"Tempting Fate- Hobey Baker and Robert Stiles face the Red Baron's Flying Circus" includes selections from Hobey's letters home and Robert's complete diary about their experiences in mortal combat with the "Bosch" (the Germans) as flyers during World War One. The full text of Hobey's 166 letters are provided in an appendix. The diary and letters are chilling to read as the two authors write each evening following two or three two-hour patrols over the front lines. The American pilots had to contend not only with the more experienced Germans, but with frail aircraft which frequently suffer serious malfunctions. The ammunition in the machine guns they used would frequently jamb just when they were shooting at an enemy plane. The diary entries and letters reflect the excitement, the danger, the courage and the passion that these two intrepid flyers experienced in essentially real time along with their often humdrum existence at the airfield. Furthermore, the Germans frequently bombed the airfield at night, depriving the Americans their much-needed sleep. We, the readers, now can share with their families and friends these harrowing episodes in these two heroes' lives.
About the Author: Richard Stiles Greeley, Robert Stiles' nephew, is an avid football and ice hockey enthusiast, having played JV football as a freshman and varsity hockey four years at Harvard. He continued playing hockey into his fifties. He follows the sports at both the college and professional levels. He experienced combat during the Korean War, dueling with his ship's 5" guns with Communist shore batteries. He has used these experiences to frame his non-fiction book about his two World War I heroes, Hobey Baker of Princeton and Robert Stiles of Harvard. He has recently (2013) written two romantic novels: the first "Emmie and Roger - A Thermonuclear Romance" is based on his experiences at the 1962 US thermonuclear weapons tests in the atmosphere off Christmas Island over the Pacific Ocean and his participation in the Cuban Missile Crisis later in 1962 at the Mitre Corporation; the second novel is the sequel, "Flight from Hanoi Into the Terror of the Ho Chi Minh Trail" based on his experiences in Saigon and Thailand during the Vietnam War in 1967-'68. More recently he has become an advocate for alternative energy systems, solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, tidal and, yes, nuclear to minimize the major threat to the future of the planet through global warming. He wrote the first Federal report on "Energy Use and Climate Change" for the National Science Foundation in 1975 and has been urging action ever since. He conducted one of the first successful demonstrations of using tidal power to generate electricity in 2004. At the Mitre Corporation he contributed to the early environmental legislation on the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, and Superfund Act; and helped initiate programs in solar, geothermal, wind, and tidal power for the US Department of Energy. He holds a B. S. degree in chemistry from Harvard, an M. S. degree in physical chemistry from Northwestern, and a Ph. D. degree in physical chemistry with a minor in nuclear engineering from the University of Tennessee based on work at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. He served for three years in the US Navy aboard the destroyer USS Van Valkenburgh, DD-656, seeing action behind enemy lines in North Korea. He was promoted to Chief Engineering Officer in 1953. Now retired, he is continuing to write fiction and non-fiction. A native of the Boston, MA area, he now lives in St. Davids, Pennsylvania.