June 2026 Magazine

A Third Act: At Last, Renowned Professor Doug Underwood Launches His Debut Novel, "Always, Tessie,"  a Tale of the Turbulent 1960s Set in the Pacific Northwest.  Professor Underwood relates the story of young lovers Tessie and Derek who live in a Portland, Oregon suburb during the turbulent 1960s. He captures the concerns of the period as the Vietnam War raged, a civil rights movement challenged racism and segregation, and women demanded equal rights as they gained more personal freedom with the advent of the birth control pill. The beauty and relative isolation of the Pacific Northwest loom over the young couple and their friends as they deal with past trauma, social pressure, the threat of the military draft, intense competition, and other ominous developments in their rapidly changing world.

Whenever I traveled to New York, I visited Sue at the Museum, making up for the time lost between us. We both marveled that we had escaped a blue collar fate. Other Yonkers girls took service jobs as health care workers or waitressing, a few taught in public schools. There wasn’t anything intrinsically wrong with these jobs, except they were so Yonkas.

My mother told me I had a way with words. She was proud of my poetry and stories, and said I was a natural born writer. I was flattered but I didn’t entirely believe her. She was a high school dropout and suffered from schizophrenia. I’m not sure if schizophrenia caused her to drop out of high school at sixteen. She often heard voices telling her to do things.