About the Author:
Gloria Taylor Weinberg is a fourth-generation Floridian who retired from the Fort Pierce Tribune after 22 years as a journalist. She received numerous awards from the Florida Press Association and the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors for her columns, features and explanatory reports, including the 2000 Gold Medal for Public Service. Weinberg also paints, especially the flora and fauna of her native state. She lives with her husband, Mark, and Tillie, their rescue spaniel, in Fort Pierce, Florida. Her debut novel, “A Homicide in Hooker’s Point,” earned the 2011 Royal Palm Literary Award from the Florida Writers Association.
Books of Gloria:
In the fall of 1950, eight-year-old Vicki Leigh Bayle learns that prejudice is not always about color, and that truth, as adults define it, is malleable. She learns that love and hate are drawn from the same well, and that some of the people she loves most keep stores of each in equal measure.
The day after neighbor Eric Magruder kills her kitten during a domestic dispute, Vicki and her father watch as Eric is gunned down in their front yard. Witnesses say he was killed by his father-in-law. But is that really what happened during that tragic weekend of violence? At least one investigator has doubts. Both Vicki and her father had access to a gun that day, and her father refuses to produce it. Why?
A Homicide in Hooker’s Point is a fascinating tale of innocence and pathos colliding in a small community in rural South Florida. The story develops inexorably, building momentum as it evolves, all the while tempting the reader to linger over passages of lush, evocative imagery. I was struck by the author’s insightful portrayal of people and places, which brought back fond memories of the simple, authentic life experiences that I had growing up in Clewiston near Hooker’s Point.
Seventeen-year-old Vicki Bayle, the pretty only child of Frank and Rena Bayle, has big plans to be the first in her extended family to go to college. She graduates fifth in the class of 1959 at Clewiston (Florida) High School, scores a couple of scholarships from local civic clubs, and breaks up with her steady boyfriend, who is the same age as she but still has a year to go in high school.
And then she misses her first period.
Abortion is not an option for girls in Vicki’s situation in 1959, so her parents drive her 300 miles to a Jacksonville home for unwed mothers and leave her there – frightened and among strangers.
A cruel and authoritarian housemother at the Safe Haven Home for Unwed Mothers is determined to break Vicki’s spirit, which makes her five months away from home even more difficult.
There is no way for Vicki’s parents to know how dismal conditions are at the home. The residents are always hungry. They are not allowed to eat anything except food provided by the home, and they are punished for any real or imagined “defiance” of the housemother’s will.
Vicki does not tell her parents; she knows they are suffering hardships as well.
The cover story is that Vicki is enrolled in a cosmetology school and working nights and weekends to help pay her way. Rena Bayle writes her daughter regularly but will not allow her to call home, for fear that someone might overhear their conversation on the family’s party line and figure out the truth.
