I was born in Providence and grew up in Warwick and East Greenwich, Rhode Island, spending summers on a farm near Hope Valley with frequent outings to the beaches in Narragansett.  Some of my favorite memories were trips with my father to the fish markets in Wickford and Galilee, where I would stare wide-eyed at tanks of live lobsters and layers of fish and shellfish on beds of ice behind glass-fronted counters. 

After earning my degree in English from the University of Rhode Island, I headed toward California with $90 in my pocket and all my worldly goods packed into a 1965 VW Karmann Ghia.  Stopping along the way to visit siblings, I eventually reached Denver before running out of money.  My job hunt landed me at a consortium for higher education where I worked for the public information officer.  Months later, my boss confided that I had been hired over others because, when asked if I could spell, I replied, “No, but I can use a dictionary.”

It took four years for me to bail myself out of Colorado and reach California, but by that time my heart belonged to the high desert plains of the Rocky Mountains.  Instead of returning immediately to Colorado, however, I made a slight detour back to Boston and Cambridge where I was hired to work on a National Science Foundation grant at M.I.T.  The project was to investigate the feasibility of computerizing the allocation of urban emergency services (police, fire and ambulance).  In addition to my duties as project editor, I researched and wrote a paper on the historical evolution of police performance measures which included such things as two-man versus one-man patrol, response time, and patrol frequency.  Thus began my fascination with the world of public safety and how the men and women “in blue” cope with the jobs they are given.