One of my next storybook endeavors, It All Began on Brook Street, sprung from ‘the box of old pictures under the bed’ on the occasion of my Mom’s 87th birthday. I scanned a wealth of classic images from this trove into my computer and then set about the task of restoring each picture as well as identifying who appeared in them, which was particularly tricky as Mom was probably the only person who could truly confirm who these people from the past were and I didn’t want her to know what I was up to.

Moms seemed to dominate many of my efforts with It’s Your First Mother’s Day!, which I ghost wrote for Dylan, our first grandson, for his Mom and Grand Moms and with Presenting Ella Addison Rhodes, daughter Mollie’s first born and our first granddaughter, where I was more of a collaborator to Mollie. But as you will see later, I have been more than inspired by Miss Ella to make up for that on my own.

My most recent storybook, All In The Family, used nearly 200 pictures across 42 pages to create a guidebook to the Magnants, the Dansereaus, the St. Cyrs, the Gosmans, the DuVals and the Rhodes for the DeVoes of Redlands, CA, my son Zach and his lovely wife Marcy and our newest grandkids Danica and Max. Theirs is a wonderful story, worthy of a few more books that have yet to be written.