David Todd

I am a US Army Veteran, a surfer, and a first-time children’s book author. I've skied across the Sierra Nevada and was in the Nordic Ski Patrol in Yosemite National Park. I work in water use efficiency for the State of California. I produced, co-wrote, and directed "The Nitty Gritty (Down n Dirty) Landscape and Garden Club" featuring Eddy Albert, Richard Kiel, Jack Kelley, and Joan Embrey of the San Diego Zoo. I wrote "Sibling Rivalry" about two Jewish teenagers resisting Nazis oppression in Lithuania during World War II. I contributed two chapters to "Inspiring Generations" published by the Yosemite Conservancy. I am completing “The Prototype,” a story about what happens to a quirky surfer dude when he stumbles on a device that gives him the power of AI that can shape our future. Russia, China, and North Korea enter an unholy alliance with domestic extremists to capture the device.

I love gorillas, monkeys, and chimpanzees. Once I broke the “Don’t feed the animals" rule at the Fresno Zoo. Because I fed the baboons, I got scratched by one of them. My wife asked the Zoo Director if I would get sick. He told her that if I didn’t clean the wound, I would get “baboon scratch fever.” We cleaned the wound, but that night, while I was lying in bed and reading the newspaper and my wife was sitting at her dresser, removing her makeup, a strange thing happened. Suddenly, I started rattling the pages of the newspaper and making sounds like a baboon. Then I grabbed the hanging light fixture in the ceiling and started swinging from it, scratching under my armpits. I had all the symptoms of “baboon scratch fever.”