Synopsis

All Aboard, Destination Unknown

All Aboard, Destination Unknown by Virginia Bickel is a work of fiction based on actual events surrounding Orphan Train children. A program known as Placing Out moved between l50,000 to 250,000 children by train from New York City to rural homes in the West and Midwest. The purpose of the program, which took place from the mid 1850s to the late 1920s, was to find good homes for unfortunate children, who by circumstance were left to fend for themselves on the streets of New York City, or other large eastern cities. Some had been left in orphanages and were wards of the state or church. Some were children of immigrants that did not have the means to take care of them after they landed in America. Some came from Almshouses, Sisters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul and other such places. Some of these children found loving homes, while others were adopted for the help they could provide on farms, ranches, or in businesses. This story takes four of these children: Amanda, Peter, Laura and Jason from New York City to a small town in west Texas and describes good times and bad times as they grew from childhood to adulthood.

Is a story of intrigue involving police, the FBI and the Texas Rangers. The father of journalist Nonie Lee Talbert fears for her life after she interviews a high-priced Madam in Washington, DC. His fear is heightened when the Madam is arrested and dies of a heart attack her first night in jail. Nonie Lee starts receiving threatening phone calls. She goes into hiding on a remote island in the Puget Sound, writing a book. Misfortune overtakes her when she journeys to the mainland to promote her book. She is mugged in front of a bookstore owned by a caring man who takes an interest in her welfare.

Author's Biography

Journalist Virginia Bickel lives and writes in Texas. Her short stories and essays have been published in Sonata magazine for the arts, The WREX Magazine and other electronic publications. Her novella, Uncle Will was published by Seniors Networking in Publishing in the paperback edition of Late Harvest IV, a collection of works written by members of The Writers Exchange, WREX. Ms Bickel became interested in the Orphan Train children after corresponding with the daughter of an Orphan Train rider who arrived in Texas from New York City in 1926, when he was nine years old. Touched by the stories of the children, Virginia Bickel chose this topic for her heartwarming novel All Aboard, Destination Unknown.

Reviews

I have known Virginia Bickel for several years now, and have published several of her short stories in my electronic magazines, Sonata magazine for the arts and Allegro. Ms Bickel is a fine writer whose forte is stories about the Southwest. Having eagerly looked forward to her novel All Aboard, Destination Unknown published by Publish America I am in no way disappointed. This novel about displaced children is a poignant and well-told picture of children who were taken from their families to live with foster families all over the United States, often never seeing their relatives again. Ms Bickel's novel covers four children from the time they were "placed out" until their adulthood. It is a job well done, and I highly recommend that you buy All Aboard, Destination Unknown and read this wonderful story.

Marilyn M. Freeman
Author of Precarious Global Incandescence and Caroline's Muse.

All Aboard, Destination Unknown is a fictional look at an actual event that took place over almost seventy years. It is a view of an event in American history that helped a large number of children find homes during the time of American westward expansion. In a time when parents could die due to disease or working conditions children would be left as orphans to wander the streets and beg their bread. Orphan trains were set up to send these children away from the degradation of the cities to a more wholesome environment in the expanding west of that time; a part of the country we now call the Midwest.

All Aboard, Destination Unknown follows four of these children as they leave the streets of a large eastern city and travel west to find new parents and a new life on the farms and in the villages of Illinois, Iowa, and other mid-western states. Even there life was not as rosy as it might have been, but it was far better than what these children had seen before. This is a well told story of actual events that did occur in our past, and is well worth the reading.

Robert W. Haseltine
Editor, USA Magazine - Author of the novel, Dun Rowans