For three years, I lived in Decatur, Illinois – not far from Mary Priest’s home town. I met many nice, friendly people, but no writers. Then my husband transferred to San Francisco and we bought a house in Novato. I was thrilled to be invited to visit Redwood Writers Club and didn’t have to be asked twice to join.

I loved the mix of writers – poets, nonfiction, fiction – in the club. I loved the mix of members – young and not so young, men and women. And I loved the format of the meetings – cocktails, dinner, a poem, sales, and the program. For twenty years, Redwood Writers inspired, challenged, comforted, and encouraged me and others. I served as president of the Redwood branch and also the California Writers Club.

When Frank and I moved to the Northwest to be closer to our children, I missed my writing friends the most – and still do.

Congratulations on your many successful years of service.

I was a member of the Berkeley branch of CWC (the "mother branch") for many years before moving to Santa Rosa. I served on the CWC board of directors in the 1960s. We always celebrated when a new CWC branch was organized.

Your request to write a few words for Redwood Writers’ 30th anniversary brought on a wave of nostalgia. I am grateful to the Berkeley members who encouraged my early writing efforts. Lloyd Eric Reeve conducted writing seminars in San Francisco. His written critiques of my submitted work kept me going as I began to make sporadic sales. I remember him and other CWC pioneers with fondness.

About nine years ago, while I was doing research for my book, Realms of Gold: the Colorful Writers of San Francisco, I was reading a book about the 1939 World's Fair on Treasure Island, which contained stories of people who worked there. One of these was by a woman who worked at Sally Rand's Nude Ranch at the fair. At the same time, a CWC bulletin arrived announcing a short, short story contest sponsored by the Sacramento branch. The Nude Ranch article gave me an idea for a short, short story which I submitted. The story took a first prize, and that should have been the end of the affair. But the main character from the story kept pestering me, saying she deserved more than a short, short story, even if it did get a prize. So I expanded the situation into a novel which I hope to see in print in time for the holidays. The title is The Pickle Girl. Look for it.

Thanks so very much for the invitation to the Redwood Writers’ dinner. It would certainly be great fun to be there and join in sharing memories of the good old days. As it happens, however, the dinner is falling on the very day that we’re leaving on our next motor home trip. For that reason, I’ll have to miss the beautiful evening that you have planned.

Thanks again,

I still keep in touch with Mary Priest, Lolo Westrich and Erma Walker. I was president in 1977. I have ten published books, one a Literary Guild selection and the other a Spur winner with Western Writers of America. I have over one hundred magazine articles. I don’t write anymore as my memory refuses to give me words I need. It was an interesting life and I have met some wonderful people. I finished four other books, and never submitted them, why, I don’t know, but, I enjoyed the experience of those I did. Much good luck with the future of California Writers and the Redwood branch.

Sincerely,

I would like to express my unending gratitude to the late Mildred Fish. She set me on the path to publication and took me to my first meeting of the Redwood Writers. I miss her wise counsel.

Redwood Branch of California Writers Club accepted me into membership in 1978, when I was doing travel articles and photos plus some historical features. My fondest memories relate to the wonderful and colorful people I have met.

My excellent teachers, Helene Barnhart, Lolo Westrich and Alma Upson. Their classes kept me informed and on track. Our local members. Ed Dolan, Mr. Professional. Our brainy duo, Waldo Boyd and Earl Syverson, whose subject matter – cryptography and runic inscriptions, left the rest of us scrambling for our dictionaries. Quiet Ruth Walker and Alla Crone who could surprise us with their steamy love scenes. Inman Whipple who could talk you into doing any job that needed doing at the moment. Tiny Peggy Ray who wrote for the Press Democrat while working on her biography of Mark West. And others. We all worked together on the workshops we presented at Luther Burbank Center in between state conferences and after each we adjourned to my place for postmortems and refreshments as I lived nearby.

Until about 1988, CWC had only four branches and all members got to know each other intimately. Bernice Curler – Sacramento, Bev Lauderdale – Berkeley, and Marie Nunn – South Bay, and I spent one very long Saturday rewriting the CWC Constitution and Bylaws. Prolific Lucile Bogue hosted CWC board meetings in her charming home in the El Cerrito hills. Lucy wrote plays, poetry, novels, and memoirs of her long and interesting life. Bud Gardner – Sacramento, held a workshop each year which never failed to inspire us to bigger and better things. Ray Nelson’s demeanor was as colorful as his stories.

I also attended each conference, 1979 through 2000, where I met agents, (Michael Larsen whose book taught me how to write a proposal), publishers, (Jean Louis Brindamour of Strawberry Hill Press, who published my book), and other writers of every genre, even lawyers and accountants who specialize in the business end of our profession, and so on.

We always had interesting keynote speakers. At Stanford, glamorous Danielle Steele impressed us with her beauty if not her early novels. Genial Alex Haley delivered an hour lecture and then sat on the edge of the stage at Mills College and answered questions for another hour. Charming Mary Higgins Clark. Macho Robert Parker who required a certain type of brew and as I recall, we had to send someone from Asilomar to San Francisco to get it. He also checked out shortly after his speech. Entertaining Paul Erdman, suave A. Scott Berg, humorous Gene Perret, Barnaby Conrad and so many more. The Central Board was delighted with quite Steve and Meera Lester who ran two conferences for us and replenished the club’s finances.

So many memories. Too many to record. I’m grateful that I had the opportunity to be a part of this organization.

Having been named by my mother after one of her favorite authors, I can only surmise that I was destined to follow his bent for writing. I became, to my father's dismay, a bookworm -- which in his day and labors was about as nobody as a man could be. My earliest memories include his oft repeated "Waldo, get your head out of that book and do something useful!" Useful in Dad's world meant chopping wood, weeding garden, or helping him build an extension on the house for a kitchen.

Then at 18 came the Navy, an option due to the dull force of what is known as "The Great Depression." Therein I discovered a magazine entitled "Our Navy," and its invitation to contribute to its pages. I did, and was hooked for life when the editor sent me a check for five dollars and a glowing acceptance of my first offering. That was in 1937.

Fast forward to 1957 with a paltry few pieces of published pulp in Western Story Magazine and such trailing behind me. Scarcity of technical talent of the day contributed to my appointment to create a department of technical manuals at the Aerojet-General rocket engine plants in Sacramento - a far cry from my youthful dream of free-lance writing as a profession. There's a wife and two daughters to feed, clothe and house, so what's a dream compared to that?

Almost overnight, I hired 20 technical writers and as many each technical illustrators and typist/clerks, and began preparing for the armed services the liquid and solid rocket engine technical documentation that would send missiles into space. Can you picture publishing a hundred such publications each year for nine years? As head of department I was likewise chief editor and stand-in when my cadre of writers became ill or indisposed. Even yet today as I write this memoir, I reel in disbelief at how many of those publications I wrote myself while recruiting replacement writers for those who saw greener pastures elsewhere.

Somehow, a member of a local writer's group happened to apply for a job in my department. The group turned out to be, not a technical writer's association, but the California Writer's Club, Sacramento Branch. He didn't get the job --in fact he cancelled himself out when he saw what we were preparing. But he had left me with an unanswered yearning --was this perhaps a group that I might join? After a brief bit of research, I did just that, as a wannabe. Here was a group I could relate to! My dream took wing again.

I started out quietly as a fledgling member, testing the waters, saying little or nothing about the kind of work I was doing at the company. Then a pro member, Dorothy Dowdell, a teacher in the local school system, almost literally took me by the scruff of the neck and plunged me into doing a "real book." What was the magic that this small California Writers Club performed on me? There were mostly beginning writers in the mix of about 40 local, Sacramento members, but then there were also a few who were selling work on a fairly regular basis. Why did she single me out as "student material?" I was on the "fast track" for promotion to division manager, and only a fool would turn his back on that kind of bread.

The club held regular monthly meetings with speakers invited from "outside" sources who talked about their current jobs or on occasion, their free lance success with a "blockbuster" novel. Among these was the author of "Roots," whose novel became a movie. The romance magazines were insatiable at the time, and at least three of our members were selling therein on a regular basis. Far from standing aloof, these writers offered themselves as study and critique group leaders. We were a social club, equally devoted to "The Muse" with poetry, short and regular fiction magazine stories, and novels. There was enthusiasm and willingness of some to accept election as club officers. The Sacramento Branch, CWC, was a vibrant and growing club success.

Members hailed from many areas of work and profession: I remember fondly two attorneys, a psychiatrist, a medical doctor, many housewives, an aspiring playwright or two, and a reporter for the Sacramento Bee. In club meetings we were equal in the eyes of each other -- what matter if a genius mathematician and a successful cartoonist sat side by side as long as each aspired to publication of his writings? "Success" was measured by a sale to an existing publication.

For me, the "big day" was when I brought acceptance of my book proposal and the advance check for $500.00 to display at the monthly meeting. With Dorothy Dowdell's help and encouragement I had persevered through the discouragement to the "proof of the pudding." Now would come a few months' hard work on this book and at the same time continue my daily job at Aerojet. Six months later, Your Career in the Aerospace Industry appeared in print. Congratulations at the monthly meeting were barely over when Ms. Dowdell took me to one side and said, "I trust you have your query letter for your next book ready to mail?" I was shocked! Another book? So soon? But she was right. The excitement of first book must give way to the reality of free lance writing -- each success can make the next one bigger and better. I wrote six in all, including one or two of them while a member of the Redwood Writer's Branch of CWC.

But I've left out the part about becoming "a fool." That was what many friends thought of my decision to resign my management tenure at Aerojet and float my own canoe. An opportunity arose shortly after my second "real" book was published to become manager of the Geyserville Baha'i School. There was no salary involved, but a house was provided for self and family, in exchange for my duties and my wife's duties as school receptionist. Could I possibly step out on my own and earn enough to support a family in this way?

So I did the incredible (in the eyes of those at Aerojet). I resigned, and a new department head took my place. Two years later Aerojet laid off upwards of 20,000 of its employees when a huge contract bid was lost to Rocketdyne, in Los Angeles. The publications department virtually disappeared overnight. I wondered: Fate?

My duties at the school were intermittent, in that school was held only two to three weeks in summer, and two weeks in winter, with occasional single days or weekends throughout the year. This permitted me to establish a working routine as a writer -- in my mind a "perfect" solution to becoming a full-time free-lance writer. Further building on this, I had been active in supplying business magazines with articles in my "spare time" as an Aerojet employee, derived from interviews with working personnel and supervisors in near-by companies. The Prentice-Hall business "papers" were an insatiable market for me. I was paid 10 cents a word for my work, and the editor ran two to five separate pieces of mine in each bi-weekly publication, of which there were about six. This required the use of pseudonyms, of course, at the editor's insistence. Who was I to object? Many technical magazines accepted my articles in various kinds and quantities, so the work continued.

I missed the announcement of the founding meeting of the Redwood Branch for some reason unknown, and it was two or three years following its beginning as a member of the CWC Family that I was accepted as a local member. Many meetings over the years since have helped keep my spirits upbeat as the routine of free-lancing wears upon anyone in a self-employed occupation can attest. The then new Freeway 101 cut right through the school property in 1971, the school was moved to the Bay Area and a full-time manager installed, and by then I had saved enough from my writings to purchase a house on an acre North of Geyserville, where we lived until just recently.

I became active in the Redwood Branch just as in Sacramento, served as president a couple of times, and I freely acknowledge the help its members have afforded me to continue my "foolish" love of writing. True, my kind of writing is "off the beaten track," but with Redwood Member Ed Dolan's encouragement I stuck with it.

Besides being highly technical, my bent is perhaps even mysterious to some as one of my books carries the title Computer Cryptology, Beyond Decoder Rings. But it is a market that pays well for effort and craft. With the advent of computers the technical magazine and book markets broadened even further, so I learned what was needed and supplied it. "Luck, be a lady tonight!" The Crypto book's success brought me two recent editing stints for McGraw-Hill books.

The craft of technical editing is kith and kin to that of writing. This, too, is a ready market, which I commend to fellow Redwood Writers of a technical bent.

And here I am, at the far end of my 80th year, still as enthusiastic as ever about writing and having written. My love of good literature has increased over the years, and I dearly love to see what my fellow CWC authors and poets have produced. There may have been a pot of gold and even prestige awaiting me at the end of the rainbow of industrial management, but I am happy at heart being a self-employed writer, with no regrets.

The California Writer's Club has been my mainstay for nearly fifty years. I remain deeply gratified that I was accepted to membership those many years ago and encouraged by its members along the way. I hope that my experience will encourage others to be faithful to their dreams. Without that encouragement I doubt that I would have persevered. Sail on!