About Red Rider (aka The Rogue)

I didn’t pick-up the quill until I turned 72.  By that point, I’d become so ill-tempered and arthritic my son actually said to me, “Dad, if you were a horse, we’d take you out back and shoot you.”

The combination of an insistent family, a scholarly high school friend and former class president, and the faculty of the Southampton Writers Conference prompted me to pick up the pen and get a life.  Since then, I’ve become an evangelical scribbler. I’ve seen the light!

The road to getting my duff off the couch was a Lewis and Clark expedition. After I retired, I dallied with real estate sales but was outnumbered and outsold by a pack of voraciously determined young mothers and divorcees.  And I thought Wall Street was ruthless!  Then I tried acting, studying the Meisner technique in the West Village with teenagers with safety pins lanced through their belly buttons and noses.  Doesn’t that hurt, young lady?  My brief brush with fame included several commercials, dancing the Polka in lederhosen for Pepsi, preening in a Sport’s Illustrated full-page ad as a football coach, acting the part of an obsessed fan in a promo for March Madness on ESPN and the grand finale — appearing with Joanie Osborne in an MTV video (even my kids were in awe of my new coolness). My odyssey was interrupted twice by surgery.  During my second recovery, I began to write for amusement.  It soon became my passion.

Me, I’m a red head: 5’ 7”, 228 lbs. Five varsity sports between Bay Shore High School, Andover and Yale.  (I was once poetry in motion — slight exaggeration! — on the playing surface, now the fluidity, like the cartilage, is long gone.)

Education was followed by two plus great years steaming around the Atlantic and the Mediterranean on the Destroyer U.S.S. Abbot (DD-629).  Then work.  Wall Street — retail sales and equity sales-trader at favored locations such as Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, and Dillon Read, not to mention three others I rode down with that sank.  Luckily, I swam away.

Life has not been all beer and skittles. After five happy years, my first wife Betsy died of cancer in 1963.  She was 29.  I was blessed to find Dorothy. We’ve been married 43 years and have two kids and four grand children to show for it.

Retirement was brutal in the beginning.  It felt like being forced off the field when you know you have a lot of good games left in you.  But through my many misadventures, and my newfound love of writing, I’ve found a new way to suit up and play.