Robert j Ray

The boy in the bed could not breathe.

He lay in the bed trying not to die. 

Voices in the hallway.

The boy’s mother and someone else.

A figure in the doorway, wearing an overcoat.

Uncle Frank to the rescue.

Uncle Frank carrying a doctor bag, shiny leather—containing the mysterious medicine that will save the boy’s life. 

Metal-rimmed glasses that caught the light, a white shirt, a dotted neck-tie, a suit-coat, and a syringe loaded with adrenaline. 

The year was 1946.

Uncle Frank had just returned from the war.

Roll up your sleeve, Bobby.

The boy was having an asthma attack. 

 

Asthma inherited from his dad. 

As the first-born son, the boy’s path was charted to follow the steps laid out by the adults: be a doctor, be a businessman, be an adult-something to make the family proud. 

No mention of being a writer.

But those genes were lurking.

The boy’s mother was an artist.

She painted portraits.

The boy could only draw ludicrous stick-figures.

He had no sense of shadow—the key to great art.

But the boy’s daddy was a newspaperman.

Night editor at the Amarillo Globe.

Inescapable heritage—as the boy coughed his way toward the future.

 

In First Grade at Wolflin School, the boy had trouble reading. 

The reading problem followed him into Second Grade. 

In Third Grade the teacher changed seats, moving the boy from the back of the room to the front.

There he read the blackboard just fine, confirming the teacher’s suspicions—this boy needs an eye-test.

The boy’s mother drove him downtown.

Uncle Frank’s office, the boy’s first eye-test. 

His first glasses had plastic rims. 

GI-type glasses with pink rims that turned sallow yellow with age.

The school kids laughed at his glasses. 

The glasses kept the boy aloof from team sports.

They shoved the boy into reading adventure comics.

Batman. Superman. Captain Marvel.

But the unexpected seduction came from Terry and the Pirates.

 

Terry was an American kid—a perfect role model for a sickly asthmatic schoolboy. However, in a 1940s comic strip, a child hero didn’t attend school or engage in violence. To fill this gap, young Terry had a sidekick: Pat Ryan, a black-haired Irish-American, who was a killer and a fitting male companion for the femme fatale, the Dragon Lady. Decades later, when the asthmatic boy had grown into a man, he launched his mystery series featuring Matt Murdock, Private Eye. Murdock, with his black hair and Irish-American roots, was a soldier home from the wars, modeled on Pat Ryan from the Terry and the Pirates comic strip, and ready to fight crime in Newport Beach, California. 

The Dragon Lady seamlessly slid into the Matt Murdock series.

 

In his senior year, the boy served as sports editor of the high school paper called the Golden Sandstorm.

The near-sighted non-jock became short-time friends with hotshot football jocks.

The same thick-thighed meaty muscular lads who bumped you aside in the hallway—

They wanted their names in the school paper. 

Untold power lurked in the written word.

Until the season ended.

And the football crowd discarded the boy. 

But he’d been gripped by the Hand of Fate.

The near-sighted boy locked onto the Editorship of a college weekly newspaper.

Modesto Junior College, located in the San Joaquin Valley in Central California. 

He had come to Modesto for the tennis—the coach was world famous—

But every Thursday afternoon, the newspaper setup in a local print-shop.

The boy learned to read the heavy ink-black type-set letters backwards and upside down. 

With ink-stained hands, seeing that black type, the boy understood his future was life with words.

 

The boy wrote six novels before he got a book published.

The title of that first book was: 

The Art of Reading: A Handbook on Writing.

Written by the boy and co-authored by the boy’s scholarly wife.

The Art of Reading was a thin textbook based on five years of classroom testing.

Watching the eyes of his students popping open, 

Their faces lit by the power of understanding.

The cause-and-effect legacy that came from circling key words in a selected paragraph. 

Ten to fifteen lassoed words that pulled your reader’s mind deeper

Down under the sentences laced into paragraphs

That subterranean under-belly, truth deeper than nuance—because now you feel the words. 

 

Nine months after the publication of The Art of Reading, the boy got his first novel published.

A fictive fantasy comedy-drama-satire set against the backdrop of professional tennis.

A book that went round and round on a rotating wire book display in the corner drugstore in the Union Plaza shopping center in Roswell, New Mexico.

A book that vanished from the flimsy wire display in fourteen days.

Undeterred, the boy kept writing.

 

The boy met his agent at a book fair.

A Hollywood guy—who got the boy into Dell. 

Delacorte. 

Random House.

The books rolled out.

Bloody Murdock. Murdock Cracks Ice. Dial M for Murdock. Murdock for Hire. 

Merry Christmas, Murdock—a best seller reviewed in the Wall Street Journal.

It captured in sweet prose the joy of snowy holidays.

 

Then boy got creative with a manuscript called, The Weekend Novelist. 

The book was helped along by the assistant to his Murdock editor—

A bright young woman about to join a Buddhist sect (I hesitate to say “Monastery”)

She rescued The Weekend Novelist from oblivion by creating a sensible chapter structure.

Sheer genius.

The Weekend Novelist was her last job. 

 

Carried aloft by the surprise success of The Weekend Novelist, the boy landed a teaching job in the night school at the University of Washington—(Night school aka Adult Education).

There, he collided with Jack Remick. 

A poet, novelist, essyaist, dynamo.

With a brain like a voltaic eruption—

Together they wrote, The Weekend Novelist Writes a Mystery.

For six years,they taught the opening three weeks of the U-Dub’s screen-writing class. 

Each student wrote a film scenario, a chunk of screenplay and at least one shootable scene. 

 

After decades of teaching and inspiring countless students, it was time to retire from academia. 

Retirement, however, was not an end but a new beginning. 

Freed from the constraints of a teaching schedule, the boy returned to the tennis courts of his youth. 

He immersed himself in the world of senior tennis, 

Where strategy and skill mattered more than sheer power.

The boy penned, “Play or Die: Senior Tennis and the Art of Spin.” 

Personal anecdotes combined with practical advice, and aimed at helping seniors continue to enjoy and excel in the sport.

 It was a celebration of the enduring spirit of tennis and a testament to the boy’s lifelong love for the game.

But the boy’s creative journey did not end there. 

With a heart full of stories and a mind still brimming with ideas,

He embarked on a new literary adventure. 

Now an author with a rich tapestry of experiences, he continues to write, 

Driven by the same passion that had fueled his journey from a sickly asthmatic child with a love of comics,

To a celebrated writer and teacher.