Sometime between claiming my first Social Security check at 62 and signing on with Medicare at 65, I heard an offhand comment by a fellow writer from the same age group. Rich Benyo, my editor at Marathon & Beyond magazine at the time, was into his own multi-volume memoirs, and he urged me to get going on mine. "Our age is the best time to write memoirs," Rich said. "We're old enough to have had the experiences, but still young enough to remember what they were." The processing and polishing of these memoirs took three years. But in a sense I've been writing this story almost as long as I've lived it. The rough draft runs to more than 50 volumes. Since 1959, I have been a journalist in the truest sense: one whose writing all starts on a daily journal page.

Initially I published three separate memoir books. Now they come together as a single big one, my longest because the span of years demands it.