About Us
Lewis
My dad was an Electrical Engineer and began my formal education at bedtime by reading me Pogo comic books. He sparked my fascination with history by explaining the political satire in Walt Kelly’s work.
I loved comic books so much that learned to draw---one of mine is the temporary cover of the children's book Maynard and the Bullies. During a summer job, I learned to weld. And to love it. One of my projects was a curing furnace for electric motors.
In college, engineering was my next love. I knew the material, but couldn't finish the tests fast enough. After graduating from the University of Akron with a BA in Education plus an Ohio High School teaching certificate in my dual major of history and math, I took over my uncle's small (one-man) used machinery business. Although math teachers got jobs instantly, for some reason no school would guarantee me a history course. Loving history as much as I did ever since Pop read me Pogo, I would have lost my mind if I couldn’t escape math for a while each week by sharing fascinating stories of the past. I saw those “old” people and events as real because they are. The U.S. culture in those days usually portrayed history as something hard and tedious. I wanted to teach it as a reporter or storyteller sharing yesterday’s news with young people who didn’t know the half of it even if they had read the textbook.
Alas, the coaches had the history courses sewed up. So I chased smokestacks for ten years, buying and selling used electrical equipment and other industrial machinery. After that, I programmed computers for four decades, mostly as a hired gun (contract programmer) for companies like American Greetings, Sherwin Williams, Office Max, Goodyear, plus others you never heard of. I learned many languages such as Fortran, Cobol, German, Basic, Forth, C, Python, Java, and so on and on .
Now I’m an author programming in English. But even though I pack my code full of history, Diary of a Robot and its sequels are not about the past. They are about fantastic future history which looks so much like the past that it is scary.
There is a tiny bit of math, too. Sorry.