About Ron

Ron grew up in Kansas.

His first memory was watching Patricia Neal in “The Day the Earth Stood Still” cower in the dark and plead “klaatu barada nikto” to avoid being vaporized by Gort the robot. Ron was five at the time. Just old enough for his first legal shot of movie heroin.

When he was ten a cyclone tore through town, rousting two lawn chairs from his backyard, but leaving his house intact. This proved most disappointing as he was compelled, as Dorothy and Toto would have been under similar circumstances, to continue living his life in black and white.

At fifteen he moved to Colorado where his mom dreamed he might one day be appointed to the Air Force Academy. He dreamed about getting his mitts on a Fender Stratocaster.

A year later, “West Side Story” came to town. Ron attended the Saturday matinée ten weeks in a row. Mesmerized by the rousing prologue and the opening aerial shots of Manhattan, he began to fantasize that NYC was the Oz that would eventually change his life.

At nineteen, going nowhere at breakneck speed, he made history by being kicked out of a certain university-which-must-not-be-named, only to be reinstated a year later and invited to join its faculty on the day he turned twenty-two.

He leveraged this comeback into a one-way ticket to Manhattan’s Upper West Side, where, despite the absence of balletic street gangs, flying monkeys, and emerald skyscrapers, he began to view the world in Technicolor. Over the next four years he immersed himself in all the city had to offer, including the Knicks, who took the NBA title twice. In his spare time he earned a Ph.D. in economics from Columbia.

His backpack brimming with bagels, Ron headed back west, this time to Missoula, Montana, a place, sort of, where he raised a family and performed standup several times a week with the end of persuading college students the dismal science was arguably less boring than being kept on hold by your cable provider. Early in his tenure at the University of Montana he had occasion to testify as an expert in a federal trial. Owing to the resulting adrenalin rush, he began plying his trade in the courtroom as well as the classroom, and adapted his standup routine for juries.

During his career Ron put in his “ten-thousand hours” as a writer several times over.

Granted, most of his output was “scholarly” in nature, like the scintillating 828-page college textbook entitled Modern Economics: Principles and Policy, which, although decades out-of-print, recently rose from #16,205,822 to #15,992,206 on the Amazon Best-Seller List. (We’re not making this up.)

But from the day Ron learned to diagram a sentence he has also written for fun. And it is this writing, from his heart, gut, and funnybone as well as his brain, that has been his true passion. For decades he has stuffed untold bankers boxes, and more recently, a hard drive named “Underwear Drawer,” with his short stories, limericks, essays, stage plays, song parodies, snippets of random dialog, and film scripts.

Not long ago someone cornered him and, only half-facetiously, asked what he planned to do when he grew up. It was a moment of clarity to Ron who realized that he had, at last, grown up, and the time had come to lose the day job.

He now lives in Palm Springs, California, with his wife, Arlene, his dog, Chewiee, and his Fender Strat, following his bliss and hoping a little of it rubs off on his readers.