I was born on May 25, 1943 smack in the middle of WWII. My first eight years were spent with my family in a bungalow on Williamsburg Road in Sandston, VA near the Richmond Army Air Base, a training base for P-47 pilots. My earliest memories are of life in a small town that was really a functioning part of the military as many families in the community rented rooms to service men and their wives stationed at the air base. Post WWII was a simple and lovely time in Sandston; a Norman Rockwell small town of tree lined streets with white frame houses. A new car or someone getting a television created a wave of excitement, but it was also a time when great change was just beginning to occur. It is truly fascinating to look back as witnesses to the extraordinary changes that have taken place from that simple time to the present, and it is part of who I am today.

From the very beginning of my education reading and comprehending what I had read seemed to come easily and literature was always a passion. I also had the ability to make up tall tales on the fly and could enchant my friends by the hour with my make believe yarns. When I was in the third grade one of these friends told our teacher about my ability with off the cuff storytelling. She was intrigued and invited me to the front of the class to demonstrate this alleged gift to spin a yarn. I remember how she along with the rest of the class sat seemingly mesmerized as I rambled on with some tall tale of high adventure. My mother was especially excited when the teacher called that night to tell her about this unusual gift that I seemed to possess. She was excited because at that early age I had shown an aptitude for exactly nothing except reading and eating.

Unfortunately reading and comprehension proved to be one of my few early academic accomplishments. The simple truth is that if something didn't interest me I had little time for it, and that included much of what exasperated teachers were trying to pound into my head. After graduating near the bottom of my high school class I had a brief stint in the Army before enrolling in the old Richmond Professional Institute (now Virginia Commonwealth University) majoring in journalism. Unfortunately that would also prove to be brief as my financial situation made full time work a necessity.