Penn State Abington -- Stanley J. Cutler

In the fall of 1972 I started my second year of college at Penn State Abington. I was 18 years old.  What you don't know when you're 18 is that you'll be 18 for the rest of your life!  I took an introductory course in public speaking taught by a young instructor named Stanley J. Cutler. I earned a grade of A in the course. Mr. Cutler thought highly of my public speaking ability. 

Cutler was born during World War II into a hardworking immigrant family and grew up in Philadelphia and the Inlet section of Atlantic City, New Jersey.  He graduated from The Central High School of Philadelphia, and later earned a degree from The Pennsylvania State University.   His father was a Ph.D. who taught high school; his mother was an executive secretary.  His brother Robert became a physician.  Cutler spent his early working years hopping between teaching jobs until he realized that he wanted to do something else.  He learned how to program computers at night school, entered the world of business and then got into consulting managing big IT development projects.  His last job was the best, working for NOAA to help establish ground systems for weather satellites.  Cutler quit when he could afford it.  He's loving the fact that he's no longer any one's employee -- his schedule and efforts are his own. He plies the writer's trade without any need for book sales ("though," as he puts it,  "it would be nice"). 

His first novel is called Low Light and is available through Amazon & Barnes&Noble. It's a fun tale about a plot to blackmail J. Edgar Hoover in Nucky Johnson's 1929 Atlantic City. If you like HBO's Boardwalk Empire, you'll love 'Low Light' by Stanley J. Cutler.  The FBI that Cutler describes -- the FBI of the early Hoover years -- was the FBI of Bob Strauss, founding partner of the law firm of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, who joined the Bureau in 1941 fresh out of law school.

The second novel is called Letter From Odessa and is about the battleship USS Wisconsin and an attempt to sabotage it in the Delaware River before it could see duty in the Pacific during the Second World War. It is also about how Americans might have reacted had they known with certainty that the Holocaust of European Jews was happening.

The third novel is a work in progress. It's about a fictional murder amongst the people who built ENIAC, the first electronic computer, in Philadelphia in 1944.