There are a lot of retired residents in Edmonds, well educated in schools or the workplace, who discover they have both the time and inclination to write a book.

Jim Hodges and Reggie Allen are two who have transmitted that lust into literature. Their backgrounds indicate few other resemblances.

Hodges entered the University of Maryland on a football scholarship, became an adjunct professor, earned a PhD and entered the business world to become a vice president of Merrill Lynch.

By contrast, at the age of 14 Allen walked door to door along London's factory rows during World War II, seeking employment of any kind.  He was eventually hired as an apprentice in a plumbing company that was later bombed.  

By the age of 17 he was a radar mechanic for the Royal Air Force.  He moved to Canada after the war and eventually became a Boeing engineer in Seattle.

Both were shocked and dismayed by varying forms of economic collapse in this country.

Hodges lived through the Savings and Loan scandals and was a witness to the greed and misuse of power he witnessed along Wall Street.  He searched through American history to find heroes who put the common good above personal gain.  The result of that personal search was a book on George Washington titled, "Beyond the Cherry Tree."  

He quite often reads Washington's inspirational words before schools and Revolutionary War scholars, sometimes dressed in a uniform fashioned by a company that duplicates historical clothing for museums.  He received the National Honor Award from the Freedoms Foundation of Valley Forge.

Washington was big for his age.  Hodges is big for his age, 6-6 and 300 pounds.  He is currently at work on a second book about the first president.

The sense of mission behind Allen’s book, "Learn How to Build Your Treasure Chest" emanated from another national financial failure.   The average American doesn't know how to save and this lack of knowledge will hit young Americans -- like Reggie's seven grandchildren and three great grandsons-- with some critical financial blows due to the failing Social Security system.  The book by the former plumber's apprentice in London, begins with a simple premise.  "Save $5 every week and in 12 years you can have an $8,600 treasure chest."  And through charts and templates he points out the multiplying factors in a policy of personal financial saving.

Allen and Hodges are currently marketing their self-published books through the Edmonds Book Store and countless other online and offline venues trying to answer a nagging question: "What to do with what you write."  Fortunately, that just happens to be the title of a two-session seminar, which will be presented by the local Creative Retirement Institute in September.

Another Edmonds friend is dictating his fascinating memoirs with the aid of voice recognition software.

I have a female neighbor who has written a work of romantic fiction.  She has been shopping it to publishers and agents and tries not to be discouraged by rejection slips or unfavorable evaluations of her work.

One of my favorite authors was another Montana native, Norman Maclean.  He had a long and distinguished teaching career at Chicago University and upon his retirement relatives urged him to try his hand at fiction.  He turned out a novella that seemingly nobody wanted to publish.  Somebody at Chicago University Press urged the school to publish its first work of original fiction, just as a favor to a longtime faculty member.

Thus was "A River Runs Through It” published.    The school spent virtually no money promoting the book but it became a word-of-mouth sensation. It was eventually nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, the rights were sold to Hollywood and the film received three Academy Award nominations.

Not all books have a happy ending, financially or artistically.   This one did.