Danos

A Spanish kid, born and orphaned in Cuba, survived the Spanish-American War, fought with the rats and vermin for sustenance in the trash heaps, escaped the orphanage, navigated as a stowaway to America, survived although abandoned, escaped incarceration and prosecution and survived serious relationships; but did he SURVIVE the orphanage?

This work of historical fiction (based on A.D. Knight's authentic memoir of 1929) follows Danos through starvation, homelessness, residence in a Spanish run orphanage in Cuba, befriended by a U.S. Army Private, stowed away on a U.S. transport ship to Galveston. Danos was abandoned by his military mentor then taken in by a crude family (serving as quasi-parents) in San Antonio and Oklahoma where he struggled for ten years. Independent as a teen and young adult, Danos was demoralized by several failed relationships while he labored as a crop farmer and cattle rancher in Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas. His relationship troubles began in earnest and intensified in Lake Charles, Louisiana at twenty years of age. Danos hit rock bottom in Little Rock, Arkansas with a family catastrophe. Danos' life from age seven through the next twenty years were personally recorded in his twenty-two-page memoir by Knight at age thirty-eight in 1929. While Danos suffered mightily as an orphan, the book concludes....spectacularly.