The Man in the Purple Cow House, and Other Tales of Eccentricy has been published by Hope Publishing House in Pasadena, California, and is now ready for purchase.

This candid personal narrative is Mary Ames Mitchell’s search for her father when she suspected he was living homeless on the streets of Santa Monica, California, in 1992.

Looking for an explanation for why he estranged himself from his friends and family thirteen years earlier, she not only came to understand her father's struggles, but uncovered long forgotten family secrets and stories. Mary wrote this book to ensure these stories would not be lost once again when she, too, is no longer around.

Beginning with the newspaper accounts of her father's battles with his neighbors in 1951, over a house with a purple cow on its expansive front lawn, Mary continues her look at her father’s activities through her youth in Southern California during the 1950s and 60s. When examining the events of her own childhood didn’t provide the answers she was looking for, Mary studied her father’s family records—some nearly four hundred years old—describing his Puritan roots and the pioneer spirit which moved them from the East to the West. Thirty-nine personal photographs supplement her tale.

“I found so many people become homeless because of what might seem to others as simple circumstances.” Mary said. “I grew up thinking my dad was a normal guy. I wanted to know what made him go off the deep end? How much was due to circumstance and how much was due to my father simply being a unique and colorful character in his own right? I started by taking a trip to Chicago, where he’d grown up, to visit his aging brother and from there continued to ask lots of questions.”

About Mary