About the Author

Michael was born in Chatham, Ontario, Canada on November 15, 1943. 

He was educated there and moved on to college in Guelph, Ontario in 1963 

Michael worked in various parts of Ontario, for thirty years, in municipal government leisure services, also known as Parks and Recreation.  

In 1996 was retired through downsizing and worked in the non-profit sector and industry until 2004 when he and his wife, Mary, through her work, were sent to Mexico on a two-year employment contract. 

He returned to Canada for a brief period in 2005, after which he and Mary moved to Tucson, AZ, where her employment continued and Michael retired. They remain there to this day. 

In 2002, when asking questions of his mother about his father, who was killed in action in WW11 on April 30, 1945. He was about to write the book, the first of four, It’s Just About Me, (the title is misleading) which was about two young kids, Michael and his sister, Margo, growing up in post-war, small-town Canada, without a father that war had taken from them. 

On questioning his mother, she said you may as well have these and handed him over two-hundred letters his father, Donald, had sent to his mother, Phyllis, from before the war, after he signed up with the Canadian Active Forces in July 1940, while he trained across Canada, from England June 1943 to the War’s front in July 1944, until his untimely death on April 30, 1945, one week before VE Day in Europe. 

Donald left for war duties in England in June of 1943. Michael was born the following November. They never saw each other. 

It took Michael, after receiving and reading those letters – Life Letters – until 2015 to complete the book, Ducky, and republish it in 2021.  

Michael has drawn from his life experiences, not having an in-person father and the wonderful letters from that father, to complete Ducky, a name his mother and father called each other regularly.