SERGEANT PRESTON OF THE YUKON
By Martin Grams Jr.
OTR Publishing LLC
(www.MartinGrams.biz)
123 pages
In this self-published book, award-winning cultural historian, Martin Grams Jr. pays homage to one of early radio and television’s most popular heroes, Sgt. Preston of the Yukon. Working from the first 16 radio scripts written in Detroit’s WXYZ station by writers Tom Dougall and Frank Striker, Grams adapts them to prose form. He takes us readers on a trip back to the wild and wooly frontier days of the Yukon when gold was first discovered in the frozen north.
Here is the stalwart Sgt. Bill Preston, his faithful dog, Yukon King as well as a supporting cast to include Canadian Pierre LeRoux. Each story is set against the rugged, unforgiving Yukon with locations such as Frozen Gulch, Skagway, and Dawson. Names that echo romance and adventure. Gram’s prose is straightforward, without flowery embellishing adding to the rugged drama of each story. It’s his first venture into fiction writing and we certainly hope not his last.