Bob Fields grew up in the 1940s and 1950s, long before the advent of the Internet, smartphones, and social media. Not that Bob would have had access to such wonders-his family was poor, and life during and after the Second World War was often difficult.
In Memories from a Shoebox, Fields remembers a time and a way of life long gone. With an eye to the present, he explores the culture of his small hometown and how racism and gender bias influenced the era's social and personal attitudes.
But young Bob Fields wasn't overly concerned with cultural questions. A proud member of the Charles Street Gang, he and his buddies were more interested in ghost stories and the local cemetery-and, as time passed, with the advice the older boys offered on the biological mysteries of women. Such advice was, as it has always been, of dubious accuracy.
From those early days in the Evergreen Cemetery to his own rags-to-riches story, Fields recounts a time when a young boy didn't have Google to verify his friend's scholarly dissertation on the science of "spermocity"-and reminisces that life moved at a much slower pace than it does today.
About the Author: Bob Fields is a veteran of two wars-and he insists his time on Wall Street counts as a third. A hardscrabble life in a small Maine town taught Fields valuable real-life lessons, which he applied to his successful military and business careers.
After retiring from the business world in 1999, Fields reinvented himself and became a freelance writer. His environmental writing has been published in regional magazines as well as company newsletters. Fields is also the author of two books describing his boyhood in the 1940s as well as Rendezvous with Destiny, a novel about discrimination, love, murder, and redemption in small-town America.
Fields holds a BS from the University of Arizona and an MBA from the University of Chicago. He, his wife, Janice, and their three children operated a quarter-horse training and breeding facility for twenty-five years on an Upstate New York farm, where Fields still resides.
