User:Chuckmiester999

I write as Charles Lee Lesher.

Born in Kansas, I spent my childhood in Colorado and attended high school in Southern California. It was there, in a small Mojave Desert town, that I received a heavy dose of Pentecostal religion. From them I learned about speaking in tongues, the Rapture, and the Second Coming of Christ. What really stuck with me over the years were the stories concerning the Antichrist and the Number of the Beast. At this point in life, I find it remarkable that otherwise intelligent people will believe such strange tales without question.

The day after high school graduation, I moved to Phoenix, Arizona and enrolled in auto mechanics school. Over the next year, my days were filled with school and learning how to make it on my own. I worked as a bus boy, a fry cook, slung hamburgers, drove delivery trucks and sold vacuum cleaners door to door just to make ends meet. However, it wasn’t long after graduating that I realized that I didn’t like being a mechanic either. At the time I was working changing tires in the Monkey Wards Auto Center at Christown Mall. At lunch one day on impulse, I walked into the recruiting station and joined the Army.

The reason this sounds like I was bouncing around from job to job is that I was. I skipped over at least twenty jobs, some lasting months, the shortest only a few hours. I was a rudderless ship. Having fun was never a problem but I wanted more and the most influential friends I had were Vietnam vets just a few years back home. Older, wiser, tougher, their stories and demeanor drew me into the Army like a moth to the flame. In the Army, I learned physical and mental discipline that has served me well throughout life.

At Fort Dix, they taught me how to use an M16. At Aberdeen Proving Grounds, they taught me how to use an arc welder and cutting torch. After attending boot camp and AIT on the East Coast, Uncle Sam sent me to Germany where I spent three years fixing M60A1 Main Battle Tanks and trying to stay warm while playing the coolest war games you can imagine. Anybody out there remember Reforger? I also took my turn pulling guard duty. It is an eerie feeling looking through binoculars across no-mans-land at someone on the other side looking back, both of you carrying live ammo. That’s as close to combat as I came, thank the Great Spaghetti Monster!

While in Europe, I purchased a motorcycle and toured at every opportunity, which wasn’t nearly enough. I also learned to ski in the Alps, keep up with the Germans on the Autobahn, and drink with strangers in strange towns. I’ve tried to sit down and list the number of rock concerts I attended while stationed in Europe but I know I missed some. Fuzzy memories keep popping up at the most inauspicious times. That I survived my European tour of duty surprises me still.

When I wouldn’t re-up, the Army got pissy and sent me to El Paso for the last few months of my enlistment. I guess they showed me! Don’t tell them but I had a great time in Texas. I drove dirt track racers, went to more rock concerts, partied, played drums in a local rock band and partied. Total blast! Somewhere along the way I lost my hearing. Oh… I’m not totally deaf, except in the high frequencies. I just have this god-awful ringing in my ears all the bloody time!

After the Army I returned to Phoenix, got a job, started college and generally bounced around some more until one day I received a call from an old army friend. She wasn’t really all that old, but she did have long red hair and an attitude. We got along great! I accepted her invitation to come up to Wisconsin for a visit. The next day I loaded my ’70 Mustang with everything I owned in the world including my dog and headed for Madison. Only after arriving did I realize there was a university in town. I ended up staying for a while. Enrolling at the University of Wisconsin was one of the better decisions I have made in my life. (Marrying Peggy was the other.)

I didn’t know what I wanted to become but surprise, surprise… I found that I liked learning. This was diametrically opposite attitude from the one I had in high school. In high school, I looked for the easiest way to get by. At some point, I changed and now, I actually sought out difficult courses and excelled in them! Oh don’t get me wrong, I still liked to play hard but now I was doing it a little more responsibly. The Army had something to do with it but I was getting older, wiser and more determined. Five years later, I graduated from the University of Wisconsin, Madison with a BS in Engineering Mechanics-Aerospace. I loved Wisconsin and it was with great reluctance that I left and moved back to Arizona.

It didn’t take long to find a job and I started working in a small aerospace firm that converted old military missiles into scientific sounding rockets. Typical of corporate maneuvers, the company was bought by a larger East Coast corporation and moved to the other side of town. A few years after that, Reagan’s Star Wars Missile Defense Plan collapsed sending the aerospace industry into the mud. I was caught up in layoffs but looking back, it was the best thing that could have happened to me. I would never have met my wife, Peggy, the love of my life. I decided to go back to school and enrolled in the graduate program at Arizona State University. Two years later, they handed me a Masters degree in Materials Science.

Again, it didn’t take long to get a job. I boiled down my choices to either being a big fish in a small pond or small fish in a big pond. I settled on being the Quality Manager at a small electronics manufacturer. During eight years there, I helped them double then triple their annual income and pulled them kicking and screaming into the 21st century. I wrote a computer program that tracked parts and labor throughout the assembly process. I started from scratch using SQL7 and MS Access mostly on my own time before and after the normal workday and on weekends. I averaged at least twenty hours every weekend for months at a time. Persistence is my middle name!

With the support of my loving wife Peggy and our wonderful family, I made the commitment of becoming a writer. Since then, I have researched and developed plots and characters in the same bulldog fashion that I designed rockets and computer programs as an engineer.

I can’t begin to express my appreciation to everyone who reads my stories.

Thanks! Chuck