Dale Bingham

I started writing as soon as I knew what a pencil and paper was. The same with reading. I can even recall, even though it's been many many years now, not wanting to wait to learn to read. My father is a voracious reader and I always saw him with his nose in a book and I wanted to know what that was all about so as soon as I could read, I did read anything that interested me. I really honestly read the encyclopedias - my mom would get one every pay day at the grocery store and bring them home for me and I read them cover to cover.

But just like reading, writing is so much just an extension of my love of books and it opened up new worlds that I could reach with a pen and a paper. This may sound funny to some people, but when Christmas or my birthday came around, I loved getting big gifts like a bicycle or similar, but I was just as sincerely content with pads of paper, pens and pencils, and notebooks. I wrote poems, stories, football plays and diagrams, song lyrics, and anything else I wanted to, so long as I had an outlet to be creative, I was.

This book truly has it's base in my childhood. My best friend Anthony and I would play and prepare and dream of our own "safety patrol" where we would help others and rescue others. It was a very safe imagination we had and little did I know that when I was only 18 years old I would become a paramedic and start a career on the ambulance, a career that continues to this day, 25 years plus, in emergency medicine.

And though I was voracious reader like my father, even when I was very young still, I was not into science fiction or vampire books, and books like the Hobbit were a very popular series back then, but it wasn't for me. And then some of my own kids were into Harry Potter's books, while the others, like myself, just found no interest in those things. So I wanted to write an alternative for kids like me to read - something outside the science fiction or wizard realm