A true account of the hazards of homesteading and the "coming of age" of the author. Peek's story recounts the joys and perils, the fear and bravery of his homesteading family. Set in Eastern Colorado, Loneliness Is a Train Whistle will give the reader a portrait of a bleak landscape and one family's attempt to live in it. Its author chronicles the challenges, hopes, joys, and hardships homesteading families often experienced, all through the eyes of his own coming-of-age. His story does not come from the romance of dime novels; instead, it presents the actual life of a homestead in one of the more barren landscapes in the last days of the homesteading west. The simple pleasures, daily dangers, and extraordinary hardships the story chronicles were all too real for the Peeks and their neighbors. Some succeeded, some failed, but all experienced extraordinary emotional and physical hardship. Yet, many of their lives also told a story of enduring, of surviving defeat and being able to tell the tale.
About the Author: George Hooper Peek was born in January of 1908, just a week too late to have been born in a covered wagon. After the heroic efforts to survive the life chronicled in his boyhood story, he went on to college, worked for Penn Mutual Life and Remington Arms, served in the Navy in WWII, finished his education, and earned a Masters at what is now Northern Colorado University and then a degree in Sacred Theology from Seabury Western Seminary in Evanston, Illinois. He served in various capacities in Episcopal parishes in Ft. Lupton, Loveland, Greeley, Salida, Westcliffe, and Buena Vista, Colorado, and McCook, Lincoln, Grand Island, and Hastings Nebraska, where he ended his active ministry as Dean of the Pro-Cathedral. Over those years he belonged to the Civil Air Patrol and Rotary International, headed several PTAs, served on he board of Clarkson Hospital (Omaha), and was in much demand as a speaker. The statue of the lion in the courtyard of St. Mark's, Lincoln, is a memorial to him, where he is fondly remembered as "The Lion of St. Marks"! He remained active, even in retirement. During a critical period in the history of the Diocese of Nebraska, he came out of retirement to serve as its Pastor at Large. Despite his later years being plagued by the consequences of childhood injuries incurred during the course of the story he tells in Loneliness Is a Train Whistle, he managed to devote a great deal of time to giving talks in rehabilitation facilities and counseling and hearing "Fifth Steps" from people in recovery. He participated in the beginning of the Hospice program in Grand Island, Nebraska, while he served on the board of St. Francis Hospital. He was honored in his lifetime as an award-winning insurance salesman, an inventor of improvements in radar technology, and an invited participant in the College of Preachers. He counted among the highlights of his life praying at President Eisenhower's visit to McCook, his close friendship with many Governors and Senators from Nebraska and Colorado, and having played in a band under the direction of John Philip Sousa. Among his joys were winning a duffer's class trophy in golf, speaking and guiding community groups, and being present when the National Cathedral dedicated the completion of its final tower. But his greatest joys were his 66 years of marriage to Dorothy Lucille Urie, becoming father to their son Charles, and taking part in reunions with his family and in-laws.