On this father’s side, Reid Lance Rosenthal can trace his ranching heritage back four generations to land his family lost to the Nazis.
Rosenthal’s real estate business acumen likely came from his mother’s side, he says, and she has roots that go back to the Mayflower.
And his best-selling writing career? That started on a day when Rosenthal was in the fourth grade.
Ranching, real estate, writing—combined, those experiences have given the 71-year-old Rosenthal a family history and identity that may be grander than any of the characters he has created in his award-winning series of historical fiction, “Threads West: An American Saga.” But he is willing to keep it simple.
He is a Jewish cowboy.
“Not a lot of me around,” he says. “But those are my roots, my ancestry, and my traditions. I’m a sabra, a warrior spirit.”
Escape from Germany
Rosenthal’s great-grandfather owned a 500-acre cattle operation in Prussia near the Baltics on land that would ultimately become part of Germany. His grandfather took over the family business. Then, world events intervened.
“When Hitler rose to power, my grandfather could read the tea leaves,” Rosenthal says. “People were disappearing on cattle cars, and the long train rides had begun.”
Rosenthal’s grandfather arranged for his 14-year-old son and 12-year-old daughter to leave the country in the late 1930s and live with relatives in the United States.
Reid Rosenthal’s parents
With his children safe, his grandfather also made arrangements to flee Germany. He and Rosenthal’s grandmother sold their cattle and sewed the money from the sale into the hem of their coats. They had already boarded one of the last ships leaving Bremen in Germany when odd looking men in plainclothes on the dock triggered his grandfather’s sixth sense. He went back to his cabin and told his wife to leave everything behind so they could exit the ship, looking like they had just been saying farewell to someone. The two fled and spent the next four months making their way to Switzerland, where they could board a plane for the United States.
The men on the dock turned out to be Hitler’s SS, looking for Jews trying to flee. The ship sailed and was turned away at every port, eventually returning to Germany where many of the passengers were arrested by the Nazis.
Rosenthal’s great-grandparents chose to stay in Germany even as the rest of the family was escaping.
“My great-grandfather had served in World War I and earned the Iron Cross,” Rosenthal says. “He thought because he was a war hero, they would not bother him.”
Both Rosenthal’s great-grandparents died at Auschwitz.
Ranching and real estate
In the U.S., Rosenthal’s grandparents bought a ranch northwest of Ft. Collins in Rist Canyon to “do what they had always done” and eventually, handed the ranch over to his father. Rosenthal grew up dividing his time between the family’s business and agrarian interests in the East and ranching in Colorado.
He bought his first ranch with a partner when he was an 18-year-old college student at Colorado State University majoring in forestry and technical journalism.
“I planned to be a rancher and be involved with land in all respects, and I also planned to write books,” he says. “I am living the plan.”
The first year on the ranch, he and his partner lived in a 12×16-foot tent on a plywood platform with a wood stove. He ranched, went to college, and he started buying, renovating, renting, and selling properties around CSU.
“The inspiration for that came from my mom who put herself through college trapping in upstate rural New York,” Rosenthal says. “She always loved real estate and formed a brokerage that did exceptionally well in Connecticut.”
In the late ’70s and early ’80s, Rosenthal branched out beyond ranching, real estate, and remodeling and grew his business into new construction. He developed The Landings in Ft. Collins and built the Har Shalom Center for Jewish Living. He also expanded his ranching interests to include multiple additional partners. By the late 1980s—a decade he describes as the “Star Wars years”—he was ready to walk away from developing real estate and devote his energies full-time to land and cattle.
He bought more than 20 ranches and ran cattle in Montana. Over the years, he added ranches in Canada to his portfolio. Ultimately, he decided to move out of Canada and mostly out of Montana and consolidate his holdings in Wyoming, where he has lived for the past 25 years.
“I have always loved Wyoming because it really is the cowboy state,” he says. “It’s the closest thing with the possible exception of the Dakotas, Idaho, and Nebraska to what the West was—a place where you had values and you lived them.”
Today, Rosenthal works his 10,000-acre ranch in Wyoming—but not between 3:00 a.m. and 8:00 a.m. That time is devoted to the passion he discovered when he was nine years old—writing.
Writing
Rosenthal the writer was born when he was in fourth grade, and he had to ask his teacher for a week off from school to take a family vacation to camp in the national park on St. John U.S. Virgin Islands. In exchange for permission to go, she extracted from him a promise to write about the trip in “a little brown glued-together book with white paper and oversized blue lines.”
“When I got back, she had me read to the class what I had written while they were eating lunch,” he recalls. “I looked up and everyone had stopped eating. I discovered that I could tell a story and people would listen.”
Rosenthal started his writing career in 2010 when he was in his mid-fifties. The first book in what he envisions as an epic 22-book series, “Threads West: An American Saga,” was published in 2013.
“I didn’t expect much, but it sold out on major platforms nationwide,” Rosenthal says. “Much to my utter and stunned surprise!”
The first book begins in May of 1854 and Rosenthal plans to carry his characters through five generations before he concludes the series.
“It is really the story of America set in the West,” Rosenthal says. “The real melting pot in this country is not on the coasts—it’s the Rockies, where east meets west and north meets south.”
Rosenthal is getting ready to publish the fifth book in the series with the sixth book following shortly behind. With 11 primary multicultural protagonists and at least half that many primary antagonists, Rosenthal likes to say that the series of novels “breaks all the rules of novel writing.” He has created two Jewish characters he calls “pistols” because “They have moxie, spunk, and ambition—when their jaw sets, it doesn’t change.” The series has won a long list of national awards for historical, romance, western, and multicultural fiction.
Rosenthal is also the author of a number one best-selling nonfiction book, “Land for Love and Money,” which is an anecdotal and instructional book on “the things you should think about (that no one ever does) when you acquire land or real estate of any type.”
Rosenthal’s first novel is dedicated to his mother who he describes as a good writer. At the age of 100, she is still closing real estate deals in New Mexico, a good indicator that Rosenthal may have the longevity he will need to see his series through to the end.
“I have always been fascinated with America because, alone among nations, it is a tapestry,” he says. “Every other nation on the planet is a mosaic. The “Threads West” tale is the story of the weave of America’s cloth.”