Writing and editing have paid the freight for much of my working life, starting with a summer job at a newspaper in Neosho, Mo., but with lots of detours and odd wrinkles. In the Navy, I was trained as a radioman and served on a minesweeper off Vietnam and later changed rate to a journalist and did a community newspaper on Midway Island, for which I received a Navy Achievement Medal, and later was a communications guy at a recruiting station. That kind of a job rating reassignment is rare. I did a grad program in writing where I studied with a future state poet laureate and another person who won the Nobel Prize in Literature. I worked as a veterans benefits counselor on several N.C. campuses, before taking a job with one of the National Institutes of Health, eventually as the news director and later as a policy analyst. My work involved some photography, live presentations, video scripts, media liaison, tour guide, authoring a children's book, and many other assorted tasks. I rounded out that career writing reports to Congress on our research and grants. I'm still at it with the writing. And posting here.
