The Flight Deck

Steve

Grew up in southern Ohio with much of my pre-school childhood spent in Europe courtesy of Proctor & Gamble. Uncle Proctor employed my father as a civil engineer and sent him all over the old continent to build things. Not a bad way to start out.

Ran away from home and attended college down south at the University of Alabama. Unfortunately I didn’t consider Naval Aviation until I was almost through. Fortunately I was accepted before “Top Gun” sent the standards through the roof – after Hollywood’s marketing campaign, a business major with marginal grades didn’t stand a chance. Graduated AOCS with Nose and entered the firehose educational path of a student Naval Flight Officer. Finally learned how to study! Selected for S-3 Vikings, I went through the west coast FRS, VS-41 in Lex’s Sandy Eggo. Then it was back east to Cecil Field outside Jacksonville, FL, home of the VS-28 Gamblers. Did the last fleet deployment on the first supercarrier, USS Forrestal. It was post Desert Storm and we were the first carrier the Med had seen in over a year so port calls were a blast.

The Cold War was still very warm and the Russians kept us busy with mutual harassment from beneath the sea. Heady stuff, tracking their nuke boats for days on end. When we got home the Gamblers got word that we had completed our last cruise. Closed the doors on that squadron and went next door to VS-27 as an FRS instructor. A year or two later we got word that VS-27 would be disestablished and NAS Cecil Field had fallen victim to BRAC. The Navy’s premier Master Jet Base surrounded by miles of pine trees would close in favor of other bases surrounded by crash zones full of schools, homes, and urban sprawl. Such is the logic of military politics.

Left the Navy in ’94 and went to work for the Caterpillar dealer in Birmingham, AL. After ten years of pushing iron I decided to take a break and try my hand at writing full time. I’d been hacking at a novel in my spare time for years and my wonderful wife convinced me it was time to finish it and attempt to find a publisher. What had been a relaxing distraction became a daily obsession and some of those days were downright painful. Almost two years later with the mortgage industry threatening to slow our only source of income and a still unfinished manuscript, my old territory with the Cat dealer opened up. It seemed like the responsible thing to do! I haven’t touched the book since going back to work over four months ago but things are starting to settle down such that I can devote time to it again. With luck I will still make the leap from writer to author!

I started blogging while working on the book as a means of curing writer’s block and stumbled onto Lex purely by chance. I still post over at The Wood Shed and hope that you’ll visit from time to time.

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