Please allow me to introduce myself.
I am a resident of Virginia’s Northern Neck on the Chesapeake Bay. Published by Random House, Prentice-Hall, Hilltop Publishers along with many regional newspapers and magazines, I currently have multiple books in print. My writing has been heavily influenced by the works of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, John Steinbeck, James Herriot, Richard Bach and Jane Roberts. Listings of my currently published works and brief descriptions may be found by scrolling down.
My writing life had been influenced by my time as a soldier in the United States Army, my time as both a Commercial Pilot and sport parachutist, having been a licensed pilot since 1967 and a skydiver since 1962. I have been married for twenty-four years to a wonderful woman and gifted artist, Marianne, and we are blessed with multiple children and grandchildren. Along the way, I worked at many trades and retired as a Tactical Paramedic some years back.
Every summer for years, Doc, a long-time flight instructor, has barnstormed the Midwest in his ancient Jenny biplane, there to sell airplane rides, experience the lives of those he encounters, write about his adventures and live the simple life of a pilot still in love with the earliest days of aviation. But he has grown old enough now that he fears that the coming summer’s flying that he is about to undertake might be his last. That is, until he crashes in a West Virginia field and meets a young, simple girl who changes his life and makes him young again.
The Barnstormer’s Handbook: The History & How-To of Flying the Summer Skies for Fun and Adventure! - The Barnstormer's Handbook was written for the dreamers, those who wish to follow in the footsteps of the early aviators - the barnstormers of the 1920’s and 1930’s – the daring and unique characters who wandered across American skies in their box crate, wire and fabric airplanes performing stunts and selling airplane rides. Get the inside scoop from a pilot who has been there, and done that summer after summer.
All of life is an illusion that we create for ourselves. We choose our lives for the lessons a life teaches. We choose our roles in any life for the adventures we experience. We create our lives and design them for specific reasons, and we understand at a basic level that we live many lives simultaneously in differing realities and existences. And we draw our talents and abilities from others of whom we are already a part. In this novella, an aging pilot crashes on a mountainside, and he awakens at Midway Field to remember these realities. It’s a fictional story, yes. But the possibilities are intriguing. The book will cause you to ask questions. It will cause you to question everything.
Written for people of all ages who love the sky and the adventure it holds, The Flight of Charles Sebastian Crow is the tale of a young crow that changes the way his flock understands and performs flight. In so doing, he creates a new flock of unique birds that practice flight in ways that birds never have. The author is a long-time pilot and skydiver who has penned a finely-crafted novella that beautifully expresses his experience of flight in its many forms, and assures the reader that no one who has ever loved the sky can ever truly leave it behind. It will always be a part of who they are.
A group of aging skydivers and pilots who, in spite of their age and infirmities, decide that they want to recapture the glory days of their youth by forming a secret band of aerial outlaws. What makes them outlaws is that in order to achieve their goals of parachuting, flying and finding a lost camaraderie again, they must flaunt the rules, the regulations, and their own mindsets that have long held them back. The Outlaws tells the story that every old skydiver and pilot has, at some point, fantasized or dreamed of.
What if you met your spirit guide in an empty wheat field while barnstorming in the Midwest? What knowledge would he share? How would your life change? Toss the Feathers is the story of a modern-day, successfully published author, who also happens to be a pilot and skydiver, who goes looking for book-worthy material to write about. In that pursuit, he trades his modern airplane for an antique biplane and decides to journey across a Middle America summer selling airplane rides as the barnstormers of 1925 might have. With nothing but his ancient box-kite of an airplane, ready to maim him at the slightest infraction of his flying skills, a sleeping bag, a cook pot and his writing journal, he flies from town-to-town, cow pasture-to-corn field selling fifteen-minute airplane rides to the curious and the adventurous. Along the way, he learns provocative answers to long held questions he has asked himself about life and the nature of the world around him. The answers he seeks are the same ones we all ask.
In this, my most popular book, I write of a time in the 1960’s when sport parachuting, or “skydiving,” as it is called today, was just starting to come into its own as a sport. In the U.S., Europe and across the world, even in the Soviet Union, small groups of jumpers would gather at local airports and grass airstrips on the week-ends. The equipment used was usually military surplus, the aircraft, a mixed bag of smaller airplanes. My early days as a skydiver began at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, then took place mainly in the south, starting first in Mississippi and later in Louisiana. I reveled in the sport as a young guy with nothing on my mind but jumping, girls and partying. The characters I write about were all slightly off-balance. For instance, there was Major Goody who tried to kill a cat with homemade nitroglycerine, and Swartz who jumped with his dog. There were the first-jump students from all walks of life that I trained and the jumpers who would become my extended family. There were the vicious ocelots kept as pets that terrorized the various visitors that came to my parachute center. There were the outrageous drinking games, and eating unbelievable amounts of the Louisiana staple, red beans and rice. You'll roar with laughter at the story of "Eddy and the Body." You’ll most likely hear the sound of Zydeco music in the pages of this book. See what life was like for early sport parachuting pioneers.
The trouble with fatherhood is that it doesn't come with a flight manual. If only sons knew that. But when fathers and sons are aviators, the bond is flight. In this novella, you'll read the heartfelt story of a father and son finding closeness in the sky during the father's last days.
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