About

That’s me in the photo above. The satisfied look on my face came from installing my very first photo exhibit outside the Dean’s office on the fifth floor of the Zachary Engineering Education Complex on the campus of Texas A&M University. Note how evenly the framed prints are hung on the wall behind me. I did that on my own and may have been as proud of that as I was in assembling the pieces included in the exhibit.

Also note the mask around my neck. My exhibit spanned the 2020-21 academic year, And while Gabriel García Márquez may have written about Love in the Time of Cholera, I can speak to the matter of holding a photography exhibit during the COVID-19 pandemic. Let’s just say not a lot of people saw my work.

A number of stories on this site reference various aspects of Texas A&M and its local environs. My wife, Nancy, and I moved to College Station in 2017 after she accepted a teaching position within the College of Engineering. Before the end of the year, I, too, was working for Texas A&M, specifically, the Texas A&M University System Chancellor’s Office. My assignment was to put together a history of the old Bryan Army Air Field, which had been converted into what came to be known as The RELLIS Campus. My efforts led to the creation of the RELLIS Recollections website.

“RELLIS” is an acronym representing the core values of Texas A&M: Respect, Excellence, Leadership, Loyalty, Integrity, and Service. Coincidentally, I had written about the Bryan Army Air Field in my first book, Moon Shots, about the life of former Major League Baseball standout Wally Moon, who had played both baseball and basketball at what was then called the “A&M College of Texas.” Wally was not only the embodiment of those “RELLIS” values, but also was best man at Nancy’s and my wedding.

The RELLIS website, which featured oral-history interviews I had conducted and stories I had written for a series that appeared in the local newspaper, eventually became a book in its own right, entitled, not surprisingly, RELLIS Recollections.

I grew up in Oklahoma and in my youth, my three greatest passions were St. Louis Cardinals baseball, Oklahoma Sooners football, and listening to the broadcasts of those two teams’ games on the radio. Isn’t it ironic that my first three books were about a Cardinal player, the legendary University of Oklahoma football coach Bud Wilkinson, and the long-time broadcast voice of the Houston Astros baseball club, Bill Brown.

God, I know, had something to do with all that.

I wound up attending the University of Oklahoma, where I majored in Radio & TV Journalism and for two years did play-by-play of OU football games on the campus radio station, KGOU. After graduation, I spent the next ten years as a radio sportscaster before miraculously landing a job as a public relations director on the women’s professional tennis tour. I wrote about that in a story I call “Turning Pro.”

Eventually, I left the sports business and joined the corporate world, working in the telecommunications sector for ten years as a marketing and public relations manager. Then, in 1998, I ventured into a new realm of communications, launching a company I called Turn-Key VideoWorks. Eventually, I shortened that to “TKVW,” as I offered both Video and Web-design services. But, as always, at the root my trade was telling stories I tried to make stimulating and transformative.

Which is why not all of the “30 STories” you’ll find on this website involve merely the written word.