Last month my husband and I visited the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame in Waco, Texas. We’d seen it from the interstate for years but never taken the time to stop. This trip through we made it a goal.
This is the law enforcement Rangers we’re talking about and not the baseball kind. After watching a History Channel video, we began to explore the artifacts and details of a proud Texas tradition. Just across from the gift shop was a room depicting the Texas Rangers in the media. It drew me like a magnet.
Movies, television shows, music, comic books, novels. There were posters and costumes, props. All had Texas Ranger themes. And there, proudly displayed with novels by Larry McMurtry and Elmer Kelton, were romance novels. Although there are surely more, the ones featured were by Joan Johnston, Diana Palmer, Pamela Ingraham, and Lyn Ellis.
I didn’t write down the particular titles, as I was busy scribbling the author’s names on a scrap of paper retrieved from the bottom of my travel bag. And I was smiling, so proud of the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame! Romance may be frowned upon elsewhere, but there, in a place devoted to one of the romance genre’s favorite archetypes, romance was honored.
Have you ever found romance novels where you least expected them?
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very cool. What a win-win for both the Texas Ranger Museum and there writers
Awesome post!
I once worked for Coca-Cola
and everytime Coke was mentioned
in a novel,
we proudly sent around an email.
Yes, many of those novels were romance!
So you’d have
(often male) marketing regional V-P’s
reading romance novels
and discussing them in the boardroom.
Kimber – so product placement works, huh? Hmm, interesting – and I’d always gone for generic names. Guess it also depends on how you’re portraying the product.
But isn’t that great that the Texas Rangers HoF would be proud of the romances? Good for them!
Kay,
That is wonderful! Very cool. I think, as romance writers, we’ve grown so accustomed to the genre being condescended to in the literary world, we’re actually impressed when someone is fair and decent.
But then again, the Texas Rangers are not the literary world, and they have no problem recognizing & appreciating romance at the same ‘level’ as others. Yea!
And Kimber, I love the idea of biz exec’s at Coke discussing romance novels in the boardroom!
Great, great image.
Kris
Fourth grade, at the back of my bedroom closet.
Sixth grade, in the cupboards above the washer and dryer.
Poor mom didn’t hide them very well.
My first honest-to-goodness, five page love scenes, Rosemary Rogers-type heaveandthrob romance? In my high school library. I wonder now if some teacher wasn’t trying to hide it and I got it by mistake.
I can’t verify this, as I haven’t been to the American Congress of Billiards, but I understand that my Wedding Gamble, a western romance written as Cait Logan, is the only romance novel there. It was about a lady billiards shark who meets the wrong/right man/challenger. She has big plans to leave MT and hit the world rich; he needs a mother for his daughter. That’s the gamble. I researched historical billiards with the museum and enjoyed it. A billiards museum seems an unusual place for a romance novel, eh?