Book on White Sands Missile Range hits shelves

From the Las Cruces Sun-News:

A new pictorial history titled "Images of America: White Sands Missile Range" hit the shelves of local bookstores this month, the fruit of many hours of labor by the director of the Missile Range museum. Published by Arcadia press, the book covers the history of the Missile Range since its founding in 1945 in pictures. The author, Darren Court, is giving all the profits from the book sales to the White Sands Historical Foundation. When Court took over as WSMR's museum director in May 2007, he could find no single book that put the rich history of the Range into one volume for easy reference. He found many historical papers, including much material about the Trinity site. He even found writings about the ranchers who lived on and worked the land now occupied by the Missile Range, but there was no compilation of WSMR's history. In the fall of 2007, Court decided that he was in the position to meet the need of the many visitors and researchers who have asked for "the White Sands book." For the next eight months Court took his lunch hour and any free time he had after work selecting photos, scanning them and researching photo captions. "In our archives we have about 10,000 documents and photographs catalogued," said Court...