Randy Hannah

Randy Hannah was born in Houston Texas in 1976, when the peace and love era was wrapping up to make way for the crack epidemic. His future was uncertain, and poverty was the lay of the land. He was raised on the South side of Houston Texas, in a neighborhood named South Park in the 1980’s. It was a place where knowing how to fight was a necessity if you wanted to come outside and play in the streets with everyone else otherwise, you stayed on the porch and watched the other kids laugh and play. His upbringing was rigorously religious, raised as a Seventh Day Adventist, he was a bit of a square in comparison to those he was growing up with in South Park. He spoke a little more proper than most of his peers and he dressed quite differently from the rest too. It would be normal to see him walking to school in a three-piece suite on a Tuesday morning in High school in the 90’s.

On Friday nights instead of a sleep over at a friend’s house, he would be in the living room with his two sisters and his grandmother singing hymns and receiving instruction from the bible, and on Saturday morning while his friends slept late and lounged around watching Saturday morning cartoons, Randy was getting dressed for church and the only music playing was gospel music. This was his life until the age of 16, when he began to realize that not only was he different from his peers, he was different from the people who were giving him religious instruction too. This was unsettling to Randy. He could not shake this nagging desire for more information so he sought out more about life in general, he became open minded, and wiling to read other books that had to do with self and the improvement of self, and so the journey began. To make a long story short, this guy made some very poor choices with his life early on, and when you put young, unprepared, stupid, and poor together you get a ruined life by age 21. After he lost his record deal with Rap-a-Lot Records in 1997, he tried to sell crack cocaine and found out quickly that he wasn’t cut out to be a street dealer. So he was stuck with a fifty dollar pack of crack and an ounce of marijuana on his 21st birthday. Deeply depressed, he began to relieve the pain of loosing his record deal and all of the other pains of a broken home by mixing crack and weed together and smoking it. This error blew his life into smithereens. Soon he became a full blown crack addict. He got into more legal trouble and ultimately ended up in prison for 3 years. It was there in the belly of the beast at age 27 that he became a man and matured.

Surrounded by violence daily in prison he tuned it out by reading books on self-improvement. He had nothing else to do but read and he literally read all-day and late into the night for three years straight. However, this still was not enough. He needed more and he found it in prison when he enrolled in a class called Cognitive Intervention. At first, this was just a way to get away from the cell block. Nevertheless, every day Mr. Munson the instructor, would hand out a newspaper, pick an article, and everyone would read it. After reading it, Mr. Munson would say: “So what cha think”? He did not care what you thought he just wanted you to actively think. This method repeated day in and day out for 6 months straight was a tool designed to develop critical thinking. Randy had never paid attention to his thoughts or his thought process. This class exposed his thinking or lack thereof and he was astonished to find out that, his thoughts were very poor and that his thoughts are what landed him in prison. He was released from prison in 2006 and reunited with his wife Rhonda who supported him throughout this ordeal, and made sure he had a stable foundation to come home to.

As he began his new journey in life, he relocated his family to St. Louis Missouri in 2009, attended, and graduated college in 2013 with a degree in music theory and composition. He was inducted into Phi Theta Kappa the largest International Honor Society among two-year colleges and he served as Chapter President of Phi Theta Kappa Xi Epsilon, Saint Louis Community College at Forest Park. Graduating with honors, he received several scholarships and leadership awards for his service to the community and was elected Vice President of Student Government and served as a mentor for the African American Male Initiative.

He went on to attend the Pierre Laclede Honors College at the University of Missouri Saint Louis Majoring in Liberal Arts. His focus and determination to live and help other people understand that the power of thought has miraculous qualities is evident in the life he now enjoys with his family as a happy peaceful man. It is also evidenced in the material covered in this book through his literary contribution. There is so much more to his story but it is beyond the scope of this, therefore we submit a small sample of the road traveled by one of the Write Bothers. Randy Hannah learned from childhood to pick up a pen or pencil, and write to express his feelings and thoughts through the creation of music, songs, and poems. He has continued this love of writing about life and his experience with life, and therefore submits this book as evidence of the power of the mind and the power of self.