Look and Listen

Biography

My arrival having surprised my parents (an afterthought) during the great depression, I was raised on a small farm near Logansport, Indiana. After high school, I served on a minesweeper during the Korean conflict before graduating from the Indiana University School of Business in 1955. It was also the year that saw the beginning of a long professional career—one that started at the company in Downey, California that built the Apollo spacecraft. In the late sixties, we moved to suburban Connecticut and I commuted into New York each day and worked for companies in the oil, basic metals, and executive search businesses. That helped form the backdrop for my trilogy. By the mid-seventies, we’d settled in central Massachusetts, I'd changed careers, and spent a dozen years in various management roles within the real estate industry. We then relocated to south Texas, and I served as an officer in the largest privately held bank in the state. My educator wife (Sandra) and then I emigrated to Europe in 1986 and have since lived in both Spain and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg.

Inspiration

During my freshman year at Indiana, Professor Zorn noted in the left column of a paper I'd written, "Awkward, Mr. Gibson." Since my parents, and grandparents, knew their way around the English language, and wrote well, I soon decided that I'd make the effort to join their league. With years of experience writing business documents and a recruiting brochure for one of my employers, it was my next older brother who kept telling me, "You can write!" After twenty years, he finally got me to consider that he might be right and it was just three years ago that I started a book based on people and events and places with which I'm familiar. After discovering that maybe I *did* have at least some of the skills required, the one book became three--the aforementioned trilogy. And now that my fingers are glued to the keyboard, the beat goes on and there are other books in the works. Having readers tell me (via Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and e-mail) that they like my yarns is the kind of fuel that keeps my engine running.