We began when Thelma Spencer was employed in 1977 by the National Woman's Party on Capitol Hill, in Washington, D.C. and worked with a publisher friend to do a reprint of the Party's history, a book that chronicled the suffrage period from 1913 to 1920 when women got the vote.  By 1981 a teaching position in the Ozarks of Southwest Missouri took Spencer back to the state where she was born and to the wonderful mountain people she came to admire and whose culture she longed to preserve.  When the local sheriff said he could write a book about the characters he had encountered in his twenty years in office, the new English teacher at the local high school was off and running with Thelton Hall Books and Denlinger's Publishers, producing in 1992, Sheriff Takes the Stand, by Herman Pierce and Thel Spencer.  With that first literary effort, memoirs and true life stories became the "reason for being" for Thel (her pen name) and continue to absorb her time and talent, culminating in her current works in progress,