"When you write novels you hope young people will read, you do well never to invoke that fatal phrase: 'When I was your age....' However, give me a moment."¹

April 5, 1934. Born in Decatur, Illinois "in middle Middle America."²

"The neighborhood is any kid's first nation, and we lived on the border. It was the white frame house on the corner where Dennis Avenue ends at Fairview Park. I spent eighteen years growing up there.

"In a neighborhood where other people's fathers went off to offices every morning in white collars and Plymouth sedans, my dad was apt to roar away astride a Harley-Davidson. Like the teenagers, he'd also gone scrounging in the junkyard and found an historic 1928 Packard coupe to drive to work. It was the size of a Sherman tank, but louder. It cornered like an aircraft carrier and had a rumble seat, and it loomed...