Nick Pappas

In October 1913, 261 miners and two rescuers died when a massive explosion ripped through a mine operated by Phelps, Dodge & Company in Dawson, New Mexico. Ten years later, a second blast claimed the lives of another 120 miners. Today, Dawson is a deserted ghost town. All that remains is a sea of white iron crosses memorializing the nearly four hundred miners killed in the two explosions--a death toll unmatched by mine disasters in any other town in America. Now, to mark the centennial of the second disaster, veteran journalist Nick Pappas tells the tragic story of what was once New Mexico's largest and most modern company town and of how the strong, determined residents of the community coped with two heartbreaking catastrophes.

No one uses guilt the way Italians and Greeks do. Maria and Nick know that only too well. The two teachers swap stories about their respective mothers and aunts, who have employed tears and sorrow the way a surgeon uses a scalpel. They gift their tormentors a trip to California, but ironically the ladies wind up on the same flight, where they become instant friends, and the world suddenly gets turned upside down. If you have kids, if you were a kid---whatever your ethnic background---you will laugh, sigh, and shake your head as you share this adventure with Maria and Nick and their Mediterranean Mothers

A Sicilian rival to Helen of Troy is sent by the gods into the 21st Century "Witness Protection" to pose as an English teacher and preserve the course of history. She meets Nick, another teacher, who is taken with her and is puzzled by her obsession with THE ODYSSEY. But Zeus had been duped by the Oracle, who in tum was tricked by Aphrodite, which complicates a prophecy that leads Maria and Nick back 3,000 years to Sicily and an encounter with Odysseus. The teachers have to make the correct decisions to fulfill the prophecy and save history. Do they? Sent by the gods into 21st Century "Witness Protection," a rival to Helen Of Troy must return to ancient Sicily to fulfill an ancient prophecy and preserve the course of history.