About Me

I was born in and attended high school and junior college in Ely, Minnesota, a city of 5000 on Minnesota's iron range. Its location near the Canadian border brought a degree of isolation to life in this city surrounded by lakes and forests. I attended the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, returning home during the summers to work 1800 feet below the surface in an underground iron mine.

I graduated with a bachelor's degree in Civil Engineering and began a career in Transportation in Minnesota. The next 43 years were spent in planning, designing, building, maintaining, and administering the road and bridge system in Southern Minnesota.

I was in grade school on December 7, 1941 and became intrigued by the war. I began reading everything I could find on the war. Now, decades later, I estimate that I have read over 3000 books and periodicals on World War II. My personal library contains approximately 3500 books and 2500 films on the war.

A lifelong goal of mine has been to someday visit the Pacific battlefields that I'd come to know so well through my reading. Cost and the everyday challenge of a full time job prevented me from doing this until 2001 when I visited Pearl Harbor and the six airfields attacked on December 7, 1941. This provided the impetus for the book, Pearl Harbor: Awakening a Sleeping Giant.

The stories of what individual soldiers and sailors did on that terrible day have been largely untold to date, and should not be forgotten. Each chapter presents information not commonly known, as well as lessons of the facts surrounding the battle at Pearl Harbor and surrounding airfields. It demonstrates how individual participants collectively awakened our nation as a "sleeping giant" and enabled it to achieve a greatness that endures today.

Research for chapter 3 of that book disclosed so many ironies and strange twists regarding the ship involved in that chapter that I resolved that the full story of that ship, U.S.S. Ward, must be told. Within months I had compiled interview notes from every surviving Ward crewman I could locate as well as thousands of archive reports and other records on the ship and crew. The results of my research are now available in my latest book, The USS Ward: An Operational History of the Ship That Fired the First American Shot of World War II.

When not busy with writing or book research, my time is occupied with other interesting hobbies including furniture making, singing with several choral groups, arranging music, collecting movies from the 1930's and 1940's, reading my way through my WWII library, and maintaining my book and film library records.