"The stories in Love, Death, and the Ladies' Drill Team were written by Jessamyn West between 1939 and 1955 and evoke a world that seems now very distant. Most are set in rural California among farmers and small town merchants when life was slow and the outside world was very far away. The most advanced technology was radio and the sound equipment that Leonard Hobart sets up at the baseball field in the small town of Tennant in the story "Public-Address System." The pressure of conformity from suburbia had not reached most of these people. Being eccentric was not only tolerated, it was almost expected."