Aggie, Felicity, Mary Louise...Tugs?
Tuesday, April 5, 2011 at 2:05PM The countdown is on! The Luck of the Buttons launches one week from today.
This is the story of twelve year old Tugs Button, a girl born to a luckless family. The Buttons are content with their lives of misfortune until the summer of 1929 when Tugs decides to become the first lucky Button.
Where does the name Tugs come from?
Several springs ago I was on a picnic with writer friends in a rare tall grass prairie that happens to be in a rural Iowa cemetery. While searching for wildflowers we stumbled across this Civil War era headstone.
Tugs! I said. Now there's a name with scope for the imagination!
I went home to try to write a story about a boy named Tugs who fights in the war. By the time I got to my notebook I remembered the last name as Button, not Britton as on the tombstone, perhaps because I'd recently been to the Pearl Button Museum in Muscantine, Iowa.
But Tugs was elusive, and the Civil War story just didn't emerge.
The next spring we went back for another picnic and I looked at the stone more closely. Not only was the last name Britton, not Button, but the first name was actually THOS, short for Thomas, not Tugs at all.
Hmmm...I thought...what if someone else made the same mistake? What if...
Tomorrow: how I met the Button family.
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