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About the Author - Whalen Wehry
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The highlight of my first grade was when two second grade girls would read stories to me in the coat room of the old wooden school house in Pennsylvania. I was among the first TV generation and loved the medium’s storytelling powers.
I read my first book, a western story paperback, at seven and from the feelings and insights it gave me. I hankered to be a storyteller.
My mother would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up and I said “a writer!” She encouraged that.
I worked in the fields and on the farm for my parents, hard work and boring. I remember staying up nights to watch “The Seahawk”, “Charge of the Light Brigade,” “Hunchback of Notre Dame,” “Lost Horizons,” Tarzan and other movies, then delighting in telling the stories to my cousins down the road.
Back then, I had an allowance of $2 a week, most of which went to purchasing books and classic comics to enhance a somewhat droll German childhood of a farmer’s son. In the coal region town of Ashland where my mother came from and where I was born, I encountered Russian, Lithuanian, Italian, Irish and other kids and cultures.
Looking back, it was a rich childhood.
Our home had books in it like Gone With the Wind, The Fountainhead and The Yearling.
Two high school teachers, history instructor and librarian Eugene Schrope and chemistry teacher Stu Prince, became my friends and were extremely supportive. Schrope ordered books like Kenneth Robert’s Northwest Passage and Arundel. I suspect he ordered them for me.
I wrote my first fiction manuscript when I was 17.
It seemed that my favorite authors, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Ruark and others had gone to war and became writers. There wasn’t bright prospects for an 18-year-old in the fields and coal mines of Pennsylvania. I joined the Army expecting to go to Vietnam.
I was sent to Korea instead.
That began the most enriching time of my life. It was a land still recovering from the Korean War and I was the only correspondent covering the hushed hostilities along the savage firefights along the DMZ in 1967. Cast among newsmen drafted from stateside daily newspapers and visiting Western journalists, with an M-14 strapped to my shoulder and a reporter’s notebook in one hand and a Petri 7S camera in the other, I discovered I could produce the same quality and timely reports.
And I remember climbing the hill to the Camp Ross Messhall, gazing at the craggy, majestic mountains to the south and Seoul and they seemed to whisper to me to learn their past. It was a recovering land worth defending and worth loving.
I spent much of the 60s, 70s and 80s in Asia and became the Korea News Bureau chief for Pacific Stars and Stripes overseas daily newspaper. I fell in love with a culture and a people well before I asked a Korean lady to be my wife.
As a youth in Korea, I occasionally had to stop by the United Nations Command Headquarters in Seoul, where stoic pictures of past four-star generals who had commanded forces since 1950 were on display. I sensed there was past involvement with the West that no one was imparting. I started researching, and as assignments across South Korea followed, picked up things that did not belong in stories I was covering.
Fifteen of a 21 year career was spent in Korea.
I discovered a past as rich as it was tragic and share that in COREA DAWN, COREA TWILIGHT and SEOUL.
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