I'm a California kid, great-grandson (on one side) of pioneers, forty-niners, homesteaders, farmers, and fortune seekers, and (on the other) devout New Englanders who left their mark on Pacific Grove. I was born in Bakersfield just as the Great Depression got started, but I never felt depressed. My dad was a forest ranger, and I grew up between San Luis Obispo and Kernville in the tail end of the Sierra, and up the Valley from Bakersfield to Delano. From the time I was three months old, we spent a lot of time on the Monterey Peninsula, and in 1940, when I was ten years old, we moved to Pacific Grove permanently. Graduating from Pacific Grove High School in 1947, I was off to the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque as an NROTC student, flunked out, went back, got married, graduated in 1953, spent three years on active duty with the Navy, went to work with Dean Witter as a stockbroker and branch manager in Oakland and San Francisco, retired thirty-eight years later. We moved to Carmel permanently, I hope, in 1991 and I started writing seriously in 2005, about a year after my wife Susie's death. I have three great kids-Scott, Laura, and Carrie-and six above average grandkids, and a sweetheart also named Susie. More about all of this some other time. Enjoy this accounting of life in Pacific Grove, one of John Steinbeck's homes as well during this time of life.