Look and Listen

Biography

I am a graduate of Thiel College and also the Medical Technology Program at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation where I worked for several years in medical chemical research. True to my love of investigation and learning, I have completed an eclectic number of courses at various schools. I have also worked as a real estate agent,gymnastics center director, computer consultant, artist, and web designer. My writing experience includes feature news articles, op-ed page essays, a children’s book about the immune system, web page copy, press releases, and 25 years of publicity for the Hungry Mother Arts and Crafts Festival. In recent years I have taken numerous classes in memoir, fiction, screenplay, and novel.

Inspiration

My father was a vital but obscure component of the early 20th Century labor movement where he served as a union organizer for UMWA and the CIO, political activist, Progressive Party campaign manager, Civil Rights Congress debater, and Secretary of the International Workers Order where he worked with luminaries that included: Woody Guthrie, Langston Hughes, Marion Anderson, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and Paul Robeson. In December of 1951 he suddenly left our New Jersey home for the wilds of western Pennsylvania where neither the FBI nor Communist Party could find him. Our family joined him over a year later. Inspired by my father, I have spent a lifetime in the study of labor history. While researching his life, I discovered many dark secrets hidden in forgotten union archives, news articles, and the memories of old men.