I am a fourth-generation Californian, born in Anaheim back when Truman was still president, and it was here that I received all of my early education, right through my first four years of college. After graduating from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in the early 1970s, I shot off to do graduate work at the University of Toronto. (Media guru Marshall McLuhan was teaching there at the time and his work had recently come to my then-enthusiastic attention.) The idea was to become a university English professor, but that ambition never quite worked out. After a few false starts in the business world (well, that’s a very generous phrase to use for the kind of work I was doing), I felt the need for an educational redo that might propel me into a somewhat loftier segment of the American economy. I was living in Houston, Texas, at the time, and with the goal of somehow bettering my lot in life, I enrolled in the law school at the University of Texas at Austin. I promptly discovered I had no desire to be a lawyer, however, so I transferred to the university’s business school. Finding it much more congenial than the law school, I finished an MBA there, and then decided to head off into the wide world of banking and insurance to see what I might find there. (Not much for anyone with an artistic soul, I assure you.) I spent the next twenty years working in banking and insurance in Texas, and then retired, but soon after that, began a new career teaching English composition at Austin Community College. I have done that for the next fifteen years—just to keep in touch with what the kids are thinking and to size up the latest generation’s writing skills, which, for the most part, appear leave a great deal to be desired. In addition to all of this, I spent many of these years also working on my "California books," somewhat quirky ones, to be sure, but, or so my readers typically say, a lot of fun to read. In any case, I have long found the subject of California endlessly fascinating and the goal of my books is to share that fascination with my readers. My first book, The Great California Story: Portrait of a Place That Is One of a Kind (rev. ed. 2022) is the "big picture" book of the two. My second one, This Day in California History (rev. ed. 2024), serves up dozens of additional details about the Golden State, but is an altogether more loosely-structured and freewheeling narrative. In the end, these books are probably best thought of as companion pieces, different takes on the same, great subject, two modest drops in that sea of books that have already been written about this most amazing of states.