Where do writers come from and how do they get that way? Good question. With a lot of answers. Wallace J. Gordon has been writing for a living for something like forever – fifty-five years and counting – and after piling up mountains of rejection slips for short stories and a novel, he made a successful and satisfying detour into the advertising business, writing ads and commercials for clients ranging from Coco-Cola and Dodge to the neighborhood bank.

However, after almost forty years of the advertising wars, he decided enough was enough, and is now writing books for himself, his wife and kids, and anyone else who happens to stumble across them. ANOTHER KIND OF WRITER, 1946, shows you how and when and where it all began, and is one of six memoirs he has written and is publishing. So far.

You are cordially invited to come along for journey ...

My mother had finally left him when I was nine, and eventually divorced him. When we left I’d just finished the fourth grade, my baby sister Cleo was barely three, and life had gotten just about as bleak as life can get.

By that time my father had been an alcoholic for several years, and had abused my mother – sometimes physically – for those same several years.

That was after he’d spent two years in the Wisconsin State Penitentiary at Waupun. And after he’d been a bootlegger for several years, which is what got him into the state penitentiary in the first place.

Along the way we’d owned two houses, rented one or two more plus numerous apartments, lived on everything from hope to a farm in Wisconsin, to several other places in Wisconsin and Minnesota, to several different parts of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, where most of those moves began and ended.

Between the time Mom left my father and the time I got out of the army at 21, I’d seen him only once that I can remember. That once was the Christmas I was 11, when my father suddenly materialized for an hour or so and gave me my first bike. The shiny new red one that was repossessed several weeks later because he "forgot" to make the payments on it.

I don’t know if all of this really justifies the way I felt about him, but that’s irrelevant. Most of the time I just didn’t think about him. And that’s the way my life went for years. I just didn’t think about him. Not even when I was changing my name.

It was years later that I finally realized why I’d changed my name. Years later that I finally realized how much I must have hated my father. And must have hated the name he left me.

That’s why Wallace J. Gordon was born.