Phyllis Marie wins Best Fiction Award

Phyllis Marie has won a Pinnacle Book Achievement Award, Best Book in the Category of Fiction, Spring of 2011, presented by the North American Booksellers Exchange (NABE).

Phyllis Marie Stanton Row Byers, 91, a Santa Barbara resident for over 20 years, is the subject of the book named for her, a name she also shared with a Boeing B-17 bomber after her husband, a young pilot, christened it.

The pilot, Perry V. Row, had been a resident of Santa Barbara from 1989 until his death in 1997. Phyllis Marie remembers vividly the day Pearl Harbor was attacked—seventy years ago this year—the day she knew her husband of sixteen months would enlist, fulfilling his dream to fly. “We were working in my father’s photography studio in Caldwell, Idaho, when the announcement came over the radio. I looked over at him and I could see it in his face that he would be going to war.”

The book, a novel based on the true story and written by her son, Santa Barbara County author, Terry Row, combines his parents’ love story with his mother’s life on the home front, his father’s experiences while stationed at Framlingham AFB in England with the 390th Bombardment Group, as well as the histories of their parents and their families. The families were members of the Society of Friends, known also as the Quakers, and at one time during the last decade of the nineteenth century all the families lived in Oklahoma without knowing each other. Further, they all migrated to Wichita, Kansas—an important cultural center for the Society of Friends—in the first two decades of the twentieth century. “I had a richness of resources for this book,” the author said, “from recorded interviews with Phyllis Marie herself to my father’s wartime diary and the letters he wrote to her, and the extensive photographic record left behind by my grandfather, a professional photographer.”

The creation of the book has been a family affair in many ways. C. Russell Byers, served as technical and military advisor, having also flown B-17s over Europe during World War II. Michael Row, a Santa Barbara resident since 1964 and the author’s brother, created the book’s cover art. And a cousin, the late Ann Fuqua of Wichita, provided background information about the Society of Friends.