the Time Line Express is not available for return to their own century in Alexandria, Virginia. Will they spend the rest of their lives stuck in a difficult and dangerous era, never to see their parents and friends again?