WAYNE E. JOHNSON
Wayne E. Johnson is a Vietnam era vet. He was drafted in 1969 and spent two years in the Army. He’s been a musician and actor, engineer and forklift driver, advertising manager and creative director, hand model and land planning technician among other occupations. He’s ghost-written two books and is working on a third with Dick Tracy creator and Pulitzer Prize winner Dick Locher. His fiction and non-fiction work has appeared in Tooling & Production, The Herald, The Chicago Tribune, Rivulets and online in Combat and The Journals of Father Nick Thomas. He currently is a self-employed book designer and writes a humor column for The Voice, a northeastern Illinois newspaper.
He lives with his wife, Pat, two cats and a yard full of chipmunks in Aurora, Illinois, where he’s working on Music Man: What Did You Do in the Band, Grandpa?, the prequel to this novel.
RICHARD WILLIAMS
Richard Williams is a WWII vet. At age seventeen he enlisted in the Navy, where he served throughout the Pacific Theater, including Iwo Jima and Okinawa, with a stint in the Philippines. He attended college on the G.I. Bill in Long Beach, CA. The nerve deafness he suffered in WWII has now been complicated by legal blindness.
Since 2008, Richard has been the unofficial poet laurate of Honor Flight Chicago, building a wide variety of rhymed verses. Richard is happily married, pro-life, pro-God, pro-family, pro nature, pro-education, and pro-American.
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JOE LARKIN
Joe Larkin has been writing poetry since he was a teenager, more years ago than he cares to think about, and publishing poetry in literary journals for many years. He grew up in the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts and after a stint in the U.S. Navy moved to Illinois to attend the University of Illinois where he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English and Education. After a long career in public relations, he now devotes himself to raising his grandchildren and writing poetry and fiction.
ESTHER REDELSHEIMER
Esther Redelsheimer has been published in The Chicago Tribune, The Lutheran, Lutheran Woman Today, and many editions of Rivulets, the annual publication of the Naperville Writers Group. She and her husband of fifty-five years enjoy their three married children and ten grandchildren. Esther is active in community and church programs and loves to read, write, travel, walk, and bike. This is her second book.