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BACKGROUND

Writing articles and books about historical topics has been one of my passions for years. I completed the MA and PhD in US History at Michigan State in 1970. First, I graduated from Eastern Michigan in 1964 and taught and coached in high school for three years. Until retiring in 2010, I taught on the college level, starting in 1970 at Clemson, then Ball State in 1975, and, in 1977, at Virginia Western Community College, in Roanoke. Before 1992, I concentrated on publishing articles in historical journals and magazines. Coaching youth baseball in the 1990s caused me to focus on sports history, and I began interviewing former pro athletes and writing profile stories about their careers. In 2012 I published my AAGPBL team history with Robert M. Gorman, The South Bend Blue Sox (McFarland, Inc.). Next I wrote We Were the All-American Girls (McFarland, 2013), featuring 42 interviews with former players.

 

Returning to my favorite team, the Detroit Tigers, I wrote Yesterday's Tiger Heroes (Wynwidyn Press, 2014), about Detroit's 1956 season and its players. Then I penned The Tigers and Yankees in '61 (McFarland, 2016), highlighting the two-team pennant race and the Mantle-Maris home run duel. While waiting to see it published, I wrote my first novel: Curve Ball (published by Wynwidyn Press, 2016). In late 2017 I published The Final Secret, a Mickey Mathews mystery which covers events leading to the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941 (Wynwidyn, 2017). In 2019 I followed up with The Long Pursuit, my second Mickey Mathews mystery, also by Wynwidyn. My next Mickey Mathews adventure was Shadow of the Hawk (Wynwidyn, 2020). Even more recently, I wrote Warm Springs Mystery (Doce Blant Publishing, 2020).
 

Most of my historical writing, starting with my book, Roosevelt and the Hundred Days of 1933 (Garland, 1981), covers topics in American History from the 1930s to the 1970s.  I came of age in Flint, Michigan, in the 1950s, graduating from Kearsley High in 1958. I love using my historical knowledge of the twentieth century to make the characters and scenarios in books come alive. I'm retired as a history professor. Now I'm combining my enthusiasms for mystery and history into an enjoyable writing career.

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