User:Aelwood

I  live in   Cardiff-by-the-Sea, California, with  six cats, a desert tortoise, seven box   turtles, and a German Shepherd, Louis, who looks something like Rin Tin Tin in his soulfulness. At night I can hear the ocean when the tides are high.

When I was nine, my family moved from Ridgewood to Saddle River, New Jersey, a paradise of a town with a woods, a skating  pond, a fishing pond, and 700 people who knew who we all were and where we were every minute. After college (two miserable years at Trenton State Teachers College and two happy ones at Fairleigh Dickinson College), I taught elementary school for a few miserable years, then moved to Camden, New Jersey and  landed a job as a typist-clerk at the Philadelpha Bulletin. When my boss discovered I had difficulty typing up circulation figures with twelve carbons, I was fired and found another job writing copy for a paternalistic insurance company that offered a low salary and delicious free lunch. One of the typographers had the magical ability to square up a stack of paper into a perfect rectangular solid.

Eventually I moved to a studio apartment on Irving Place in New York City, and, after a few months of writing copy for a textbook company, went on to free-lance as a writer of anything anyone  would pay me for. In 1967, I moved to Los Angeles, where I was advertising manager for a publishing company. Then the west coast was a mecca  for writers and adventurers. Within a couple of years, I visited a Malibu  beach house, fell in love (long-distance) with Bob Dylan,  met Thomas Pynchon (he wouldn’t remember it), and saw Hair.

In 1972, I returned to free-lancing, moved south, and found my first dog, Puppy, a mixed breed who looked something like a fox. (To show you how inappropriate Puppy’s name became, I’ll tell you this: Puppy died  at age 17.) I wrote articles for Irving Wallace and his son, David  Wallichinsky (People’s Almanac and Book of Lists), and did other wonderful things I won’t mention   here. With Carol Orsag Madigan, I wrote several books.

A desire to delve more deeply into ideas finally drove me to graduate school  in 1981. My dissertation focused on an order of 17th and 18th century French   nuns so I  had to spend a happy  year in France doing research. During that  year, while not in the  archives, I drank local wine with fellow historians and   traveled the  country with Puppy, who had far less trouble than I did communicating with the French.

Now, I teach history part-time at California State University, San Marcos, spend time with Louis and the other animals, and write the books I have always wanted to write but never had the time for.