During World War II there was a serious housing shortage in Santa Monica, a sunny, laid-back beach city in southern California. In 1944, my family moved there from a small town in Rhode Island after my artist father, Eric Jones, was hired to paint and beautify the historic carousel which dwelled in a shabby, run-down building known as the Old Hippodrome. A small apartment above the carousel in this domed Byzantine styled structure would be my home for all my teenage years. The book is a collection of stories based on actual events from this postwar era from 1944-1951. The narrator of the...