Rancho Bernardo man fulfills lifelong goal of writing a book

One of Rancho Bernardo resident Roger Power’s lifelong goals has been to write a book.

Power, 82, said he finally achieved that bucket list item after finding inspiration in family tales.

“I always felt that I wanted to be a writer, since my teens. It had been in the back of my mind because I did a lot of reading from my teens, mostly adult literature,” he said.

The most influential for him was “The Cypresses Believe in God: Spain on the Eve of Civil War” by José María Gironella, published in 1953. Power said it was about residents in a Catalan town that he found inspiring.

His book, “Where’s Cherry? An Immigrant Family Seeks a Future,” tells the story of Jim and Mary Tobin and their five children in St. Louis, starting in 1888 and ending in 1921, about a year after Prohibition began. It was published last November by Panda Publishing.

Power used historical events and their impacts on the working-class family to explore how people faced challenges and overcame them, he said.

“My whole family lived in St. Louis,” he said. “They were immigrants coming in the 1860s and 1870s. They were poor but made it work for them.”

In the book, Jim dies from typhus shortly after the Streetcar Strike of 1900. And Mary, who is left with a meager income to raise their children, teaches herself and then her three daughters how to be bookkeepers, which earns them notice throughout the city.

Meanwhile, her two sons pursue legitimate work, but end up under the influence of Tom Egan and his criminal enterprises that eventually would include bootlegging during Prohibition.

Jim’s involvement in a strike was reminiscent of Power’s great-great-grandfather who participated in the 1877 St. Louis general strike.

“The upper crust was controlling the money, keeping wages down and not giving workers breaks,” Power said of the weeklong strike to improve workers’ job conditions.

Tobin is the family name of a great-great-grandmother who came from Ireland, he said.

“I was inspired by my family, but this book is fictional,” Power said.

He chose the late 19th and early 20th century because “the atmosphere of this era interested me,” Power said, adding that the way the novel ends opens the possibility of a sequel to follow subsequent generations of his fictional Tobin family.

Power said he worked a variety of jobs throughout his life. He was a customer agent for United Airlines as a young man, then served in the Navy for three years in the mid-1960s. After leaving the military he moved to Spain to teach English in Barcelona.

When he returned to the U.S. several years later, he worked for an international business publication, reading articles written in Spanish from South American countries and rewriting them to inform English-speaking readers about international events.

“I would read the news from foreign journals … and relate them in English, putting them in a new context,” Power said.

He has also been a bartender, wrote instructional materials and has been an avid traveler throughout Europe and Argentina. He has twice walked the historic Camino de Santiago in Spain.

While he was born in St. Louis, he moved to California with his family when he was 10 and has lived there off-and-on since. As an adult he lived in San Diego at various times. Power said he moved back, this time to Rancho Bernardo’s Seven Oaks neighborhood, two years ago after living in San Luis Obispo for several years.

It was in San Luis Obispo that Power got serious about writing his book, he said. It took him six years to complete and get published.

“I made a dedication to myself that I would try to make this successful,” he said. “I spent a lot of time on it, working daily for two or three hours at a time for months. It was not easy to do.”

“Where’s Cherry? An Immigrant Family Seeks a Future” can be purchased through Amazon for $18 as a hardcover and $10 as a paperback. It is available as an eBook for $5 through Barnes & Noble.