I’m a California kid, great-grandson of (on one side) pioneers, forty-niners, homesteaders, farmers, and fortune seekers, and (on the other) devout New Englanders who left their mark on Pacific Grove.I was born in Bakersfield just as the Great Depression got started, but I never felt depressed.
My dad was a forest ranger, and I grew up between San Luis Obispo and Kernville in the tail end of the Sierra, and up the Valley from Bakersfield to Delano. From the time I was three months old, we spent a lot of time on the Monterey Peninsula and moved to Pacific Grove permanently in 1940 when I was ten.
I graduated from Pacific Grove High School in 1947, went off to the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque as an NROTC student, flunked out, went back, got married, graduated in 1953, spent three years on active duty with the Navy, went to work with Dean Witter as a stockbroker and branch manager in Oakland and San Francisco, and retired thirty-eight years later.
We moved to Carmel permanently, I hope, in 1991, and I started writing seriously in 2005, about a year after my wife Susie’s death. I have three great kids-Scott, Laura, and Carrie-and six above-average grandkids, and a sweetheart also named Susie. More about all of this some other time.
My column in the Montery Herald, Phil's Flashbacks, is also above average.
I am the author of two well loved books:
When the Lord Spoke
What Steinbeck Left Out
Stay tuned for more stories, some fact, some fiction, and others a little of both....
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