Ned C. Webb

I was born in a smalll town in Tennessee, in 1937. Delivered at home by the county's only doctor, who travelled around the county making house calls, spending the night at whatever house he happened to be in if birth was imminent, he had nearby calls to make the next day or was simply too tired to make a long drive back home.

I have had a varied life, became involved in and did some different things, from getting a degree in science (PhD in chemistry, Caltech) to driving race cars, writing, running marathons, and climbing mountains. Was never a standpout at any, but I enjoyed it.

My first book, From Last to First, was about Neil Bonnett. I got to know him racing against him (and Bobby Allison and Darrell Waltrip, down Southand in the Midwest), and when I quit, I followed Neil from race to race (sometimes working in his pit crew) to gather material for the book.

By that time I had left my first job -- research at P&G's Miami Valley Laboratories -- to take up writing. People said it took a lot of nerve at age 40 to quit a good job and go out writing free lance. I told them if you had a wife who was willing to feed you and give yoku ka place to sleep, it didn't take much nerve. You can only be so warm and eat so much.

My second book, The Short-legged Fisher Boy of the Land of Left, was written with my Engish-teacher daughter Kalinde. It is aboiut a boy who grows up in an isolated kingdom, who thinks for himself and learns that not all he is told -- and things the people around him believe -- are true. It is something of an anti-Harry Potter book. Thought and reason guide him, not belief in the mystical or the power of brooms.

Third book, A Tennessee Childhood is about growing up in he hills of Tennessee in the 1940s and early 1950s, before we had air-condtioning and TV, at a time when our grandparents drew water from a well, didn't have an indoor toilet.

My latest book, Reaching the Bazuft, Keeping up with Tim and Zo, is about the 20 plus years I followed my son Tim and his best friend Lonny (Zo, soon a "best' friend to me too) in hiking, climbing, camping and tramping from the deserts of Utah to the mountains of Colorado, Wyoming, Washington and Canada. It also includs our experiences in a triathlon and a 100-mile run in Vermont.

The books are available on Amazon.com.