About Me

My life-long love of words began in the '50s in a central Oregon spud-growing town located on the high desert between Madras and Bend.

 

In those days, if you motored north or south on US Highway 97, my town, Redmond, was a spot you normally drove through, not to.

 

Its population of some 2,500 souls was too negligible to stir much outside notice, with the possible fleeting exception of when local high school wrestlers surprised themselves with the state championship in 1959. Still, civic leaders deemed themselves remarkable enough to create a kind of caste system, mostly merchants and then everybody else. If you had no dad—and I didn’t—you were often lonely even among friends who did.

 

When I was 11, my mom walked me to the town's one-room public library on Seventh Street to get me my first library card. There, the venerable Mrs. Ward stood in wait behind an oaken battleship of a desk, her mien nearly as gray as the severe bun tied behind her head. When with fastidious attention to detail she signed me up, my mother exhaled in triumph. With an eighth-grade education, she had dreamed for me a life of the mind she would never know.

 

Gazing about, I took in the room’s six tables and the aroma of freshly waxed floors. The place, although microscopic, seemed like a shrine. The distant expiration date on my card widened my eyes. Nineteen fifty-six—a lifetime away. Yet my journey had begun. My love of books started here with the Hardy Boys and baseball fiction. By the time my  card came up for renewal, I was on familiar terms with Hemingway, Falkner, Fitzgerald, and Virginia Woolf.

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