J. E. Richman's
Montana Adventure Series
J. E. Richman
| I've described myself as a child of the 50's and that says most of it. I was born in Upstate New York in 1947 into a middle class working family. With two brothers and an older sister, I spent lots of rainy Saturdays watching cowboy serials on a 12" black and white TV. Most of the early ones were what I call "shoot 'em ups," but with or without the gratuitous violence, and excepting only for the unjust representation of native Americans, there was always a moral core to the stories. I liked that. After moving around some we finally settled in a suburb of Rochester, N.Y., where I graduated from high school and college. In 1968, at the height of the Viet Nam war, I followed in my older brother's footsteps and enlisted in the United States Marine Corps, where, while assigned to stateside duty only, I attained the rank of Sergeant in less than two years and was licensed to fly (rear seat) in several of our A-4 and F-4 fighters. After the Marines, I returned to the New York State University College at Brockport and graduated in 1972 with a Bachelors Degree in English. I spent the next six years learning to be a labor negotiator for General Dynamics Corp and left them for thirty more at Xerox Corp, retiring in 2006. Upon retirement, I would soon discover that thirty-six years of writing labor contract language did not, in any way, qualify me to write fiction. But, since that was my calling, I re-learned how to write. I've been married to Jane for forty years and we share two wonderful sons, Kevin and Jeff. Kevin is married to a terrific girl from West Virginia and they've blessed us with two great grandchildren, Abby and Nate. Jeff is a software engineer and they both live close enough to borrow my tools. The Montana character was originally inspired by my brother Dean, who at the age of ten, attempted to write a screenplay about a young man growing up in the early West. Following four years at Annapolis and six more in USMC and several tours of Viet-Nam, Dean lived most of his adult life in Texas personifying the spirit of "Montana." He passed away from Parkinson's in December, 2011. I miss him. |
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