Roger Howell was raised in a loosely knit working-class and often not-much-working-to-be-had-class family in numerous towns in Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Washington. Stories around campfires and wood stoves told of brawling uncles, lost gold mines, and friends and family who had gone away-to war, to jail, or to start somewhere better. Those stories made the years of the forties and fifties seem to Roger a lost romantic age. And it is. America then was suddenly safe and prosperous, but frozen with paranoia over atomic bombs and flying saucers. A good and innocent people thought they would save the world, but along the way sowed deep prejudices they didn't yet understand. In any case, all those romantic tales of friends and family seemed to happen just before Howell happened along. As a consequence, the midcentury years have always tempted him, so that his own stories, even after four universities and an international career as a geologist and engineer, tend to be of the small towns of the Northwest and of the time and the simple folks who only just preceded him.