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After writing and publishing myriad newspaper and magazine articles beginning in my junior year of high school, as a journalism major at Bowling Green State University, and during my four-year career as a military writer in the United States Air Force, I wanted to write and publish a book. Beyond the many plays I have written, two of which have been produced by community theater groups, writing a book is the only writer’s challenge I have yet to accomplish. Knowing that nonfiction is often the better choice for a first-time author regarding publication as opposed to fiction, I decided to write a memoir about my adventurous and mischievous childhood through my maturation as a fulfilled adult. The title Why I Never Had Kids struck me as being appropriate because it is the truth. Neither my wife, Fran, nor I ever wanted to deal with the childhood antics, some just downright dangerous, related in this book. I started making the notes two years ago and wrote the book in about two months after retiring from my corporate job in late 2018. Most of the incidents were fun and easy to write, but some were not. The pieces Losing Pepper and The Wreck in West Virginia resurrected painful memories but had to be included. This book is absolutely a work of nonfiction. The dialogue is as close to being exact as I can remember it. The incidents are correct. Everything you read here really happened. Reference is made to my mother’s sometimes stinging sense of discipline, but she was in no way a child beater. She was a lovely, loving woman who made sure that my brother, sister, and I were properly fed, clothed, and grew up in a well-maintained home. She reveled in our successes and softened our failures, but Mom had rules. You didn’t talk back, swear, sneak cigarettes, or drink Dad’s beer. We all came out the better for that. Mom and Dad did things that I do not think I could have done as a parent, particularly the family vacations that took us hundreds of miles from home by car, with Dad doing the driving. I had a wonderful childhood, and the intent of this work is to deliver testimony to that and to entertain you as well.
