The Right Direction

If I had followed the trail I set as I grew up, I would have never written anything or escaped the steel mills in Pittsburgh. I quit school after the tenth grade, and a few years later joined the Marine Corps where I played football at Cherry Point Air Base in North Carolina and El Toro Air Base in Santa Ana, California.

It was during that time that I decided I would not return to the factories. I finished high school in evening classes, played semi-pro football while doing so, then managed an athletic scholarship to Westminster College in Pennsylvania. I got a BA in Journalism there and later, an MA in Communication from Wayne State University, Detroit.

I wasn't drafted, but was offered a tryout with the Pittsburgh Steelers by the coach, Walter Keesling, but turned it down (I already had too many broken bones and dislocations) in favor of a reporting job in a small Pennsylvania city. That kicked off a fun and interesting career.

My profession was writing, but never what I really wanted to write -- novels. It was years before I was able to proceed with novel and short story writing. Up until then, I was busy with newspaper and radio reporting in Greenville and Sharon, Pennsylvania, some free lance sports for the Akron Beacon-Journal and Cleveland Plain Dealer and news editing for WBBW radio in Youngstown, Ohio. I then worked in public relations for Goodyear and Chrysler.

Included in the Sharon job were musical reviews and interviews - - Van Johnson, Ethel Barrymore, Robert Horton, Robert Goulet, Chubby Kaye and many others at the well known summer stock theater, Kenley Playhouse in Warren , Ohio. An assignment at Goodyear was as Promotion and Publicity Manager for Goodyear in the pro-level National Industrial Basketball League. I was at the 1960 Olympic Trials in Denver, CO. when the greatest Olympic basketball team ever (before the pros were permitted to play). I was a member of the Promotion Committee for the PGA tournament at Firestone Country Club in Akron. And in the early 1960's, I published a sports magazine in the state of Ohio.

I found writing a novel much different than writing for the media or industry. For those, facts are usually within reasonable reach at an interview or at a crime or accident scene. It was often hard work and not always easy. But for fiction, one has to create characters, facts and events and other than science fiction, they have to be believable. That, too, is hard work, but fun, especially when it all comes together and thankfully what the publisher wanted.

I wrote "The Pen Pal Murders" so no one could read any part of the story and say: "It couldn't ever happen that way." What happened in the novel could happen just as it's written to anyone at any time.

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