Danny's Tavern--A Collection of Neighborhood Stories 1935-1975

 

 

Our guest today is Dr. Thomas Melvin, P.E. I'm looking forward to reading his book, Danny's Tavern! I think you'll enjoy his explanation of how this collection of short stories came into being.---Mary Ann

 

A few years ago I wrote a novel-The Great American Story-so I thought, “Two Winds To Vandalia”. It was about two Cain & Abel brothers and an accident at a nuclear power plant. But 20 or so rejection slips later convinced me otherwise.

 

My friend Bill Flynn was a bartender at Danny’s Tavern. He was always writing too but his finished work never saw the light of day. He wrote the real life stories that the patrons at this neighborhood tavern shared with him.

 

Upon his passing, all of those writings were discovered in boxes in the basement and might have been thrown out. But Bill left behind a hand written note that they were to be given to me.

 

The stories shared in Danny’s Tavern could have happened anywhere, any year and in any economy. Neighborhood taverns are places people go to share stories and sometimes the type of secret you could only confess to a relative stranger.

 

They are centers of neighborhood culture and conversation and no matter where you live or are traveling to you just feel more connected to the rest of the world, when you’re there.

 

They are safe havens you can go to for answers when you’ve been laid off for the very first time and you feel like you’re the only one that’s ever happened to. They are where you go to brag endlessly to relative strangers about how you finally met the woman of your dreams who thinks you’re the man of hers.

 

Perhaps most importantly, in an economy where all the rules of how to be successful seem to have changed, your own “Danny’s Tavern” is where you know you can you go to share your greatest hopes and dreams, and find a community that will hold you accountable for achieving them.

 

Just as the All Things Writing blog image says “Writing is the recording of life as it passes you by” and Bill Flynn’s writings captured the lives of 26 characters through the ups and downs of life, unfiltered, authentic and timeless.

 

About the Author:

 

Dr Thomas Melvin P.E. graduated from the Doctoral Program at Nova Southeastern University and received a Distinguished Research Award for his dissertation, in 1996. For over twenty years he worked as an Engineering Consultant for the Medcon Engineering Corporation. He has lectured throughout the U.S. on Construction and Facilities Management.

His career began at the age of ten having worked at everything from scraping barnacles off of tugboats, to shoveling coal on a steamship, jumping out of planes as a US Paratrooper, to teaching engineering, to project management consulting at Harvard University. He is also the author of Practical Psychology in Construction
Management published by Van Nostrand Reinhold and Danny’s Tavern – A Collection of Neighborhood Stories 1935-1975

His facebook page is: http://on.fb.me/GNLW5d

Readers can buy the book here: http://amzn.to/XcyCAn