Foy W. Minson

It all started, for me, anyway, in a little, rock-walled farmhouse in western Oklahoma in 1939. Three years later, my family gave up on farm-life and moved to Palm Springs, California, where my dad worked as a civilian carpenter at the nearby airbase through WWII. He was too old to be drafted and not desperate enough to enlist. After the war, he moved the family to Selma, a small Central California town near Fresno and opened a shoe repair shop. That's where I grew up.

In 1957, after graduating from high school, I joined the U.S. Air Force and trained as an aircraft mechanic. I shipped out to England in 1958 and a year later was transferred to Ramstein Air Base in Germany. After a few months I went back to England just long enough to get married and returned to Ramstein with my new wife. Eighteen months later, in August of 1961, the Berlin Wall went up. Things got a bit tense during that time, even at Ramstein. My wife and the other dependents had to attend monthly meetings to discuss evacuation routes, and I recall lots of conversations at work involving nuclear blast radius, fallout, survivability and other fun stuff. Ramstein was about three miles from the European equivalent at that time of Cheyenne Mountain, which was probably target number one for Soviet ICBMs. Of course, on the flight-line at that time, that little detail was not well known. Uncle Sam's response wasn't exactly a replay of the Berlin Airlift, but it was close. Any plane flying into Berlin dared it only with fighter escorts, oftentimes an F-104 or two from Ramstein.

After I returned to the States in 1962 with my wife and toddler son, I finished my eight years on the flight-line at Hamilton AFB a few miles north of San Francisco. I clearly remember working for tips as a check-out bagger in the commissary on my day off one November day when word filtered through the store that President Kennedy had been assassinated. The various reactions were surreal. Some people just turned and walked out, leaving behind full shopping carts. Others, both customers and employees, broke down in tears. Some cheered. No fights broke out, but several almost did. Mostly, though, there was merely a long hush that gradually worked back to the almost normal bustle of the market.

After receiving my discharge at Hamilton, I remained in Sonoma County where I was hired as a police officer in the city of Petaluma. After eighteen years on patrol, I received a medical retirement for an injured back--just missed my twenty years. Since that time, I've been a private investigator, a commercial property manager, a security guard, and a court-house weapons screener. Charmed by the beauty of the rugged coastal hills and redwood empire north of San Francisco, I've used the area, with some alterations, for the locales of my books. I currently live and write in Santa Rosa, the heart of Sonoma County.