J. E. Richman's
Montana Adventure Series
J. E. Richman
| I was a post-WWII child of the 50's, born in Upstate New York in 1947 to 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 Vietnam war, I followed in my older brother's footsteps and enlisted in the United States Marine Corps. 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 contracts 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-three years and we share two wonderful sons, Kevin and Jeff. Kevin and Heather blessed us with Abby and Nate. Jeff is a highly respected software engineer and they both live close enough to "borrow" my tools. The Montana character was 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. My younger brother Steve and I teased him relentlessly about it. Following four years at USNA Annapolis, six more in USMC and several tours of Vietnam, Dean lived most of his adult life in Texas personifying the spirit of "Montana." He passed away from service related Parkinson's in December, 2011. I miss him dearly. |
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