John De Haven

At age 71, John De Haven is one of the youngest over all and among a paucity of the male gender in the never large Writers’ Group of Maple Grove, MN where he occasionally serves as its facilitator. While he has made occasional and short-lived forays into poetry and fiction, most of his writing is simple story-telling, essays about his observations of the world as it passes by or about his family and the memorable experiences they have encountered together.

More than 31 years of employment with a small, family publisher in Minneapolis presented work travel that took him to each of our 50 states at least once and to many of them many times. The work assignments on each occasion were always important yet seldom were they the only lasting memory of each visit. Now well-retired and looking back, De Haven insists it is difficult not to feel good about it and even smile a little.

In other, prior lives, John De Haven was director of public relations for the St. Paul Red Cross and the Regional Red Cross Blood Center. He held a similar position with the Minnesota Automobile Association. He was for seven years a news writer and dee-jay at KSTP-AM, a 50,000-watt flamethrower in the competitive Minneapolis/St. Paul radio market, was a co-producer of Vikings football broadcasts for three seasons and part of the announcer team that first put KSTP-FM on the air in 1973. He stayed with KSTP-FM for another four years thereafter.

The author is an active volunteer having given thousands of hours to Odyssey of the Mind and Destination Imagination over 15 years, rising to the position of State Challengemaster, the top of the program’s volunteer cadre. He was a Big Brother for five years and, beginning in 2002, he was for a decade a speaker for Suicide Awareness Voices of Education (SAVE). SAVE is the leading and foremost organization addressing suicide, suicide prevention and the needs of suicide survivors. De Haven is a reader for the Radio Talking Book (RTB), the local radio station for blind people, where he continues to prepare a recorded broadcast each week as he has since 1988. RTB’s programming is heard throughout Minnesota.

Happily, his role with the publishing company has left him with friends throughout the country. De Haven’s adventures are by no means confined to the USA, however. Since their children completed school and left the family nest, he and his wife Karen have been fortunate in being able to visit both popular and less-traveled places in more than 40 countries.

Except for two memorable years in Colorado, mostly Boulder, when he was single, slim and owned a convertible, a motorcycle and a pair of skis, De Haven has always lived in Minneapolis or the surrounding suburbs. He and his wife still live in the home they bought in Plymouth, Minnesota in 1973.