Mama Says It's Hogwash: A Texas Woman Comes of Age in Rosebud

This book reveals one little girl’s struggle to maturity in the small town of Rosebud, Texas and in a large family, her parents and seven siblings. From the time she watched her brothers and sisters throwing ice cubes at each other around the dinner table, the author felt she landed in a war zone. As a first grader in the City of Orange, Texas where the family moved for Dad’s work, she and other kids prowled the neighborhood, shutting off electrical transformers, easily reached by small hands, while living in the Navy Addition. In the second grade her gang stole cigarette butts from the lobby of a nearby theater to reroll the tobacco for smoking and playing grown-up ladies. Until moving back to Rosebud from Orange, our author may have become a juvenile delinquent. Rosebud looked very much like all the little towns of the Depression era with downtown banks, a movie house, grocery stores, and dry goods’ shops – a time before Wal-Mart changed small towns forever. The town’s motto “everything’s rosy in Rosebud,” isn’t borne out once we learn that all’s not rosy for this little girl. The scarcity of affection and the rocky relationship of her parents weigh heavily on the child throughout the book. Her push to get to know her mother more intimately gets no further than the title expresses, Mama Says It’s Hogwash.