S5 EP214 Best of S4 Lovefest Replay: Barb Warner Deane, WWII Romance Author of The Whistle Stop Canteen

Hello My Happy People,

Due to a brief illness, today’s episode is a  Best of Season 4 Lovefest replay. Be sure to check the listings on burckhardtbooks.com/podcast for updated scheduling.

Today I am thrilled to bring you this Best of S4 Lovefest replay with another historical fiction author. Being one myself, I love promoting authors who take accuracy and research seriously, and today’s guest is definitely one of them.

Barb Warner Deane is an award-winning author and public speaker who has given more than 130 presentations on American women in World War II, including at the Historical Writers of America conference in Williamsburg, Virginia. We chatted about her book, The Whistle Stop Canteen.

She attended Cornell University and the University of Connecticut School of Law. She grew up in New York’s Finger Lakes region and has lived in Frankfurt, Germany, and Shanghai, China.

After leaving her law career, Barb opened Barb’s All Romance Book Store and later worked as a substitute teacher and in school tech and media. She has also been published as a travel writer and now writes full-time, alongside volunteer work and travel.

Barb's Website

Barb on Facebook

Barb on Instagram

Barb on BookBub

Barb on Amazon

Transcript

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Dianne Burckhardt 0:01

You're listening to BookBanter with Diane Burkhart, your booktop podcast. Join me every Wednesday for real conversations with authors and publishing insiders, where you get to connect with the humans behind the book to your left. Let's get on with our show today. Hello, my happy people. Today is March 18th, 2026. And as you know, well most of you probably know, uh occasionally my health likes to throw a little curveball, and this week I was hit pretty hard by one of them. Because of that, we have had to reshuffle a few upcoming episodes. For the updated lineup, please visit Burkhartbooks.com slash podcast. In the meantime, please enjoy this best of love fest episode from season four of BookBanter with Diane Burkhart. Welcome to BookBanter with me, your host, Diane Burkhart. I hope you will join me every Wednesday as we explore all things to do with, well, books. Let's get on with our show today. Hello, my happy people. Today is March 12, 2025, and have I got another fantastic Love Fest author for you. Now, if you are a history buff, and I'll admit I have never been a history buff before I met my husband, and he is a very big military World War II history buff, and we have gone to like the Panzer Museum here in Germany. We've toured through submarines and somebody with claustrophobia that was an experience on many levels. But I have become absolutely fascinated with this era in time as well. And that's why whenever I came across this author, I knew I had to make her part of our love fest. Because this book is based on actual historical events, and it is such a fantastic story. It is so interesting. It has strong female characters that are based on real people, and it's something that really needs to be brought to light. It seems like recently some of the forgotten stories of the contributions that women in general, and even specifically women of color, like with the movie The Six Triple Eight, made to the United States war effort during World War II, are finally starting to come to light and be recognized. And these women are being given the honor that they should have had all along. And this story today brings to light some more work that women did during World War II that is almost forgotten history, that is not taught in classes, and these stories need to be talked about. So no more blather from me right now. I will come back at the end with some announcements and tell you who's coming up next week. But for right now, let's go to this incredible author so that we can talk about this book. Please welcome to Book Banter with Diane Burkhart, Barb Warner Dean. You know that I always like to start the show by just having my guest tell our listeners who you are and what you do.

SPEAKER_01 3:23

Well, hello, and thank you for having me. My name is Barb Warner Dean. I am an author of historical romance, romantic suspense, and romantic women's fiction. I have four published novels working desperately on number five. And I live in the upstate New York Finger Lakes region in the United States, and I'm the mother of three wonderful adult daughters, wonderful new son-in-law, and I'm married to my husband now for let's see, going on 42 years. Oh wow, congratulations.

Dianne Burckhardt 4:00

Thank you. Now, one of the things that I noticed, you definitely have an interest in the World War II era.

SPEAKER_01 4:08

Yeah, I was thinking about this yesterday, getting ready for the interview, and I remember reading my first World War II historical fiction book in middle school. It was a book called Escape from Warsaw, and told the story of a couple of kids who were in Poland during World War II. It's a very good book. It's an old one. I think it was also published under the title The Silver Sword. Anyway, it it stuck with me, obviously. I mean, I read Laura Ingalls Wilder's and other historical books, but that one stuck with me. You know, my parents were of the World War II generation, my aunts, my uncles. My father served, although he didn't get into the service until the end of the war because he was fairly young. But I think it just stuck with me that this was a fascinating period of time in our history. And when we moved to Germany in 2006, I was really caught up in being in the middle of so many of the locations that were part of the war. And we did a lot of traveling. And when we went to visit the beaches and the cemetery in Normandy, I would absolutely went down the rabbit hole with my research on World War II. And I'd been writing quite a long time at that point, but that was the moment where I was like, okay, I want to tell the stories of some of these American women that we know nothing about that were doing their part during World War II. And that led to my first published novel on the home front.

Dianne Burckhardt 5:48

It seems like within the last few years, a lot of the forgotten stories of World War II are finally being brought to light.

SPEAKER_01 5:57

Absolutely. I think in part because some of the materials became declassified. And I mean, reality, this is a generation and on the whole came together to work with one purpose to save the world. They all were doing their part. President Roosevelt came on the air and said, you know, everybody has to find their way to contribute. And so Americans, by and large, did that, whether it was, you know, rolling bandages and knitting socks, or whether it was building airplanes and driving rivets or going to the front lines, people stepped up in some way. And when the women in particular were told, thank you for your service. Now go home and don't ever talk of this again. That's what they did. They didn't talk about it. So their journals and their letters and all of these things that their families are finding now after their death are giving us insight into some of these histories that we never knew about. I've read a lot of books and also listened to a lot of oral histories of women during that time. And they talk about, well, you know, my husband was the postmaster in our little town, but he had to go to war. So I stepped up and was the postmaster general in our community. You know, it's just not big, flamboyant declarations of duty. They just did what needed to be done. And they also learned that they could make good money and support their families. Not only were their husbands at war, but they were killed. And suddenly these women became the heads of their household.

Dianne Burckhardt 7:32

Yeah, and I think that there's probably a lot of that got just dismissed. Yeah. That so many families lost their providers and then they had to figure that out after because whenever the men started coming back from war, they're like, well, we've got to give them their jobs back, women go back home. It's like, okay, but my provider is not coming home. Now what are we going to do?

SPEAKER_01 7:53

Absolutely. Absolutely. That's one of the things I talk about when I do programs in front of libraries and historical societies. I've been speaking on the roles of American women in World War II for almost eight years now and have done almost 150 programs for different women's clubs, book clubs, libraries, historical societies, and the like. And I talk about particularly the Rosie, the Riveter women who stepped up. And when the war began, we were so far behind the access countries of Germany, Japan, and Italy that no one thought we could catch up. We had not been preparing for a war. We'd been in the midst of a deep depression. We weren't making tanks and guns and jeeps. And by the time the war was over, those American women, the six million women who stepped up in these jobs, created more than double what the three access countries combined produced in terms of war tanks, planes, ships, guns, all of the materials that we needed to then help save the world. And so they stepped up and took these jobs and they did great work and they made good money. And in many cases, manufacturing companies found that these women were better at the jobs than men had been because they were very attuned to detail. You know, one of the women's histories that I heard a woman talking, she said, Well, you know, my job in the war was welding. And it wasn't all that different than my needlew at home because you want your welds to be straight and even and strong, just like your stitches. And yet when the war was over, these women who'd done great work and made good money and contributed to us winning the war, were told, thanks so much, but we're shutting down now. We're gonna not make jeeps anymore, we're gonna go back to making Oldsmobiles, and these jobs are gonna be for the boys. So you go on home and have babies. And you know, many of them were like, wait a minute, my husband died in the war. I'm in charge of making money for my family to support my family now. And they were said, you know, oh well, go find a new husband, have babies, and see you later. And that was it. They were out of work in many cases.

Dianne Burckhardt 10:11

Yeah, I think that's probably one of the stories that I think gets missed still is how many women just kind of got left behind and had to figure out how to survive after all of that.

SPEAKER_01 10:23

Absolutely. Absolutely. I'm currently writing a book that is sat in upstate New York during the war, and it's it's about one of the WOWs, the women ordinance workers. So these were women hired by the army to manufacture, construct, store, and ship bombs and ammunition and all of the ordinance that our military needed. There were four ordinance depots built, one in each quadrant of the country. And for the Northeast, it was built here in the Finger Lakes, very near my home. And that's the setting of my new book: is this Seneca Ordnance Depot. These women came in and ran fork trucks and manufacturing lines and you know, stored the materials and shipped them out, including some nuclear materials that were eventually used for the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And again, when the war was over, men came home, and these were some of the few women that didn't lose their jobs to men because we went directly into the Cold War. We needed to store materials, we had a huge facility that needed to be run. It was actually active right up until 2000 when it was decommissioned in the base closing commission. And they were some of the very few women that weren't told, okay, you know what, the men are coming home. We don't need you anymore because we still needed bombs and we still needed people to run the ordnance facility for it. When did they start coming together with the clubmobiles? So the clubmobiles were roughly in place in World War I, but at a much lower level. But in World War II, when our troops started showing up in England in 1942 to prepare and train and get in place for what would eventually be D-Day, the D-Day invasions of June of 44. They realized that they had all these American troops there and they were starting to get in large numbers, and they were needing to have some method for the men to blow off steam and boost a morale. And there was some friction with the British troops. And so they started building clubs. The American Red Cross came in and started building clubs to entertain these men on their off hours so they could go and have coffee and donuts, play a game of cards, read a magazine, dance with a pretty girl. You know, there were Red Cross hostesses in the clubs. And it worked so well that they thought, what are we going to do when we send these guys over the English channel? And they start marching across the continent on their way to Germany. How are we going to maintain these morale issues? They'd found it, it was such a boost to the men to see these women and have a taste upon them, whether it was coffee and donuts or whether it was a hamburger or whatever it was, it made a huge impact on their ability to stay in the battle, so to speak. So they looked into different options and decided that the best option would be to outfit a six by six GMC Army truck with three coffee urns and a donut machine made by the Donut Corporation of America. I believe they gave the machines to the Army at no cost, but then sold them the mix of donut materials that they would need to make donuts in the machine.

SPEAKER_02 14:04

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 14:05

Yeah. Smart commerce in wartime. So they built these trucks that would then theoretically be driven to the front lines and serve coffee and donuts. They decided that was the quintessential American pick-me-up was coffee and donuts. And they recruited women, the American Red Cross, hired women. They said these women needed to be over 25 years old. They needed to be college educated. They needed to be employed or have real life jobs. Many of them were secretaries or teachers. I think obviously nurses made the switch to the nursing corps, but there were a lot of educated women that were hired for these Clemobiles. Oh, and they they needed to be strong. They needed to be able to carry the 50 to 100 pound bag of donut mix. And oh yeah, and they needed to be pretty. Now the American Red Cross said they didn't have to be movie star gorgia, but you know, pretty girl next door kind of deal. Amazingly, they hired 300 of these women and they sent them over the English Channel three weeks after our troops went and they unloaded them on the shores of France with the truck and their donut machines, and they went to work driving these trucks right up through the battlefields. Like if today the battle is raging on this front line, tomorrow that woman is going to be there and she's going to be serving coffee and donuts out of the back of a truck.

Dianne Burckhardt 15:44

That is just mind-blowing.

SPEAKER_01 15:47

It is. These young American women who had never seen the front lines of war saw it in a way that no other women did. I mean, nurses were very close to the front line, but these were really the first civilian women who knew nothing about shooting guns or carrying guns. And they are up on the front lines. And sometimes in the Battle of the Bulge, some of the clubmobilers were found to be behind enemy lines because basically the front line oscillated such during Battle of the Bulge. The bulge actually re refers to the way the front lines oscillated and sometimes it bulged out in places. And so it was a very fluid front. And at one point it moved and the women were there delivering coffee donuts and mail for these men who were fighting the Battle of the Bulge, and they found themselves behind enemy lines and had to be rescued. Wow. Yeah. When I heard about Clubmobile women, or they called them the Clubmobile girls, although they had to be 25 years old. I heard about them when we visited the cemetery in Normandy, the American Cemetery in Normandy, France. And there's a headstone there for an American woman named Elizabeth Richardson, who was from Indiana and died in July of 1945. And I asked our guide, what's the deal? You know, she's a civilian woman from Indiana, and she died two months after the war in Europe was over. Like, why is she here? And he said, Oh, well, she was an American Red Cross Club Mobile Girl. Like, I would know what that meant. So that's when I started researching these remarkable women. That's my first book on the home front. The story of three women. Two of them are sort of the Rosie the Riveter types. One is a British war bride, but the third woman is an American wife and teacher who becomes widowed during the war and decides to go and be an American Red Cross Glomobile girl. And it was fascinating researching those women. It really just blew my mind. And that was really my first insight into what American women were doing. Because I love all those British TV shows and I read lots of novels about the spy women in France and the British women and even the Russian night witches and all these European women and what they were doing. But there was very little out there telling me what American women were doing. And that's what I wanted to be able to speak to.

Dianne Burckhardt 18:26

We know, and I want to back up just a little bit here, too, because with all of this research that you're doing on the World War II topics, I would think that you are very good at doing research considering your previous career.

SPEAKER_01 18:42

Yes. I graduated from college with a degree in hotel administration, if you can believe that. And then I went on to law school. And I loved the law. I loved the research. I loved the writing. That was really my strength. In fact, I was yet to be a teaching assistant in our legal writing class. But when I got out and started practicing law, I realized I didn't like the lawyers very much. Even me when I was practicing law. It's the kind of profession that brings out the worst in many people. Not everyone else. Wow. Yes, it was really wonderful. Romance readers and writers are just nice people.

Dianne Burckhardt 19:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:43

It was a big about face from the world of lawyers. And um I would imagine.

unknown 19:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:51

And that I was happily doing until we moved to Germany in 2006. So it I sold the bookstore when we learned we were going to be transferred. And all that time I'd been writing. I wrote my first book in third grade about being a brownie girl scout. Nice. Wrote a lot of really bad short stories and poetry in high school and college, then wrote a lot of legal briefs. But by 1999, I joined the Romance Writers of America. I had a romance bookstore that I was running, but I also was a part of RWA and my local Chicagoland chapter, the Windy City Romance Writers. I became eventually spent a couple of years as president of the group. Some wonderful writers, got some great critique partners, wrote a couple of really bad romance novels that will forever be hidden in boxes under my bed. And in 2002, I wrote what would become my second published novel, Killing Her Softly, which is the first of my Harper's Glenn series of contemporary romantic suspense. And I wrote it. I got an agent. I was really excited. I was on the road to publication, except the agent never sent it to any publishers in the two years that we worked together.

Dianne Burckhardt 21:17

Oh, wow.

SPEAKER_01 21:18

And yeah. And so when we found out we were moving to Germany, I just said, you know what? Okay, that's it. We're we're done. I will take my book back and I will put it away for now and move on to Germany. That's where I learned about the Club Mobile Girls and I started writing on the home front. And when I finished that book in 2016, I sent it off to some publishers and agents and eventually got a couple of offers from different publishers, small presses. And I went with the Wild Rose Press. I'd heard some good things about it, but I also knew that they had a fairly extensive romance and romantic story. Suspense category. And so once they agreed to publish on the home front, which is really strictly women's fiction, I said, Hey, you know what? I have this romantic suspense. Would you like to take a look at it? And they did, and they published actually both of those books in 2017. And then in 2019, I published, and then there was you, which is the second in the Harper's Glenn series of contemporary romantic suspense. And then that was followed by The Whistle Stop Canteen, which was my second World War II era historical novel, fully historical romance. And so that's the one that has won me prizes. You know, it was one of those things where the other ones always finaled in things, but on the home firm actually won a couple of contests and has done very well for me. And as I said, started speaking about the role of American women, which I still do to this day. I think I have six programs scheduled in March and a couple more in April. And next fall, I just constantly am out speaking about these women because people need to know. When I was researching on the home front and all of the information about Club Mobile Girls, I went to visit the National World War II Museum in New Orleans, which is a phenomenal museum, and I highly recommend it if people have not visited it, because it's part of the Smithsonian Institute, even though it's located in New Orleans. And it was originally set up in buildings that were donated by the Higgins Corporation, because that was headquartered in New Orleans, and they were instrumental in helping win World War II. They created the Higgins Boat, which many people have never heard of, but everybody has seen if they watch Saving Private Ryan or any of those D-Day movies, and you see the landing craft approach the shore and the front of it comes down and all the soldiers come running off. That's the Higgins boat. Okay that allowed them to get the men close to the shore.

Dianne Burckhardt 24:06

Yeah, I definitely know what that is, but I would have never known what it was called.

SPEAKER_01 24:10

Right, exactly. And so that's why the museum is in New Orleans. And I went down there and listened to audio transcripts of women who were clubmobile women and you know many different things about the war. It's a fabulous museum. And I spoke to some of the volunteers who were at the time World War II veterans. I don't think there's many of them left, but they said, Oh, if you're interested about the women, you better go, you know, read about North Platte. And so I went and looked and fell in love with the story of the women of this town of 12,000 in western Nebraska. That there's nothing out there but family farms, very kind people. And they had the largest railroad station in the country. It was a huge crossing point for all the troop trains that crossed the country, going east or west. And so the women of the town decided to start a canteen on the side of the tracks for the troops at Stepped, because oftentimes these soldiers would get on the train in New York and be riding for three or four days, sitting up, not able to lay down, not having any food besides army rations.

SPEAKER_02 25:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 25:26

You know, had no idea where they were going or whether they'd ever make it back home. And so they'd stop in North Platte to change their crew or take on additional water or coal or more cars or whatever. Everybody stopped in North Platte for like 15 minutes. And so the women said, okay, well, you know what, we don't have manufacturing here. We can't be Rosie the Rivetors, but we can do this. We can meet the trains. And so from December 25th of 1941 until April 1st of 1946, eight months after the war was over. So period of like four and a half years, they met the trains. All of the trains. This was an entirely volunteer operation that met over six million servicemen.

Dianne Burckhardt 26:15

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 26:16

Yeah, it's a remarkable story. These women gathered 55,000 volunteers from over 200 communities in this range, anywhere from northeastern Colorado to eastern Nebraska, this 200-mile range around North Platte. And the community would say, okay, we will take the third Thursday in the month, and we will take the second Friday and whatever. And when it was your turn, you got probably on a train at three in the morning, and Union Pacific would train them in for free if they were going to work at the canteen, and they'd bring food and coffee and clothes and books and magazines and money. And they would go to the canteen and run it for the day. And it was sort of a loaves and fishes deal. They never knew how many troop trains were going to come because that's national security. Yeah. And they never knew how many servicemen they'd have to serve, and they never ran out. They could put out a call to local people in North Platte and say, you know, hey, if anybody has any more coffee, we're running low, and they'd bring it in. And one Thanksgiving, a local priest donated 12 turkeys, 100 candy bars, and you know, whatever for the troops so that they could have turkey when they came through on Thanksgiving Day. And at the end of the day, they called and said, We're out of turkey. And the the priest got up from his table, grabbed his own turkey, took it down to the canteen, and served the remaining servicemen who came in. Incredible story. Every service member who came through on their birthday got a full birthday cake to take with him on the train. Oh wow. Women in the back of the canteen who were just whipping up angel food cakes all day. And everything was rationed. You know, they had to take the sugar out of their own family allotment. They had to get creative and use duck eggs or turkey eggs because chicken eggs were rationed. I mean, everything was rationed. They would take a ham and make stretch it by chopping it up and using mayonnaise made from the egg yolks left over from making angel food cakes. And they would then use ham salad sandwiches instead of ham sandwiches. I mean, they used pheasant that some of the local farmers had hunted for and make pheasant sandwiches. I mean, it was it was a remarkable experience. And they got no federal money whatsoever, except for a $5 check that FTR sent them when he wrote, Hey, heard you're doing great work out there. Five bucks.

Dianne Burckhardt 28:56

Now, whenever you come across an idea that inspires you and you're like, okay, I want to write this story, how long does it usually take you to go from your concept to a finished product?

SPEAKER_01 29:07

A long time because of the because of the research. So the book that I am working on now, I I completed the first draft in November, and I started researching it in 2022. So that was two years of research and drafting, and I know that it's going to make it a lot to revise it to a point where I actually want to send it off to anybody. I I guess it's lucky for me that my publisher is willing to take things whenever I write them, you know, because I'm not with a big New York publishing house, I'm with a small publishing firm. The Wild Rose Press published three of my four books. When I came to the Whistle Stop Canteen, my editor said, send it on. I really want to see it. And I said, I think actually I'm going to self-publish this one. And so I did. I published it myself on Kindle, on KDP through Amazon because I do so many of these programs in libraries. And so I'm doing a lot of my sales through hand sales. I meet the person, I shake their hand, they listen to my story, they buy my books, and I frankly just make more money on the one that I self-publish when I stand there and sell it myself. So I'm not adverse to the idea of self-publishing the new one, but it has some themes to it that might appeal to a larger audience. So I'm going to try to do a little more traditional route and see what happens. My main character, my woman ordnance worker, is neurodivergent. And I think that that isn't a story that has been told very much in the 1940s. You know, they certainly certainly didn't have the terms Asperger's or autistic or anything, certainly not neurodivergent in 1943. Um, she was just considered a pain in the neck. Um so I think that there are some themes to this book that make it have a wider audience. The hero is an Italian POW at one of the POW camps here in upstate New York during the war. And his sister is one of the refugees that the United States accepted. So I didn't even know this until a few years ago. I'd always heard that we turned away ships full of refugees, you know, from the Holocaust. But in fact, in 1944, Roosevelt agreed to take a thousand refugees from concentration camps in Europe. And so sent representatives to Italy, where they actually brought over 982. They looked for refugees who could establish kind of a self-contained community. So they had dentists and doctors and teachers and musicians and a wide spectrum of primarily Jewish refugees from these camps. And they brought them over from Italy in 1944 and put them at Fort Ontario in Oswego, New York, which, if you're unfamiliar with Oswego, New York, it stands at the intersection of Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence Seaway. And it's stinking cold. These poor people came over from camps in Italy and were stuck in the frozen tundra of central New York, where I mean, literally every winter day on the news, I will hear, oh, Nightw got three feet of snow this weekend. You know, our Suego rather would got got three feet of snow. Wow. A difficult environment for them. But these 982 refugees came and got settled there. And the idea was that they agreed when they came over, they signed an agreement that they would go back when the war was over, that this was not going to affect our immigration quotas. It wasn't going to be uh open the gates, because of course America was very concerned about immigration prior to World War II. And that was part of the whole reason why we didn't take refugees during the wars because we didn't know how to get around our immigration quotas. So the idea was that they had to go back. And so one of my characters is a woman who was chosen to come as a refugee to Fort Ontario in Oswego. And she was an Italian Jew, resistance fighter. And I think again, these are histories that people don't generally know. I grew up in upstate New York my whole life and I did not know about this. So I think that there might be some themes that make this a bigger story to tell.

Dianne Burckhardt 34:13

That could be very, very interesting. But why don't you go ahead and tell us now the actual story behind the whistle stop canteen?

SPEAKER_01 34:21

Sure. So my main character, Maggie, is the town librarian. She's a woman in her 40s. She would be called a finster. She had a fiance in World War I that went off to war and was killed. And so she lives with her really unpleasant mother in this small town of North Platte, and she's the town librarian. And when the war breaks out, she hears that this canteen is going to be formed, and she thinks that it would be a good thing for her to get involved in because she could help keep records and make sure that they do a good job of keeping track of all the men that come through. And she can also make sure that the service members have the opportunity to take with them reading material, which was hugely popular. You know, frankly, the only news that the service members got was through Armed Forces Network Radio or the Armed Forces newspapers. And they weren't getting a full picture of what was happening in the war because that was not necessarily deemed a good morale for the men. So she gathered books and magazines and newspapers, and she ran the periodical table in the canteen. She'd always been a pretty closed-off woman. Her mother was angry and mean, and her father had been gone for a long time. And so it was a wonderful way for her to get to know some of the town women that she didn't really know from church or the library, particularly some younger women. And so a very young woman is assigned to help her with the periodicals that she hands out. This woman is really a girl. She's young and she has a lot of concerns, and she wants to meet a man and she wants to escape her abusive home life. And Maggie takes her under her wing. But one of the first times Maggie's volunteering at the canteen, this cocky captain comes in and won't go get his sandwich and won't go get his cup of coffee and won't go through the line that everybody is supposed to file through. But he can't leave the periodical table because he finds Maggie fascinating. He convinces her to write to him simply by badgering her and writing her letters. And eventually she gives it rights back because she feels it's sort of her patriotic duty to maintain the morale of the service member. And frankly, that was the big message that women got. People talk about how could they have married somebody they only met for two weeks? Well, the government said it is your responsibility to send these soldiers off to war happy. And so they tried very hard to do that. They made friends with total strangers, they married total strangers. So Maggie starts writing to this man, and it turns into a wonderful friendship. And eventually she falls in love with him through the mail. And I try to include a lot of their letters back and forth. He gets sent to the Aleutian Islands with his platoon of men. The Aleutians had been invaded by the Japanese. So there's this concern that she can't get responses from him for a while, that he's injured, or all the things that come along with writing to someone who's gone off to war. In the meanwhile, she's dealing with her young charge back at the canteen. She's getting to know some of her contemporaries. She deals with her vile mother. And she finds that she has a lot more warmth in her than she ever thought. And she eventually says, okay, even though this man is at war and could die, just like her fiance did in World War I, she's willing to admit that she's falling in love with him through his letters.

Dianne Burckhardt 38:16

Now I think it's a good time for us to do our five quick questions that never turn out to be quick, but one day it will happen. Let's see if it's today. Are you ready? Bring it on. So, question one. I know you have spent a lot of time traveling around the world. So, what is your most memorable foreign country you have been to?

SPEAKER_01 38:39

I basically have two. I love every time we visited Italy, I fall in love with it. The people are wonderful, the food is out of this world. And the colours, the architecture, the agriculture, the coastlines, everything is so vibrant and beautiful. I have loved every part of Italy that we have visited.

Dianne Burckhardt 39:04

Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 39:06

I also fell in love with Melbourne, Australia. It was so different. When we were on the coastline and Phillips Island, which is a little island off the coast, we went out at dusk and watched the little tiny penguins march in from the ocean. So they come every night. You have to sit in the dark. They have a few subdued spotlights so you can see what's going on, but you can't take any photos, you can't have any flashlights. You sit there and watch these penguins come out of the water and go to the same nest that they've had forever. And if somebody interrupts where they're going by flashing lights or being in the way or disrupting them in some way, they can't find their way home and they never do again. So you must sit still in the place where you're going to be and watch them. And it's incredible. I mean, it was such an beautiful, beautiful sight. We went to a koala bear refuge. We just stood on the coast and took incredible pictures of the ocean crashing against these rocky coastlines that look like they're sort of on the moon. It blew me away. Melbourne, great zoo, great sights. Got my husband to take me to the theater. I mean, it was a gorgeous city, but the natural beauty there blew me away.

Dianne Burckhardt 40:32

Question two. I know you did some substitute teaching. So, what was your favorite thing about being a teacher?

SPEAKER_01 40:40

The students are fabulous. I mean, I I only substitute taught in high schools. I did a couple of desperate days in middle schools, and those were very challenging. And people who choose to teach in middle schools have my undying respect because it's a tough time because the kids are so confused about everything. So that comes out in many uh inappropriate ways. But the um high school kids are fabulous. I just really enjoyed working with them. I worked in high schools in media and technology, first in the school that my younger two daughters graduated from, and then second in another district after we came back from China. And that was really fascinating for me. I I liked the media and technology aspects, you know, the helping teachers use classroom media like projectors and smartboards and those sorts of things.

Dianne Burckhardt 41:43

Question three. When you talk to people about your travels, what is one country that you always tell people you should go there at some point in your life?

SPEAKER_01 41:53

I used to say China because it's so different. But given the current political situation, I would not go back to China right now. My husband's company operates in 42 countries around the world. He's traveled so many places that our daughter's friends thought that his job was a very bad cover story for CIA because he traveled to Argentina and to Jordan and to Korea and you know, all of these places are like, this is not actually all about mops and brooms. But my husband does work for the company that makes O-Cedar mops and brooms. And it's a German company. They are sold under the product name of Valleda, which I'm sure you have in your local grocery store. So it really was all about mops and brooms. But in all of the places that we have traveled, we found that Chinese people are more like Americans than pretty much anywhere else we've gone. They are kind people that are working hard to get a car, to buy a house, to put their kids through school, what we call the American dream. Governments aside, they're just so kind and wonderful and not necessarily what average American would expect.

Dianne Burckhardt 43:10

Question four. I know that your children have left the nest. So what is the best part about being an empty nester?

SPEAKER_01 43:20

I would say the ability to travel, since I retired, I can go, you know, pretty much anywhere at the drop of the hat. And I generally get invited to go visit my kids a lot, which is wonderful. My oldest daughter lives in Seattle, and she bought a home there in the city of Seattle in November. And so she invited us all there for Christmas, but said, Mom, if you want to come ahead of time, we can go buy rugs and curtains and couches and establish her new home there, buy some Christmas decorations and all that sort of stuff. So I went out in early December, and then my husband and my middle daughter came out just before Christmas. But One of my Christmas presents from my youngest daughter and her husband was come to New York City, we'll go to the theater, come and stay with us, and we'll do a New York City weekend. And my middle daughter and my husband gave me a present of come down to New Jersey, where my middle daughter is a PhD student at Rutgers, and we'll go on a comedy tour. We'll do a comedy club in New York City, we'll do one in Atlantic City, we'll do one in Philly, you know, we'll travel around a reasonable distance from her and do comedy clubs because I love to see comedians. That's really so much fun for me. The travel is fabulous.

Dianne Burckhardt 44:41

I was gonna say, it sounds like you're having a fabulous retirement.

SPEAKER_01 44:46

I am, I am, and you know, it's it's not expensive travel to question five, your last one.

Dianne Burckhardt 44:56

Whenever you have some spare time and you just want to relax, who is an author that you always want to go pick up a book of theirs?

SPEAKER_01 45:07

I would say JD Robb, which of course is Nora Roberts. I love that series. Same with Louise Penny. I have a thing for police procedural thrillers. I don't want to write them, but I love escaping into them. And Kendra Elliott writes the Will Trent series. I love those. But something about JD Robb, I will go back and read those over again. I've been through the series probably at least three times, and I think she's written like 55 books in the series.

Dianne Burckhardt 45:41

You would probably really like an author I've had on the podcast. Her name is Sheila Lowe. She is a forensic handwriting specialist. She actually testifies in court and has done this for like many years, but she also writes books about a forensic handwriting specialist who helps solve mysteries.

SPEAKER_01 46:02

How cool. That's very different.

Dianne Burckhardt 46:05

Yeah, definitely. So now let's remind everybody who you are and where they can find your books.

SPEAKER_01 46:11

I'm Barb Warner Dean, and I like to say that I write stories of strong women in small towns. I have two historical World War II era published novels and two contemporary romantic suspense novels, and they are all available on Amazon. Two of them are also in Audible on the home front and Killing Her Softly are both also available on Audible, but they're all available ebook and paperbook on Amazon.

Dianne Burckhardt 46:40

And I know the one that we were specifically covering today, the whistle stop canteen, is available free in Kindle Unlimited. Yes, yes, it is. And as with everybody, all of your information will be in the description of today's podcast and also on our website at Burkhartbooks.com. So people will be able to find your links and just click and go and find you on your social media and at Amazon. And I should also mention that we will have a link to your main website. So if there is anyone who would like to have you come and do an appearance and do a discussion about World War II history and the research that you have done on this, you do have presentations that you do. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_01 47:21

I'm always excited to meet and reach out to new readers. And obviously, I could talk about these things for a very long time. So I really appreciate you giving me the opportunity to talk about this.

Dianne Burckhardt 47:35

Thank you so much for doing this today. This has been just absolutely fascinating.

SPEAKER_01 47:40

Well, thank you. Thanks so much, Diane.

Dianne Burckhardt 47:43

So there you have the interview with Barb Werner Dean. If this interview did not entice you to go learn more about the women in World War II, I really don't know what's going to get to you. Because this just had me asking so many questions and wanting to do more research into this topic. It's absolutely fascinating. The things that happened that we are not being taught in schools about this era in American history. But then I think there's a lot of things that are left out of American history, but we weren't going to that. If you want to find out more, be sure to go to Barb's website and check out all of the information that she has there and pick up a copy of the Whistle Stop Canteen. You won't regret it. Now, next week we have romanticy author Randy Dawn, and we will be talking about her latest book, The Only Song Worth Seeing. It is available on pre-order now, and you can pick it up April 8th. And as for me, I am still diligently working on my medical memoir, Free Bed Haircut with Each Craniotomy. I do have one third of the book written, and I am back to working with my memoir mentors group on Meetup. I have been making meetings about once or twice a month, and everybody always gives such wonderful critiques, and I actually sit down and do some concentrated writing on this thing. I hope to have it finished here soon because I desperately want to take it with me to the Frankfurter Book Mesa in October and see if I can't shop it to some agents there. At least that's the plan. I am also trying to rearrange my schedule now that I'm finally back to being mostly back to health. I plan to get the rest of the book banter magazines that have already been published as e-magazines into a print format available on Amazon. You'll be able to find this information at burkhartbooks.com in our BookBanter Productions area of the website. And if you haven't heard, I decided to go ahead and do one year-in book buying guide of BookBanter magazine at the end of the season that will cover every single author who has been on the podcast for that season. So we will have one big issue that comes out every year, and I think all of this is doable. I can keep writing my books, still keep doing the podcast, do one magazine a year. I think I'm finally getting everything figured out. Keep your fingers crossed for me, people, because I don't want to give any of it up. I want to do it all. I I think that's so typical sometimes. You just want to do everything, and I'm going to find a way to do it. So it's time for me to get back to work on other things. So it's that time again. Time for you all to go forth and be really happy. Then I am still working so hard to bring you all this great content covering so many amazing authors just for you. Thank you for joining us today. Be sure to subscribe to BookBanter with Diane Burkhart on your favorite podcast streaming service. Because if you love books like we do, you do not want to miss a single episode of this podcast.