About the Author

I was born in Waterloo, Iowa - Ioway as my maternal grandfather pronounced it. My family moved to Tucson, Arizona, when I was two. I don't remember Iowa or the trip to Arizona, but I do remember the Mayflower moving van backing into our driveway on Eli Drive and crushing one of the concrete curbs - an early lesson in the transience of this world.I also remember playing with the sand between the stones in the driveway, looking up, and seeing a monster headed straight at me. I ran to my father, imploring him to get his shotgun. "Well, let's take a look at this monster," he said. When he saw it, he said, "I don't think I need my shotgun. I think I can use the rake." He lifted the thick, brown worm - at least a foot long - off the driveway and tossed it over the back wall into the alley. I was amazed at his courage and ingenuity.My father was a machinist, a turret lathe operator. When he was laid off from Hughes Aircraft, he traveled to Los Angeles and got a job making parts for the Apollo space program. We sold the house in Tucson and joined him in Canoga Park. I was ten.I attended Sunnybrae Elementary School. One of the teachers there, Betsy Crawford, encouraged my writing. I had a rubber-stamp printing set and my father had taught me to touch type on an old Royal manual typewriter. I used to make sports broadsides for his amusement. He told Betsy Crawford about my hobby, and she suggested that I try writing newspaper accounts of historical events. I did, and Betsy reproduced my work on a mimeograph machine and gave copies to the class - my first publication but also a source of keen embarrassment as the other students called me "teacher's pet."I attended Sutter Junior High and was awestruck by the massive, delicately colored mural in the library. It was painted by the Danish artist Kay Nielsen, who had traveled to Southern California to work at Disney Studios. Nielsen worked on a version of "The Little Mermaid" that was never released, but he did receive a posthumous credit for the 1992 version.I served as student body president at Sutter, representing the school when it received an award from the Freedom Foundation in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. That was my first trip to the East Coast, and I was awed, perhaps most of all by the trees. Growing up in Arizona and California, I finally understood why the European settlers had to clear the trees.During the L.A. teacher's strike of 1970, I collected some interviews with striking teachers that the principal had ordered removed from the school newspaper and published them in an underground newspaper. I also wrote a critique of the administration, which did not seem to be living up to the ideals of the award the school had received. I was suspended for the duration of the strike - an experience that helped inform the five or six books I have written about free speech and censorship. As a former student body president and holder of many offices,

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