Saturday, December 13

In the second grade, Brew lived in Jacksonville, where his father mustered out of the Navy, at Cecil Field.

Brew was later to go to Cecil Field TDY on a site survey, to write the engineering-installation plan for the installation of an Intrusion Detection System (IDS), a balanced bridge annunciator, at the base.

The country was still wild and deer and bear would set off false alarms, rubbing against the perimeter chain-link fence.

He wrote a short story about that trip. He and the head draftsman went. The draftsman would be doing the drawing package. They stayed in adjoining motel rooms, shared a rental car, and ate all their meals together.

In the story, the two men gradually discovered that they were a literary writer and a painter, in their secret lives, hiding it from their co-workers, and each other.

In reality, Brew never knew a draftsman who was a painter or a technical writer who was a literary writer. Not a one. And not that many journalists who were really novelists, poets, playwrights, or screenwriters.

Brew wrote in all of those forms, and wrote memoirs, too.

He had produced a body of work, his stack, and invented a form to present it in, daily typewriting.

By working at a day job and writing before and after work.

Not many real writers had done what Brew had done, published writers, writers who won grants and prizes and had jobs teaching writing in a university.