The conquest of cancer
I was born at a very young age in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, N.Y., the son of an Italian fireman and an Irish colleen from Lowell, Mass. I spent summers playing stickball and going to Ebbets Field and the rest of the year in Good Shepherd grammar school and with the saintly Christian Brothers at St. Augustine Diocesan High School. In those days one could graduate from high school on Feb. 1, which I did, and when my father announced he was retiring and moving us to Los Angeles, I worked on Wall Street until June, when my sister finished her semester at St. Brendan's High School. Although I had been accepted to Manhattan College and Notre Dame University, I decided I would go to Loyola University in L.A. However, when I took the exam for Loyola in August, I had forgotten one point's worth of high school information and flunked it. The rest of my education was spent in various local colleges studying pre-med and engineering. (If I'd managed to get anything higher than a "C" in chemistry, I'd be a doctor now.) I worked for a while for North American Aviation as a designer on the Atlas missile booster and sustainer engines, but knew deep down I was really F. Scott Fitzgerald, so I got a job at a local newspaper. I've been a newspaperman and movie columnist in Los Angeles; a science correspondent for McGraw-Hill World news; an editor of a trade journal; an acquisitions editor for Chilton Publishing; an advertising/public relations writer and executive for various agencies in San Francisco; and ran my own marketing communications agency for 10 years. Most recently I was the Executive Editor of five Marin County weekly newspapers. I live in Mill Valley, Calif. with my wife, Jovita, in the same house for 35 years, in which we raised two wonderful girls who turned into fabulous women and mothers.