Ronald K. Myers is the author of Stay On the Blue Grass and The Orange Turn. However, in Dillinger’s Deception and the sequel Impossible Gold, Myers changes genres and draws from years of tales of the area around the machine gun turret-protected Jungle Inn Casino.
When Myers and Kenny, a brother he never knew he had, were united they exchanged life histories. In disbelief, Kenny asked him if he had all his oars in the water. Butcher-knife-carrying bullies chased four-year-old Myers and threatened to cut his ears off. When he was a little older, he worked for months with a broken shovel and dug a pond in a creek. Fish and other wildlife came, and he raised over one hundred rabbits. Then, neighbors ran raw sewage into the creek, poisoned his rabbits and killed the fish. He was told that it was progress, and that nothing could be done about it. This is the driving force behind his futuristic novels Stay On the Blue Grass and The Orange Turn.
At the age of twelve Myers was paralyzed with rheumatic fever and was condemned to be a cripple for the rest of his life. He got back on his feet and returned to school, but because he couldn’t fight back he was pummeled by the cruel kids. He fought the crippling legacy of the disease and became a championship high school wrestler. With a college scholarship almost in his pocket he got married, joined the Army Security Agency, and made it through a cryptic school where candidates who washed out were taken away in straight jackets. Then he was transported to an isolated island at the end of the Aleutian chain called, ‘The Rock’. Under the cloud of Russian capture, he became a guinea pig in a nuclear test called ‘Long Shot’. During the 1968 Washington, DC riots, he was a gas station shift-leader and experienced the violent racial side of the American dream. In the late sixties he was a semi-drunk in Chitose, Japan. Back in the States he landed in a steel mill operating a 225-ton hot metal crane from six stories up, where he watched many men get mangled and killed. When he boxed, he was called an animal. When he jumped on a Harley Davidson motorcycle, he became a hill-climbing nut. He has won arm wrestling championships. On more civilized days, he attended the University of Virginia, was a tour guide, a mailbox painter, tree trimmer, clerk on the Erie and B&O Railroads, diesel locomotive mechanic, high school wrestling coach, salesman, construction worker, roofer, scuba diver, power lifter, union representative, electrician, and newsletter publisher. He is also the inventor of magical trick rope called ‘Flick It’. He died in 1998, came back to write. His varied life experiences are reflected in his writings. And he’s just getting started. When he’s not swimming, fishing, or at a writer’s meeting he can be found in Pennsylvania reading and writing.
