The Westborough Crusaders: The Trilogy That Took Forty-Four Years to Earn Its Novels

Some work waits for you. Not patiently. Not the way a dog waits by the door, loyal and uncomplicated. It waits the way a diagnosis waits in a family’s bloodline, silently present, expressing itself in symptoms you do not recognize until you are old enough to understand what your body has been trying to tell you. In 1982, I was sixteen years old, living in the Midwest, and I sat down and wrote eight episodes of a television series called The Westborough Crusaders. I did not know I was writing the first draft of a trilogy. I thought I was writing television. I was wrong, but I would not understand how wrong for another four decades.

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1983: Year of the Big Glasses

Yes, 1983 was the — “Year of the Big Glasses” — as you can see preeminently evidenced below in the 1983 promotional newspaper advertisement for “KFOR, Radio 1240, The One You Turn to For News.” I am in the lower right corner, aged 18, and in my Senior year at Lincoln Northeast High School in Lincoln, Nebraska. I was not alone in my Big Glasses accoutrement. Three others were with me, but none of my coworker cohorts also had the keen, brown, tint-a-wheel of The Big Glasses Transitions lenses of 1983!

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