For openers, I am a lucky guy. Who else do you know who got to sit in the dugout next to the consummate slugger Stan Musial, shake the hands of both Hopalong Cassidy and the Cisco Kid, peddle newspapers on a vintage stretch of the Mother Road, and listen to the yarns of a woman who remembered the day Jesse James was gunned down by the Ford brothers? And all of that before I even got out of grade school!

Thankfully, my luck has held to this very day. Must be that Irish blood mixed with the German.

I was born in 1945 just off Route 66 in St. Louis. After matriculating from a string of public and private schools, putting in a hitch with the U. S. Marines, and bouncing around a few colleges and universities, I went the Hemingway route as a writer. Included in my "day jobs" during my fledgling author period were stints as a ranch hand, bartender, hotel waiter, social worker, printer, and ski-lodge manager.

Thanks to such literary and artistic mentors as Thornton Wilder, Jack Potter, Dorothy Brett, and others, I managed to finally earn my wings as a writer. Still, I never forgot my roots or those formative years, and to this day I remain a staunch child of the sixties.

• founder of a literary magazine in Santa Fe, New Mexico
• newspaper reporter and magazine writer throughout the American West, Mexico, and the Caribbean
• newspaper bureau chief in Austin, Texas
• special correspondent for Time, Inc.
• writer of articles published in Time, Life, People, Smithsonian, Texas Monthly, New York Times, and many other magazines and newspapers