ABOUT THE AUTHOR DR. KEN ARMSTRONG
I didn’t know whether a long-time nonprofit executive could, late in life (I’m 59), learn a new trick. How could I expect a prospective reader to have enough confidence to spend hard-earned money on a copy of Saving the President?
Well, the fact that the book exists should count for something. And since I wrote the novel, it must be a product of who I am. Either I’m made of the “write stuff” or I’m not. Here’s who I am, and you can decide whether you think there’s a better than even chance that I can pull it off!
I’ve always been creative and have always written (but never fiction short stories, let alone novels). Plus I’ve rarely felt something was too tough for me. My parents were demanding, sometimes aggravatingly so, but they instilled confidence in me.
In my postsecondary career, I imagine I’ve written 5,000 pages. My doctoral dissertation alone is 1,000. Then there are two masters degrees, undergrad, and a little law school thrown in.
I’ve written speeches, church plays, parables for work, countless marketing and fundraising pieces, and the occasional poem or song.
But I never prepared myself to write a novel. It just happened.
I’m a very blessed preacher’s kid. We moved a lot. Until college I never attended the same school more than two years. Rebellion was never part of this first-born’s game plan.
Studying and achieving were. College debate took center stage eventually, as I prepared to be the next Perry Mason in training at University of Michigan Law School.
You know what? Every other student in my law school first-year class thought the same thing! We realized during our first year that we weren’t going to be Perry. Most assimilated this discovery and went on to perfectly fine careers in contract, property, or estate law. I said, forget it; no Perry Mason, no law school.
Nonprofit work, particularly liberal arts higher education, became my choice. Along the way I’ve worked at a number of colleges, but you’ll note in Saving the President a mention of my favorite: Mary Baldwin College in Staunton, Virginia.
My Ph.D. from University of Virginia and twin masters degrees in education and business administration were equipping me for a college presidency.
Then came the detour. George, who sang in the same section in the church choir, turned out to be the Board chair of the United Way in Dallas. A casual lunch he set up with the president of that United Way led to a temporary (in my mind) learning opportunity there, one of the 1,300 independent organizations of that name in the country.
Here I sit 15 years later having fallen in love with the community aspects of that work. As the major gifts officer in Dallas for three years and the president here in Tallahassee for almost 12, my responsibility has been raising $75,000,000 or so.
If that doesn’t make you bold enough to think you can write a book, what will?!
Tracking my background and career, one might wonder how a bookworm turned into a people person. My dad and my grandma were interpersonally gifted, so I had good role models. But more in my family preferred the quieter, orderly life, and that’s probably my natural tendency, even today. For example, sitting for hours on end and writing is just fine with me.
Extraversion, which is the bread and butter of my professional life, came almost certainly from travel.
You know that my family moved a great deal while I was growing up, but the unveiling was in 1965 when we went to Africa and Europe. This trip changed me in countless ways, and it instilled wanderlust. I have scratched that itch in 30 countries and hope more are to come (buy more books—hint hint!).
I live in Tallahassee, Florida, and married my bride Jeanie last year, gaining in the process a fine young man named Christopher. We are a wild and happy family.
The Acknowledgement section in Saving the President begins with homage to my community. I’ll end with it here. This is home. The community (we call it the Big Bend because it’s here that the peninsula of Florida bends into the panhandle of the North Florida Gulf coast) has taken me in. This is a wonderful place to live and raise a family, made so by the warm and generous people in a to-die-for part of God’s creation.
I’ve gotten to know literally thousands of you through my work at United Way of the Big Bend. If it hadn’t been just too sappy, I’d have dedicated the novel to all my neighbors here in the Big Bend. You know who you are.