David E Richardson

David E. Richardson always wanted to be a writer. Oldest in the family, he made up stories and told them to his young brothers and sisters in small groups or while he milked the cow. He majored in English and journalism at Granite High School in Salt Lake City, UT, savoring those classes, and took two years of type and shorthand in classes with one other boy in a class of about 50 girls. He still uses his shorthand to this day. Determined not to continue in his father’s heavy construction business, David enrolled in journalism at the University of Utah; however, a professor told one of the classes that it was hard to get a job as a journalist at that time and, if you did get a job, it was low pay. So David switched to engineering and received BS and MS degrees in mechanical engineering and a PhD in metallurgy with the goal of creative writing on the side. He went to work as a rocket scientist and system safety engineer for Hercules Aerospace which was bought out by Alliant Techsystems which became then Orbital ATK and now Northrup Grumman. Finding the time to write on the side proved to be difficult, but two of his early novels were published: These Were the Valiant (Cottonwood Publishing; 1975; the prequel to this book--Rescue) and The Enchanted Palace (Cedar Fort, 2000)