There’s one little issue with setting anything in the real world and in years past. Certain things have happened, and people know about them. That means you’ve got to do your homework.

Example, I’m working on Family Secrets, the sequel to The Lawman. In it, Will and Jewell attend a Broncos night game at Mile High Stadium where a crucial event in the novel occurs. This is not an event that was earthshaking, didn’t change the world in any significant way, but has a huge impact on several of my characters.

As Will points out, he’s never been much a football fan, more interested in boxing, martial arts, and rodeo. But this presents a unique opportunity for him, to witness firsthand what a lot of people take for granted. He’s as much interested in the experience, as he is the game, so it since he’s reported as accurately as possible on other events, it makes sense that I’d write in what actually happened.

First, the game happens on October 17, 1994. It was a night game between the Broncos and the Chiefs. It matched two of the world’s greatest quarterbacks, John Elway and Joe Montana, and as games go was one of the greatest games ever played with the outcome in doubt right up to the end. So I had to get out there and do some huge research. Someone out there knows how every play went down, when, and probably which blade of grass was stepped on.

So, in an effort to appease them, I had to research out that game. Here’s one of the sites I used:

https://www.pro-football-reference.com/

In this, I was able to learn who did what, and when. So that helped add some realism to the story (which really doesn’t go too much further than the end of first quarter).

Other things I had to research. Opening. Today, the Broncos are led through gauntlet of pompon shaking cheerleaders and smoke by a woman riding a beautiful white horse named Thunder. Did they do that in 1994? A little research showed that they did, and Thunder 1 led the way.

Another important piece, since this was a night game, when did the sun go down.

A check using the website: https://sunrise-sunset.org/calendar gave the answer. You can set the date/time and location, and it will tell you. Interested in knowing what the sunset time for October 17, 1994 was? It went down at 6:15 PM.

Why was that important? In my first draft I had them do something I’d seen at a few games, namely a fly over by of Air National Guard F-16s. This fact changed a piece of the story, and would have an impact later. Since the game started after sundown, what was the point of having several high performance fighters blast overhead if you couldn’t see them. Also, would the ANG do such a thing? Doubtful. While I’ve no doubt the pilots couldn’t have handled tight night flying formations, you save the crazy stuff for wartime, not for showing off over a populated area.

Being October in the Rocky Mountains, we could have had anything from a balmy evening to fifteen feet of snow, so weather became important. Here’s what it looked like for that date, high of 56, low of 36, clear skies and no snow.

The site: www.wunderground.com/history will give you what it was like when and where.

This influences the story on how people are dressed, any discomfort that might be felt, and so on.

I also had to talk with retired Denver Police officers and get an idea of how security would have been handled for the stadium at the time, and wove that into the story. For example, today it’s hard to smuggle weapons into Mile High Stadium because of how security is handled. Back then, there hadn’t been many of the mass shootings and bombings at public events we’ve seen today. So since they were more interested in tickets and rowdys, guns and even explosives could have easily been smuggled in (and probably were).

All that to say that the tiniest things can have a huge impact on the realism of the story,