Background image: Amtrak's Coast Starlight rounds a curve traveling along the California coast.
About
Inside my roomette on the Coast Starlight, an Amtrak train that runs between Los Angeles and Seattle.
I'm a retired journalist in San Jose, California, who covered transportation, housing and other topics for the Silicon Valley Business Journal. I began my career at the Asheville Citizen-Times, Charlotte News and Charlotte Observer in my native state of North Carolina and later worked for the San Jose Mercury News in California. As a sports writer I covered topics ranging from NASCAR to equal sports opportunities for women to a half-dozen Olympic Games.
During a break from journalism 2000 to 2015, I published a novel, Through the Heart of the South, which has a section on this website, and worked in the sports and nonprofit worlds in San Jose doing various communications jobs including public relations, web site work and grant writing.
Hamlet, North Carolina, is where I grew up and worked as a brakeman for the Seaboard Coast Line Railroad during my college years at the University of North Carolina.
My other writing projects include newsletters for family and friends, which are archived on this website, and usually relate to my hobbies of travel -- especially by train -- and enjoying the outdoors. I've also written short plays for the Stone Church of Willow Glen (Presbyterian Church USA) in San Jose and the church's 1998 Covenant of Dissent expressing the congregation's reasons for not following the national Presbyterian ban on the ordination of gays and lesbians to church offices. That ban was lifted in 2011. I also designed and manage Stone Church's website.