About the Author
Dennis Arnold
A photo of the author, Dennis Arnold, taken since his retirement
I think I was about eight years old when I decided I wanted to be Mark Twain when I grew up. Of course, it didn’t take long for me to change my mind. I switched from Twain to Jules Verne to Edgar Allen Poe to Ray Bradbury and proceeded through several others before coming to Dave Barry, who is my latest literary idol.
I can remember writing book reports in grade school and being told by my teacher that the reports weren’t supposed to be as long as the books themselves. I guess I always have had a tendency to be a bit verbose, although I prefer to think of it as being eloquent. I guess you could say eloquent is to verbose as eccentric is to weird. Over the course of my lifetime I have been described as all of these.
A great part of the responsibility (or blame) for what you will read on these pages must go to my fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Oberlin. She was the one who noticed I was always bored in class and had the foresight to tell my parents to take me to a library and get me something to read. Thankfully, my parents did as she requested and it opened up a whole new world for me. The world of books. The world of literature. The world of imagination. While I did dabble in some Greek Mythology and even a bit of Shakespeare, I was most impressed with adventure novels, and especially those which used humor in the telling. Hence my love of Twain, and while Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn would be brought to mind for most, my favorite Twain tome has always been A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.
I strayed from my literary path during high school when I discovered that girls, sports, girls, cars and especially girls were a lot more fun than books. It took me several years and several expensive divorces to realize I should have stuck with the books. Although, my participation in sports did afford me the honor of getting my picture on a lunchbox, an achievement which puts me right up there with The Dukes of Hazzard and Scoobie Doo.
I have lived in many different cities in several different states (none of which were Indiana). I also did a tour in the Navy during that Vietnam thing before returning to one of the four colleges (and 15 years) it took me to finally earn my degree, which I have never used in any of the jobs I have subsequently held. Recently I retired from one of those jobs and now find myself with even more time to waste than I did when I was working.
And so I find myself today at the beginnings of what I hope to be my writing career. Some of my fledgling endeavors are on these pages for you to peruse. They have been a long time coming. Hopefully there will be many more to follow. I hope you enjoy them, but on the off chance that you don’t you can just blame it on Mrs. Oberlin.