November 7, 2007

Often I am asked why I decided to write children’s books. These questions usually come from someone who has known me for a long time and thinks I may have lost my mind! Sometimes I think they’re right. With a background of nearly 40 years in the real estate business, I must admit it is a bit of a stretch. Here is the story.

When I was a child, we didn’t have home entertainment like we do today. In the evenings it was not uncommon for families to play games or tell stories after dinner for entertainment. My father took great pleasure in these times and loved to tell stories to the younger children. He came up with a character named Blue Eagle, who lived in Peaceful Valley and took care of all the animals living there. He had such a fertile mind that he could make up these stories as he was telling them. In later years, when grandchildren came, he developed the ability to use these stories to teach and provide behavior lessons. I can still see him sitting up in bed with several small children all around hanging on his every word. The children’s parents would be lined up in the hall outside the bedroom straining to hear and trying not to laugh out loud and be discovered. You see, the adults enjoyed the stories as much as the children, but Dad wouldn’t tell them to adults. That was his special time with the kids, a bonding time, and every child who heard him was a little better because of it.

When my father died in 1980, the family felt a great loss. Many times I had asked him to write some of his stories down so we would have them for future generations. He wasn’t interested in doing that and after one of my pleadings for this he responded with “Why don’t you do it?” Well, I never asked again, and I don’t know if it was a sense of guilt or part of the mourning I was going through, but I started having a strong urge to write about Blue Eagle and Peaceful Valley. That summer and early fall I wrote The Ballad of Blue Eagle; trying to give it as much appeal and flavor of Dad and his style as I could. I guess you could say this was the beginning of my writing for children.

So what happened between 1980 and 2004? There was a lot of talk in my family about having the story published, but everyone agreed it needed to be illustrated. We knew no one capable of that kind of work and I couldn’t afford to pay them anyway. One day my son took the story to school, he was in the third grade, and they let him read it to the kindergarten class. That is about as far as it went. Shortly thereafter, I put it in a desk drawer and it stayed there for 21 years. Finally, Thanksgiving of 2002, my daughter said to my son, “You need to illustrate the Blue Eagle story and see if you can get it published.” He replied that he had been thinking about that a lot recently! I might add that Steven, Jr. has been able to draw from the time he first picked up a crayon. He was now a professional graphic designer and artist. So this was a second beginning for The Ballad of Blue Eagle. The book was published in 2004 and has won the “Mom’s Choice Award” for excellence in children’s literature. That prompted us to do it again and this coming spring (2008) Blue Eagle Meets Double Trouble will be released.

If you would like more information on these books go to www.blueeaglebooks.com.