Books

With One Shot: Family Murder and a Search for Justice

by Dorothy Marcic

With One Shot: Family Murder and a Search for Justice

Available Mar 27, 2018
Paperback, Audiobook, Audio CD
Publisher: Citadel Press

Available from these sellers:

Amazon.com Best Seller

The killer was behind bars – a woman who had confessed to the coldblooded murder of her husband. But Dorothy Marcic suspected a more sinister tale at the heart of her beloved uncle’s violent death. And nothing would stop her from getting to the truth.

Ever since she was a teenager, Dorothy Marcic was haunted by unresolved questions surrounding the killing of her beloved uncle. Though she led a she couldn’t put her doubts to rest – especially after the conniving Suzanne was released and began cutting a new swath of destructive behavior.

Review of With One Shot

Subtitled, “Family Murder and a Search for Justice,” this book is based on true events that occurred when writer, Dorothy Marcic, began uncovering her own family’s skeletons.

This is all about what happened when Marcic’s uncle was killed in cold blood, and how solving this mystery showed how flawed the justice system in America can be. Marcic took this on and tells readers how she worked for two years to find the truth behind this tragedy, and the steps she had to take to make things right.

Her uncle, former Detective LaVerne Stordock, lost his life in a horrible way, leaving his entire town more than a bit shocked by his death. It wasn’t as if the crime was just set aside or buried by the police. In fact, they were able to get a confession from Stordock’s widow, Suzanne. With the wife filing an insanity plea, it seemed as if the case was tied up. Trouble is, other data came about that did not exactly coincide with what Suzanne had confessed to.

The author not only offers up a very complete story that is a true thriller, with mystery, betrayal, and secrets being at the very core of what took place, but she also adds in family pictures, artist renderings and recreations of the crime scene, and more so that the reader can truly see every detail that came to light.

The love that Marcic has for her uncle and the mission she took on in order to finally let him rest in peace is what makes this book a heart-wrenching tale. Not only will it intrigue readers, but it will also make them want to pat Dorothy Marcic on the back and commend her for all her hard work.

— Mary Lignor, Professional Librarian and Co-Owner of The Write Companion for Suspense Magazine

Love Lift Me Higher

Meditations on Finding True Happiness

by Dorothy Marcic

Love Lift Me Higher

Paperback: 2009
Publisher: George Ronald, Oxford
IBSN: 978-0-85398-539-6

Available at George Ronald
Available at amazon.com

Love Lift Me Higher comprises stories, exercises and worksheets on different aspects of love and other virtues, all drawing on quotations from the scriptures, designed to touch hearts and give tools to solve daily problems with relationships, families, at work, and with the Creator.

Recent social science research indicates that 30 minutes a day spent reading or meditating about love can dramatically impact a person’s level of happiness and those effects can be seen within two weeks. Why not, then, read short quotations and stories daily, in order to be happier? What could be easier?

Love Lift Me Higher is published by George Ronald Publishers and is available directly from them and also from amazon.com.

RESPECT: Women and Popular Music

by Dorothy Marcic

RESPECT: Women and Popular Music

Hardcover: March, 2002
Publisher: Texers
IBSN: 978-1587990830

Available at amazon.com

A fresh look at the women’s movement, through the eyes and ears of pop music, during the twentieth century. Here are the most popular female-sung songs, written by men and women, and the impact their words had.

RESPECT is filled with lyrics that resonate with everyone, including, Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home, Debbie Reynolds singing Tammy, Tammy, Tammy’s in love, The Shirelle’s Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? Reminiscences by both men and women of what these songs meant will strike a chord with every reader. What song did you lose your virginity to? What song played the day you graduated? The day you quit your first job?

Dorothy Marcic connects the lyrics and reminiscences of these Top-40 songs sung by women, together with the course of the women’s movement, showing where the lyrics heralded changes in women’s status and showing us what hasn’t changed at all.

Understanding Management

by Richard L. Daft and Dorothy Marcic

Understanding Management


Publisher: Cengage
IBSN: 978-1305502215
190 pages

Available at amazon.com

Based on Daft’s Management, the all-time best-selling principles of management text, Understanding Management combines classic management concepts with emerging trends and issues in a concise, exciting, and student friendly format. In direct response to customer feedback, Dick Daft and Dorothy Marcic deliver a condensed yet comprehensive introduction to management text.

Managing with the Wisdom of Love

by Dorothy Marcic

Managing with the Wisdom of Love

Cloth: 1997
Publisher: Jossey-Bass
ISBN: 0-7879-0173-3
190 pages

This book explores how the workplace might change if we acknowledge that spiritual values are as important in organizational operations as they are in the lives of those who work there.

Speaking directly to those managers who are “trying to figure out why their elaborately planned programs don’t work, why morale is low or trust is absent”, Marcic offers concrete evidence that breaking spiritual law, in business as elsewhere, elicits predictable results. Arguing that living by the Golden Rule will always bring prosperity and well-being (even in the turbulent business world) Managing With The Wisdom Of Love speaks directly to executives and managers about the ethical and spiritual principles that are indeed key to the long-term success of a company.

Then, the book goes one step further, with the presentation of a practical, step-by-step framework for operationalizing spirituality. Using checklists, charts, inventories, and questions, Marcic demonstrates exactly how to establish an organization program that brings enduring spiritual values to the world world.

Managing With The Wisdom Of Love should be required reading for anyone with managerial or supervisory responsibilities.

Bottom Line

A Tale of Greed, Arrogance, and Murder in Corporate America

by Dorothy Marcic

Bottom Line

Third edition
Publisher: Harcourt College
Copyright 2001
ISBN: 0030293111

Some copies may still be found online.

An intriguing, contemporary business novel about murder, greed, and betrayal in the workplace. The heroine, Lenore, is the human resources director for Nelson Manufacturing, a small and well-run company that is suddenly taken over by a greedy and profit-driven conglomerate.

The novel shows the negative effects upon the workforce due to a few common practices of modern management, such as indiscriminate cuts in personnel and budgets, the treatment of workers, egotism at the top, and an unrelenting obsession with the quarterly profit picture.

Bottom Line synthesizes many true stores from a number of actual companies and is a morality tale of good versus evil in corporate America. It is a unique innovative addition to the case study approach of Understanding Management, Third Edition (Harcourt College Publishers, Copyright 2001).

Organizational Behavior

by Dorothy Marcic, Peter B. Vaill, and Joe Seltze

Organizational Behavior

6th Edition, July 2000
Paperback, 400 pages
Publisher: South-Western College Publishing
IBSN: 0324048505

Organizational Behavior is a compilation of 67 engaging, flexible, and tested exercises for active learning of organizational behavior. Exercises range from the simple to the complex, and can be implemented as individual or group activities.

Self-inventories, role-plays, and case studies provide a diversity of experiences.

A section of 11 short readings serves as an anchor to students new to experiential methods, group processes, and case analysis.

Look At Me! A Book of Occupations

by Dorothy Marcic

Look At Me! A Book of Occupations

1st Edition, 1986
Hardcover
Publisher: Western Publishing Co.
ISBN-10: 0307152103
ISBN-13: 978-0307152107

Available at Amazon.com

Look At My Farm!

by Dorothy Marcic

Look At My Farm!

Hardcover
Publisher: Racine, Wisconsin, U.S.A.: Golden Pr
ASIN: B000IU5VMY

Available at Amazon.com

Articles

When lives are taken, as in the Waffle House killings, the damage lasts for years.

by Dorothy Marcic

I’ve eaten many pecan waffles or scrambled eggs with crisp, brown shredded hash browns at Waffle Houses during the 17 years I lived in Nashville. Never once did I think I had to look up from the Formica table in the booth of the red Naugahyde cushions to glance around for an automatic weapon. It never occurred to me in such a peaceful yet bustling setting with food so many people can’t seem to live without.

Four people dead, several more injured in a Nashville Waffle House. This seemed so improbable, and yet also not quite unexpected. Since Jan. 1, there have been 155 mass shootings in the U.S. Should we be surprised? But how many times have I read we’ve all become numb to the violence and deaths?

Yet I am quite certain not everyone is numb. Not the survivors and the family of those killed. They will never become numb.

My uncle, LaVerne Stordock, was murdered at 2:15 a.m. on Sunday, March 1, 1970, outside Madison. His second wife confessed and spent 11 months in a mental hospital, evidently with weekends off, and was sent home in less than a year, completely cured of chronic paranoid schizophrenia. Forget, for now, that such a condition is not curable, according to six mental health experts I consulted. And let’s not focus on her getting all my uncle’s assets, including his life insurance — with double indemnity.

What I want to tell you is how those left behind never really get over the loss. During my life, a number of family members have died, including uncles, parents, brothers, and more. If someone dies from cancer, or even insulin shock (as one uncle did), these are painful exits leaving all of us reeling. However, when a person you dearly love is murdered, the suffering is compounded exponentially. My uncle was at the height of his career as an elite investigator for the state of Wisconsin, he was healthy and full of life. And he was only 44 when a single bullet hit his left temple, and the right side of his head exploded all over the bedroom walls and floor.

We all expect the destabilizing grief that descends on us, and then we somehow think, eventually, we will be able to move on. And we do. Until one day I see a man who looks likes like my uncle might have, and I break down and can barely breathe. I've seen obituaries for decades of people born in the same year as my uncle and feel robbed of his presence all this time. I see a police officer in the kind of uniform my uncle wore earlier in his career, and I cannot speak. Or someone teases me like my uncle Vernie liked to do, and I am transported to that world called Can’t Get Over Losing You. My cousin, Shannon, from the first marriage, thought about her father every single day, but could barely talk about it for decades and wonders what he would have looked like all these years later.

It’s not only the hundreds who’ve been killed, but also the thousands of family members, young and old, who will always remember the exact moment they were told and will never have to wonder where they were at that second.

Journal Sentinel, April 27, 2018

Reader’s voice: Is anyone out there worthy of wearing Mr. Rogers’ sweater?

by Dorothy Marcic

A hero died last month. It was a man I admired and worked for back in the 1970s as a production assistant on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.

Fred Rogers didn’t have any of the characteristics of an action hero: tall, muscular, forceful or dominating. In fact, he was rather small-boned, quiet and thoughtful. Yet his style of leadership influenced a significant part of today’s young adults who are now in the work force. I only wish he had impacted even more kids.

Think of the effect he must have had on generations of employees. Consider that who we see as our “heroes” has a lot to do with the kind of leaders we become or what we look for in our own leaders. Over the years, when I told people I had worked for Fred Rogers, the reactions were polarized into admiration for him or aversion. I came to see Rogers as a Rorschach test for how we see the world. People who believed that strong leadership was always necessary or that average people were not capable of individually or collectively deciding their own destinies tended to intensely dislike Rogers. Others who believe in the ability of groups to determine their own futures or of individuals to make their own decisions without a strong authority figure directing them — those people admired Fred Rogers.

Some viewed Rogers as not manly enough. His television persona was parodied on late night television. But whose definition of masculinity is that? I saw him as someone in the vein of Nelson Mandela or Mahatma Gandhi — gentle but strong leaders.

So what are the qualities of workplace behavior that Fred Rogers helped shape? He showed children how important it is to listen thoughtfully to someone else, when he would look directly at the camera and ask pointed questions. He gave models of conflict resolution when King Friday would get angry at Lady Aberlin. He showed how important it was for members of the organization — whether in The Neighborhood or the Make Believe kingdom — to care about one another and to collaborate on problems.

He was perhaps the first children’s television star who emphasized feelings, understanding them and learning to deal with them. Many people will remember the show about the fear of being sucked down the bathtub drain or about going to the dentist. Fred Rogers acknowledged those fears and helped children gain courage. And finally, he showed what reality is, clearly distinguishing between fantasy and the real world.

Aren’t these qualities lacking in some of our leaders and CEOs these days? I think too many who rose to the rank of CEO were weaned on Superman and Batman, seeing themselves as indestructible. How else can you explain the behaviors of Dennis Kozlowski of Tyco or Bernie Ebbers of WorldCom? Men who lived in a fantasy world where the normal rules of transparency and accounting practices did not apply to them.

Dorothy Marcic and Mr. McFeely
Dorothy Marcic and Mister McFeely on the set of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood in the early 1970s.

The really effective leaders we have today are more strong but selfless and tend therefore not to be in the news. What are the great corporate success stories these days? They include Darwin Smith of Kimberly-Clark or Kurt Walgreen of Walgreen’s, both of whom oversaw dramatic transformations of their companies from mediocre to star quality. Not by manufacturing deals that could never be actualized but instead by facing reality, collaborating with employees to create a compelling vision and then having the courage to execute it – all the while listening to the public, the market and workers. Aren’t those the very qualities Fred Rogers taught us? He will be sorely missed.

The Tennessean, March 9, 2003