Introduction In 1976 my wild and crazy girlfriend and I (she has been my wife now for over 30 years) decided to go on a tour of the U.S.A. in our Chevrolet as Dina Shore once recommended in word and song many moons past. As a consequence I wrote my first book Hobo-ing America. We felt that we were vacationing even after we decided to supplement our vacation fund via manual labor. My older brother told all his friends and any of our relatives who may have asked about me, that me and my girlfriend were Hoboes. We bummed our way around the country in an old van and lived under bridges and in...

That Old Gang of Mine is my third volume in this series about Lawrence, my hometown. The word hometown means many, different things to different people. It is a word that has numerous meanings for me also. Some of them are good and some of them are bad. Lawrence, Massachusetts was not a pretty place when I was growing up there way back when. It is even less pretty today. The paint on the old tenements was often bubbling and peeling. The railings on the steps could be wobbly and often there was a wooden step to be avoided here and there. All the apartments were filled with used or secondhand...

It's All About Love, is all about love - the seeking, the losing, the wishing, the passion, the exhilaration, the humiliation, the joy, the sadness. It is about all types and kinds of love - friendship, parental love, elderly love, childish infatuation, teenage romance, early adult entanglements, dating, marriage, old age and retirement. It's about kiddy crushes and nursing homes, about mom and pop and One Night Stands. It's all about love. Some of the poems are very serious, others are funny. Some are sentimental; some are cold. My favorite poet was Robert Service. He was often accused of...

About ten years back, I discovered the blogging network and I jumped on it. I was writing for a newspaper at the time and I felt that a blog might provide me with a sort of pretend audience. In any case, it was fun. My blog, the Hobo Philosopher, has a little of everything. I've serialized whole books. I've posted short stories, poems, book reviews, satire, humor, interviews and some of my newspaper articles. I've vented with some political blogs. I've innovated with some of my personal economic and philosophical theories. Blogging has been good for me. It has helped to keep me sane - if you...

It wasn't the words that Struck me. It was the ideas. I didn't get hooked on books until my freshman year at a tiny, local junior college. It was an accident. The classes for my required subjects were spread out over the entire day. I had only one reason for attending this school. I wanted to get a better job. Consequently i would have to learn something. After a month or so, I had exhausted all wasting time avenues. As a last resort, I took a walk up the back steps to the small, one room library. Many of the shelves were still empty. The majority of the books were donated. This was the first...

"Come On-A My House" is the fourth effort in my Lawrence - My Hometown series. Like the last three, this book contains varied anecdotes about the old neighborhood and the old gang. In it I try once again to create a picture of a time and a place and a neighborhood that once was but is no more. On the front cover of this volume I have a picture of the old tenement where I was raised. This is a very old picture of the structure at 32 Chelmsford Street in North Lawrence. It is the house as I remember it as a kid. Most of the folks in the photo are my relatives - grandmother, grandfather, uncles...

The unique stories contained in this volume are either long short stories or short long stories. They are too long to be considered short stories and too short to be considered novels. When I first started working for a local newspaper, I asked my boss how many words would he like my stories and articles to contain. He said, "Write the story until it is finished. Once it is finished, we'll deal with the length." I liked that idea. Write the story until it is finished. Don't worry about how long it should be or how short it could be. Write the story until it is done and then stop. That is the...

"Don't Laugh - This Could Have Been Your Life" is a compilation of short fiction about some interesting, and for the most part, unusual events and some equally unusual characters. Some of the characters in this volume are laughably strange and others sadly odd. But none of the characters or events are so out of the ordinary as to not exist. They are all very real. None are fantasies of a distorted, overly creative mind struggling to write something new and different. I am, more or less, just reporting life as I did when I worked for the local newspaper. It is not difficult for me to write...