Voncille Shipley grew up in a time when children played outside until dark without fear, when neighbors visited each other and sat on porches drinking iced tea, and when the town high school band held a concert on Thursday nights during the summer.
Sitting unobserved while the grownups talked, she absorbed their patterns of speech, memorized their stories, and dreamed of a time when she could write it all down to chronicle a way of life that had already passed by. Using fictional families, she invented stories to portray true-to-life situations of pioneer life in Oklahoma.