When he started telling his stories about growing up in Arlington, Danny Armstrong had only a few people listening.
Mostly, it was his family.
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Then, somebody had an idea.
“One of my daughters suggested I write down some of the stories I was telling the grandkids,” he said. “I thought, ‘Well, I’ll get around to that someday.’ ”
With a chuckle, he adds, “And I put it off a year or two.”
Everyone procrastinates. But the idea stayed in the former Arlington resident’s mind. In time, he revisited it, and when he put his stories on paper, they became a book. “Rearview Reflections: Short Stories Looking Back on Growing up in Arlington, Texas in the ’50s & ’60s,” published in 2023, is available on Amazon.
In it are some five dozen child’s-eye tales of experiencing the fast-growing city as a Baby Boomer, the generation that rode the wave of post-war optimism.
“I can’t tell you how lucky I feel to have grown up at that particular time and at that particular stage of Arlington’s growth,” said the author, who moved to town in 1948 with his family when he was 3 years old and lived here until 2015, when he and his wife relocated to Santa Fe, NM.
“Those were some good times back then,” the retired small business owner said. “Everybody knew everybody. If you didn’t know a kid from church, then you knew him from Little League or you knew him from kindergarten.”
The writing took him about three years, he said. Once he began putting his memories on paper, they flowed out like they were meant to be read by others all along.
“I would have four or five stories going at once that I was writing,” he said. “But they’re not long stories; they’re short.”
It will be most gratifying to Armstrong if his grandchildren gain from the stories in print.
“I wrote the book so that my youngest granddaughter could read it and not find things that are really inappropriate,” he said. “I don’t run down anybody. Everything in there is a positive story.”
Armstrong celebrates the universalness of feel-good experiences. He’d love it if readers beyond Arlington found the book, and he’s considering an audiobook version.
“That book appeals to people who grew up in other areas, because everybody was doing about the same things,” he said.
In Arlington or anywhere else, a story about growing up is something everyone can relate to.
