An evening with the Central Indiana Writers Association

Thanks to all the great folks at the Central Indiana Writers Association for inviting me to serve as a guest speaker Monday night, June 16. I’d especially like to thank Robin Waldron for suggesting to the group that I was worthy of their time and attention. And thanks to Mike Barrett for setting everything up and giving me good directions to the meeting room in Greenwood. Unfortunately, I forgot where I wrote down the directions, so my wife and I kind of winged it. Fortunately, we found the meeting spot in time for kickoff.

It’s always interesting getting together with fellow writers and finding out what interests them. We had a lot of poets the other night. But many other interests, too.

As I discussed my book, “Murder in Wauwatosa: The Mysterious Death of Buddy Schumacher,” we got into several different topics that the book touches on, as well as some that it doesn’t.

Near the end of the meeting, we somehow, we got onto the topic of family trees and I was a descendant of King John, the brother of Richard the Lionheart. You may have heard of King John from the movie, “The Adventures of Robin Hood.” I’ve also been told (by my dear sweet aunt who would never lie) that I’m a descendant of Lady Godiva.

Being a former sportswriter, I was keenly interested in talking to a man there who was a high school football coach for 40-plus years and had written a book full of stories of his time as a coach, “From the Beginning to the End Zone.”  I later found out that Ray Schultz has a much more storied football background than just being a longtime high school football coach. He was an all-state player at Indianapolis Manual, then played varsity football and basketball at Purdue. He was a scout for Butler University and for the Indianapolis Colts and was inducted into the Indiana Football Hall of Fame in 2006.

It was great talking to him about people we both know and about football, He and his wife were very nice people. As were the rest of the folks I met that night.

Thanks, everybody!

Below are a few of the photos my wife took during the event.