Karen Kistler

karen.kistler@salisburypost.com

 

Dale Robbins of Hershey, Pennsylvania, can add another book to his personal library of published works. He now has six books which are available on Amazon.

While he and his wife Pam currently live in Pennsylvania, Robbins lived in Salisbury for several years and said he has some roots and many memories of the town, and his new novel, titled “Adventures at the Boat Show/the Castro Diaries,” is set in Salisbury.

This book, Robbins said, began as a short story titled “Adventures of the Boat Show,” that he wrote approximately 30 years ago when he lived in Miami and was managing the Miami International Boat Show. During one of his days off, he decided to write a 9,000-word short story featuring the boat show and people he knew in Miami. 

Years later, he was going through some old files and found the story and thought, “I really enjoyed that,” which led him to ask himself, “I ended the story by sending the protagonist off into the sunset to go start a new life. What happened then?”

He answered this by sitting down and starting to write and he said that, “94,000 words later, a 9,000-word short story has turned into a novel.”

Robbins said he decided to use Salisbury as the setting for the book “because a good author often talks about places that he knows, places that he can relate to,” and Salisbury is where he lived for a time during his childhood, attending A.T. Allen Elementary School in 1965. He reminisced about being in plays at the school and enjoyed his time on the stage there, and said he drew from his memory of his time there during his childhood.

Moving around, he returned years later when his father, William “Bill” Robbins, who worked for almost 25 years at Rowan Manufacturing and died in 1994 and was buried in the National Cemetery in Salisbury, offered him a place to live if he wanted to return and attend Catawba College, which he accepted.

“It’s a neat little college,” Robbins said. “I have great memories from the time that I spent there.” 

While attending Catawba College from 1972-1974, he got a part-time job at the drive-in theater, which was on U.S. 601 he said, working as the ticket taker and concession worker. Within a year, he was managing the place, “the youngest manager in the chain,” Robbins said. 

During his time in Salisbury, he said he witnessed a big event, and that was the opening of Krispy Kreme on West Innes Street.

Robbins remembered the business being built and not opening until one day they put a sign out which said “Open Now Hot Doughnuts” and by 6 p.m. that day, he said they had to have a deputy direct traffic because there were so many people.

He didn’t complete his education at Catawba, he noted, leaving for Durham in 1975, but did finish his college education later earning multiple degrees in history.

Catawba College and Krispy Kreme, are two of the Salisbury locations that he uses in his novel, noting that Catawba is where the protagonist serves as a professor and Krispy Kreme is a location where they hold meetings and get doughnuts when they have service projects.

The book tells the story of a couple who came out of 12 years of being on the run, having their lives threatened and now they can retire and can start a real life, start a family.”

He said he needed a good small town where this character in the book could teach at a small college and pursue his passion of history and Catawba worked well for this noting that “it’s a perfect description of the school and I knew the school.”

Other characters in the novel, all fictional, include students at Salisbury High School, a Charlotte lawyer who has an office in Salisbury, nurses at the Rowan hospital and “a few others thrown in to round out the story,” he said.

Robbins described how the couple who were in witness protection had a son who discovered a book and pictures of his parents revealing a life he would never have imagined they would have. Confronting his dad about this, he learns their story of their many escapes and challenges. 

“The story unfolds and for the rest of the novel, it jumps back and forth between what is happening in their real lives and him sitting down with his parents hearing their stories. 

Another facet of the book is of the son and his meeting a girl, and stories of their budding relationship, her starring on the softball team at Salisbury High School and the faith of these two families, as Robbins said she is from a devout Catholic background, coming from a long family line of Catholics, and he from a Latter-day Saints, or Morman, family. He said that he also lists exact locations for where the families attend church services. 

He said that even though he didn’t set out to write a religious book, the faith of the families became “interwoven in their lives, and what they do as far as their religious observation, it just becomes part of their life,” said Robbins.

He shared about the religious classes that the LDS youth attend before school and how she wants to be able to join them, noting that when one reads the book, people would be able to see what these families look like and all that is woven in the story.

“I tried to do some really good geography on it so it all makes sense,” he said.

The story of the novel begins with the boy’s mother, who was born in Cuba, Robbins said, and her helping to retrieve what was known as the Castro Diaries and all that happens as a result of this and the family ties that are discovered.

Robbins said that writing is his passion, one he discovered in elementary school when he started making up stories, which he said was fun for him.

He added that all throughout his life he has had a vivid imagination and could look at people and come up with a storyline for them.

While he is passionate about his writing, it is not his career, telling that he and his wife are houseparents at the Milton Hershey School in Hershey. They currently have 10 teenage high school boys in their home. They have worked with children throughout the years, he noted, running a group home for troubled children in Alaska and hosting international children when they lived in Arizona.

Those wishing to get a copy of the book can go on Amazon and purchase either one on Kindle or paperback.

Will there be another to follow the adventures of these families in Salisbury? Robbins said he had not decided yet, as he said when he first set down to write the story, it was based on what would happen to this couple when they went to “witness protection, and the rest of the story wrote itself. I did what I call a John Grisham ending,” he said, taking the reader through lots of pages and a complex story and then wrapping it up in a short amount of time. As for a sequel, “wait and see what happens.”