One of the best benefits of being in the publishing world is the people you get to meet. For example, after the first edition of our Pearl Harbor Child book was published in 1993, we began to receive inquiries from people we had never heard of, but who shared my wife Dorinda’s experience as a civilian eyewitness and/or military participant during the attack on December 7, 1941.
Several people contacted us, and basically said they had our book and enjoyed reading it, but wanted to let others know that they shared that experience . . . they also were there, each as an eyewitness from different vantage points. Each had gone through the attack . . . but no one knew their stories because they had never told them . . . and they wanted to know if we might be interested in adding their stories to our book.
This happened several times, and as we investigated further, found that several of them were not only true stories, but were important and meaningful, and needed to be told. So, when the book sold out, we decided to expand it, and add several other eyewitness accounts. I was at first concerned that this might somehow take something away from Dorinda’s story and make it less important, but I was wrong . . . adding the other stories simply made the new edition a more thorough and richer telling of the event that literally changed the world.
So, we added several untold stories, our book grew in size and importance, and we made some wonderful new friends as well. A couple of years went by, and the story of Sgt. Richard Fiske was so strong, we decided it deserved a book of its own . . . and that’s how our second book, the award-winning “Pearl Harbor Warriors” came to be written.
