ABOUT THE AUTHOR


 
A close observer of police work in San Francisco from 1970 to 1978, Brockman Morris has participated in law enforcement activities at firsthand and has been, as well, a regular late-night patron of the Golden Dragon Restaurant. He missed being present during the 1977 massacre by a matter of minutes. He is pictured above in front of the Golden Dragon pillar on the 20th anniversary of the infamous massacre.
Once a music, film and drama critic, book reviewer and essayist at The Christian Science Monitor in Boston and Paris, Morris majored in broadcasting and journalism at The American University and served as Chief Announcer on the Intercollegiate Broadcasting System. He represented Time Magazine in Spain at the time of the Algerian War and has free-lanced as a journalist, radio writer and commentator, magazine editor, columnist, consultant and manager in Europe, North and South America, Asia, and Africa.
His radio series, "True Tales of the American Wild West," written and read as dramatic monologues over the Federal Broadcasting Corporation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, was played for years before those British colonies became independent nations. He was employed in theatrical entertainment by 20th-Century Fox in South Africa and toured the entire southern tip of the continent.
A commercially qualified aviator, he piloted small aircraft in Central America, Mexico, Hawaii, East Africa, Europe and the United States. As an amateur archaeologist and historian, he participated in diggings as far afield as Zimbabwe, Tanzania, India, and Mexico. Unable from youth to resist a Halliburtonesque impulse to travel, he traversed Africa on a motor scooter, crossed the Zanzibar Strait in a dhow, traveled the width of Siberian Russia in the days of the Soviet Union, circuited the globe by sea and again by air and, before such activities were fashionable, trekked in Nepal, canoed in Ponape and dived in Truk Lagoon. "Got tangled in seaweed enveloping a crashed Japanese Zero! Shades of the Pacific War!"
In 1981, he flew to Paris as a passenger in the Concorde. "The Concorde was a remarkable experience," he says. "The only disappointment was the pilots wouldn't let me take the controls! It struck me as a foretaste of space travel, as an apéritif before voyaging to Mars. Three hours at high altitude and incredible speed from Rio to West Africa, an hour on the ground there, and then just three more hours to Paris to complete an Olympian hurdle between the two most beautiful cities on Earth. I loved it! That was in all ways a special trip. I escorted three beautiful and cosmopolitan ladyfriends first to Carnival in Rio where they bought the jewels for which Brazil is famous and then to Paris where they bought gowns from the great couturiers. I am shallow enough to have relished every minute. I am not as deep as Truk Lagoon!"
After working, residing or visiting in scores of countries, his favorite cities remain San Francisco, Capetown, Paris and Rio. "All are unique," he says. "To be in each is unlike being anywhere else. The softest spot in my heart, however, is reserved for Buenos Aires, not for its beauty, but for the memory of my romantic adventures in youth among the Argentines."
He is the author of a novel, "The Seventh Eye" and a novella and collection of short stories based on his life experiences, entitled "The Aztec Gypsy and Other Holiday Tales."
He has held a commission from Gov. Louis B. Nunn as a Kentucky Colonel since 1970, and has served in the United States Army. As of 2000, he is 66 years old. Descended primarily from pre-Revolutionary European settlers, a line including the fourteenth President of the United States, Franklin Pierce, he also stems from Native Americans of the Cherokee nation, as well as from an Irish and a Dutch latecomer in the nineteenth century.
 

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©2000 Brockman Morris