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I was born
at an early age in a Boston hospital. I don’t recall my birth,
but accept it as truth since it appears on my birth
certificate, I’m here, and my parents have assured me it’s the
truth. I have to assume that’s when and how I arrived.
I grew up
in North Quincy, Massachusetts, and went through the public
school system. I wasn’t a student who stood out. If my English
teacher in the ninth grade had not told me to put down a copy
of Hemingway’s short stories (I had taken it off a bookrack
during study class) because I was “too stupid to understand
it,” I might never have wanted to read. Thank you Mr. Carlin!
In my senior year, I talked my creative writing teacher, Mrs.
Shapiro, into getting the school to allow us to publish a
creative writing magazine, Counterpoint. Mr. Carlin barely
passed me, Mrs. Shapiro gave me A’s! Go figure!
While in
high school I worked as a stock boy at the Orbit Department
Store in Dorchester, until I tried to help unionize the
workers. I was fired for this. The Retail Clerks Union found a
stock-boy position for me in Filenes’, an upscale department
store in downtown Boston.
When I was
sixteen, Jack Scanlon, a family friend, helped get me the
midnight-to-eight weekend office boy job at the
Record-American, Sunday Advertiser, a Hearst Newspaper. Those
two-nights a week began my education into the world of
journalism and politics. What I learned from the men and women
on the Record and Advertiser was more important than anything
I learned in college. I was fortunate to enter the world of
journalism in its gritty days, when reporters came up the
ranks from office boy, to cub, to reporter. My early years
were like a black-and-white noir movie, no kidding. There’s a
book in those early adventures, and someday I expect to write
it.
College
taught me how you were supposed to put a news story together,
but nights as a copy boy taught me how to dig up the facts and
write the story. There were no Google searches back then, it
was legwork! Those days are long gone, when the police, and
even politicians, had an understanding with journalists of how
life worked. Journalism, nor the public, is not better off
because those days have been lost. After high school, the
paper put me through an editorial apprenticeship.
Because of
my volunteer work at the Cardinal Cushing Center for the
Spanish Speaking, I received a summer scholarship to the
University of Puerto Rico’s “Social Welfare Workshop.” I spent
that summer living at the Normandy Hotel in Old San Juan, and
learning about the cultural and historical aspect of Puerto
Rican life. It was an adventure and I wrote a couple of
freelance pieces on Puerto Ricans in Boston, for the San Juan
Star. Years later I learned that Hunter S. Thompson also wrote
for the paper – long before I got there.
I left
Boston and moved to Los Angeles, where I worked in TV and
freelanced as a photojournalist for years. I served one year
on the board of directors of the Press Photographers
Association of Greater Los Angeles. I also married, fathered
twin daughters (Seanan and Chela), and divorced, while in LA.
When I got
fed up with Hollyweird, I moved to Key West, where I went to
work for Bernard Hunt at the daily Key West Citizen. Bernie
and copy editor Van Trotter forced me into the business
editor/writer position and I don’t think I ever had the
decency to thank them. The position gave me a unique
opportunity to witness the inner workings of business in Key
West. I spent more than five years at the Citizen.
I have
spent another five years as the public information officer for
the City of Key West. Add the inner workings of Key West
politics to my knowledge of local business, and you could say
I have an inimitable opinion and understanding of the workings
of my island home. Education, I discovered long ago, comes
with living life, not necessarily from the hallowed halls of
universities. My ten plus years in Key West has been
educational, in many ways. My mystery novel is fiction, but
the city that looms in the background, the bars and
restaurants and many of the characters that run through its
pages are taken from real life. If you have visited the
island, you will know this. If not, come on down and see for
yourself.
I moved to
Key West to sail and today I own a 1973, 36-foot Amel sloop.
With friends, I have sailed to Cuba four times and flown from
Miami once. Much of what I learned about Cuba is in my novel.
While I wait for a political change in both the US and Cuba, I
still sail the waters off Key West, expecting the day I can
sail that 90-miles south will arrive soon. I would love to set
a whole novel in and around Havana.
In my
writing, I have tried to be faithful to the island and its
businesses. I should remind you that my story is fiction,
because crime as I write it does not happen in Key West. We
are a long way from the mayhem and gangs of Miami, but with a
vivid imagination, I have been able to create the situations
needed for a political-murder mystery.
Hope to see
you at the Hog’s Breath or Schooner Wharf one of these days. |
