A Saturdays child, the author has had many jobs since beginning to support himself at age 16. Grocery and bank clerk before the Second World War, Coast Guard seaman, merchant marine A., and army landing craft coxswain during it, and teacher-counselor for thirty years after the war. While teaching, he moonlighted in an amusement part and as an adult school teacher and librarian. After retirement he served on the 80 Olympic Games staff, put in fourteen years as an L.A.P.D. volunteer in a detective squad room, and is presently serving his Congregational church as a deacon. He has one wife, three children, nine grandchildren, and three great grandchildren, with more on the way.
The first novella, Uncle Willy and the Golden Bird, tells the story of a boy trying to survive in the l930s during the Great Depression. When his prosperous family is destroyed by catastrophic illness, alcoholism, and the depression, he is sent to live with an older brother with whom he has nothing in common. This man becomes his legal guardian and employer and plans a life for him as a grocery store clerk. The boy dreams of going to college and becoming a journalist but his dreams are dashed when he wins a scholarship to a school of journalism but has to refuse it because of lack of family support. Then a fabulous character enters his life, the boy's Uncle Willy, a charming man, part con man, part saint, who is sent to live with the boy and his brother from a Mexican jail where he has been sent for a fantastic attempt at embezzlement that gained national coverage for the effrontery of the crime. With him comes his golden bird, a souvenir of his attempted crime, a beautiful work of art, made of lead and encrusted with a thin layer of gold. And with that bird comes the malignant presence of a Mexican crime boss named El Pelon who believes Uncle Willy is hiding gold from him. The boy becomes a central figure in the conflict between Uncle Willy on one hand and his brother, the grocery store manager, and El Pelon, a Mexican crime lord. The second novella, The Search for Paul, tells the story of a middle school teacher in Los Angeles who becomes involved in a government search for a sleeper espionage cell imbedded somewhere in Southern California by the former Soviet Union. Established by the Russian during the first Gulf War, it apparently has been transferred to Arab Terrorists, probably for a profit , now that the Cold War has ended. The Department of Homeland Security has become convinced that the Resident Director of this sleeper cell, whom they have named Paul, is somehow connected to a middle school in Los Angeles, a school at which Mike Carlins works. They have lost one agent in the school and they want to draft Carlins to replace him as an inside observer in their search for Paul Carlins after some persuasion and with much reluctance agrees to help the department in its search for a traitor and a spy, living in our midst and planning for our destruction.
The memoirs of RADM Peter Wake, USN, steam into the twentieth century in Full Naval Honors. This final volume finds the admiral dealing with European and Japanese spies and assassins in the Pacific while on a “diplomatic” recon mission ahead of the Great White Fleet‘s epic 1907-09 voyage around the world. The action continues at the beginning of World War I, as Wake clashes with a German espionage network in the Central American jungle. The reader will be at Wake‘s side when he visits his friend Theodore Roosevelt‘s New York home in 1918, as that family learns of their tragic war loss. Following that war, readers will learn the poignant story of Peter Wake‘s final years in Key West with his beloved Maria. But Peter Wake‘s story doesn‘t end there, for the call of duty lives on in his descendants as they are plunged into the midst of World War I, World War II, Vietnam, and the First Gulf War. From a clandestine mission by Wake‘s son inside the Crimea at the chaotic end of World War I and the start of the Russian Civil War, to a World War II minesweeper commanded by Wake‘s grandson in 1941 at the doomed Philippines, the reader is enveloped in a new era of adventure with the Wake family. On the other side of World War II, we find another Wake grandson training Cuban sailors in anti-submarine warfare, giving them critical skills for their famous 1943 victory against a Nazi U-boat on the Cuban coast. The Wake legacy continues as Wake‘s great-grandson skippers a Swift boat in 1968 Vietnam, later becoming a CIA operative with a crucial role in the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. With the 2023 commissioning of Peter Wake‘s great-great-great grandchild as a U.S. naval officer, his descendants continue their service to Navy and Nation into the uncertain twenty-first century. Some things never change, however. Shadowy espionage, world-changing events, crucial split-second decision-making, gut-wrenching combat, tragic losses and great loves—and above all, a never-ending sense of honor and duty—they all form part of the Wake family‘s character as America depends on each generation of them. Full naval honors, indeed.
