I’m a writer, producer, director, composer, and entrepreneur, as well as an Air Force veteran. I live in Southern California, and storytelling has been part of my life for many years through screenwriting and filmmaking. At 74, I’m still working on stories I want to tell.

My work spans writing, filmmaking, and other projects. These days, much of my attention goes to Lost Valley — Lost Innocence and helping it reach readers. Telling this story meant confronting experiences I had carried since childhood, and I hope doing so helps other survivors feel less alone.

Lost Valley — Lost Innocence is my memoir about what happened to my best friend, Greg Connor, and me as boys. From 1964 to 1967, we were child prostitutes in an international pedophile ring run through the Boy Scouts of America.

The emotional center of the book is our friendship. There is humor, affection, and adventure alongside the horror, because those experiences existed together in our lives. I wanted readers to understand the boys we were and how adults used our trust against us. I still believe in Scouting’s ideals; I later became a Den Leader and Scoutmaster myself. The betrayal came from adults who abused children and those who failed to protect them.

Yes. This passage from the prologue captures something that can be difficult to understand: how a child could feel attached to a place where he was being harmed.

“Lost Valley gave me some of the happiest memories of my childhood. It also became the place where love and manipulation blurred until I could no longer tell one from the other. That is one reason survivors stay silent for so long. Abuse does not always arrive wearing a monster’s face. Sometimes it arrives as attention. Sometimes it feels like rescue. Sometimes it is wrapped in praise, secrecy, adventure, and the promise that you are special. I did not understand that when I was a boy. I only understood that I was lonely and unloved. I understood that Greg was my best friend. I understood that camp felt bigger and safer than home. I understood that I wanted to belong. And because I wanted that so badly, I did not know how to recognize the danger when it found me.”

For survivors, I hope the book offers recognition and some relief from the shame so many of us have carried. It took me a long time to understand that the responsibility belonged to the adults who hurt us. If another survivor sees something of their own experience in mine, I hope they feel less alone.

For parents and other readers, the story shows how grooming can hide inside attention, rewards, and trusted relationships. It can also help people understand why a child might remain silent. I want readers to listen more carefully when a child or an adult survivor tries to tell them something painful.

Thank you for helping me share the story. I’m working on the audiobook and continuing to get the book in front of readers through interviews and outreach. I’m also working toward adapting Lost Valley — Lost Innocence as a minimum eight-episode limited streaming series, with enough time to do justice to the friendship at its center.

My priority is for the book to be read and discussed. If readers believe it has merit, an honest review or a recommendation to someone who needs it can help the story reach further.

My parents were both gone by the time I wrote Fighter Pilot’s Daughter, and one of my older sisters had passed away. I was worried about how my other two sisters and the larger, extended family would feel about my describing intimate dynamics in the book, like my parents’ fighting or my father’s alcoholism. But my sisters and I talked about these things, and they were supportive. Before publication, I sent them both the finished manuscript — not promising to make changes but to hear their feedback and be influenced or not by it. I know one of them has read the entire book, and she was very moved. Her response has meant the world to me.

In some ways, it wasn’t so much of an issue, since from the time we were very young, my sisters and I were moving every two years or so. It was all we knew and all we expected. The other kids on the Army posts where we were stationed had the same experience.

But a couple of things complicated that normality. Whenever they could, my parents enrolled us in Catholic schools, off post, and we would find ourselves surrounded by kids who had known each other since kindergarten. Generally, they looked at us like we were irrelevant — at least at the beginning. Eventually we’d make friends and be invited to their homes, where we’d see the continuity and stability of their lives, in contrast to our own.

And there were the visits to see our New Jersey cousins, who lived in a lovely house in a country town where they’d been all their lives. They’d gone to the same school, had the same friends, and so forth. It was an ideal domestic scene, and I loved being there. I was envious of their world but couldn’t imagine it for myself. It was too far out of reach.

When we were young, the moves were exciting. My parents would talk about the places we were going — California! Germany! — and my sisters and I would start imaging what they would be like. We’d read about and picture ourselves in the new situation. As we got older and had close friends and boyfriends, the moves were more difficult. It was sad and painful to have to leave, and we wished very much we could stay in the same place. Then, again, the new place would be exciting and different. We’d make new friends, and the cycle would continue like that.

Moving so much and not having a home has shaped me a great deal. After leaving my parents for college, I kept moving and am still am not quite rooted, although I’m married and have a nice house in Easton, Pennsylvania. But every three months my husband and I shift off to Spain, where we have a cabin in the mountains of Andalucía. I love being in Spain and would move here if I could. We have friends and more of a history here than we do in Easton. We don’t, however, have residency in Spain, so after three months, we come back to Easton. The year is divided up like this, and it feels perfectly familiar to me.

Living on military posts, I think we had more of a sense of the potential for nuclear war than other children in America. Because our fathers’ jobs were to get the defense apparatus ready for that eventuality, we were made constantly aware of it. Civil-defense shelters were everywhere, and we practiced the “Duck and Cover” moves at school, huddling under our desks and hoping that would do the trick! On the posts in Heidelberg and Stuttgart, Germany, there was a lot of talk about the Fulda Gap, a point on the border between West and East Germany where it was predicted the Soviet army would flood through to do battle with the Germans and the rest of Europe. These images and warnings kept the possibility of nuclear apocalypse in our minds almost all the time.

Apart from that, our parents were practicing Catholics, and the story of St. John’s Apocalypse often came up in the post chaplain’s sermons. Apocalypse offered a ready analogue to the talk of nuclear annihilation, and the chaplain would build on it, trying to imbue in us a sense of how close the end of world might be. The terrifying judgement of the living and the dead and the assignment of eternal damnation or happiness was always upon us.

These twin discourses of apocalypse were in the air, in our dreams and produced what I’d call a habit of fear, a trained response to seeing whatever troubling situation emerges as a sign of the end of days. Or the end of something. Like now, so many people my age are seeing the current political situation in the US as signs of the end of democracy and, perhaps, of America. But on a more personal level, the habit of fear has stayed with me and been a real handicap to my self-development and to my ability to genuinely live with confidence. Fortunately, it’s an obvious enough problem that I’ve known about it for a long time and have spent a lot of time (and money!) trying to come to terms with and manage it in therapeutical contexts.

I think Jack and Franny were in some ways typical of their generation. Born in the 20s, they lived through the depression and came of age in the second World War. They weren’t subtle but saw things in black and white terms; and were very clear with their comments about everything from politics to homemaking. In many ways, I think they thought of themselves as opposite to the communists who they considered the enemy: communists were subtle, cagey, didn’t put their cards on the table. You couldn’t trust people like that, since what you saw wasn’t necessarily what you got.

Jack and Franny were both larger than life for me, but others outside the family responded to them as if they too saw them as striking characters. They were outspoken and definitive in their opinions. They were both loud and ready for an argument. I never heard them identify themselves as such, but they were politically independent and would size up the candidates carefully, then decide which was the better man (it was always, of course, a man). And once decided, that was it. There was little room for dialogic discussion of things, much less changing their minds.

As parents, they could be very difficult. They were strict, demanding, and kept a close eye on my sisters and I. They weren’t alone: child-rearing was like that in those days. Kids got spanked, and nobody thought it was wrong. My parents set the rules and the tone for our household, and we followed. There was no consulting us as to what we thought or hoped for or worried about.

But they were affectionate, and we knew they loved us. They hugged us a lot and always made a big deal of our birthdays. Christmas was a huge celebration with lots of good presents. And Jack and Franny were fun. Our moves across the country were always treated like adventures. The hotels, the pancake breakfasts at roadside restaurants, the sites along the routes of America — Carlsbad Caverns, Route 66, the Rocky Mountains — were part of a great expedition we were making. They inspired us with their excitement.

At a certain level, I suppose it’s simple vanity: I want them to be remembered because they meant so much to me. But they both contributed something to the world they came of age in, and they were characters of that time. I think that’s worth remembering.

I’d like future readers to know what life was like in the middle-to-late years of the twentieth century, particularly for the children of military families, a generally little understood component of American society. The focus of attention to US forces fighting overseas and preparing for war at home is usually on the service members themselves — all their adventures and sacrifices. I’d like readers to know more about the people who came along with them, followed in their wake — the spouses and children of the warriors. They may well not share the warrior’s priorities or even their ideology, but the children in particular are called on to be part of the picture anyway, like camp followers of all ages everywhere. I’d like people to know more about what life was like for us in our time, but I also hope readers will see how military children still experience the difficulties of moving all the time and the instability of life in warrior society. It’s an age-old portrait and one that’s little understood.