More than you probably want to know about Ranse Parker
y wife Gayle and I have been married for twenty years. We
have four children; one in college, one headed to college, one in junior high
and one in elementary. There might be one more but we can’t be sure. It’s the
one I keep holding the door for at restaurants after the other four have
already gone in. You ever do that? It’s like there’s an invisible child in your
family. Maybe it’s a manifestation engrained from years of hearing my wife
confuse and run our children’s names together. Je-rya-matt? Who’s that? Our
fifth child? That could explain it.
I was raised on an 80-acre farm near the tiny community of Castleford
in Southern Idaho. My life was full of swathers, combines, bailers, real
trucks, small tractors, megalithic sprinkler systems, a few monster sized
tractors, fields full of corn, wheat, barley, hay, beans, sugar beets, potatoes
and sometimes rocks. Ah yes, picking rock all day in dry, dusty fields under
the blazing sun. That would contrast the winters when a little wind and three
inches of snow would form three-foot drifts across the roads. Good times.
Cattle and sheep were common in my part of the country as
were dairies. My high school was populated by an average of 88 students total
(including the 9th grade) with 28 in my graduating class - and ours
was one of the bigger ones. The open and quiet country still beckons me to
return. You can take the boy out of the farm… When the animated movie Barnyard
came out, it seriously messed with my mind to see even computer generated male
Holstein cows…with udders. That was just so wrong.
After graduating from Idaho State University with a degree
in Communications Electronics, I was hired as a Satellite Systems and Broadcast
Engineer for Bonneville International Corporation. Later I moved into the
private sector of the communications industry and managed the interests of a
few large companies. It was during that time I joined the Editorial Advisory
Board and became a contributing writer for an international trade magazine.
Later, I left the regular work force and started my first
communications services business. Shortly after that I formed another corporation
and built the largest wireless messaging network in Idaho. I was proud of that
one. Why back in Idaho of all places? Opportunity and familiarity. Sometimes
the best place to grow a small business is where big business doesn’t want to
go.
A few other businesses followed, then I contracted to manage
communications facilities for a national company. These were the communications
buildings and/or towers you see on mountaintops (at least in the Eastern and
Western U.S.), on buildings, along roadways (cellular phone towers) and
sometimes in the middle of absolutely nowhere. Traveling to those sites is a
book full of stories in itself. Regular visits included driving to the top of
10,000-foot plus mountains with long, narrow and twisty-steep roads. Or using snowmobiles,
snow cats and my favorite, helicopters. I have some great pictures and a video
of our helicopter flying in to land on a small helipad hanging off the side of
a narrow mountain peak. I love helicopters, have ridden in many, and have
piloted a Jet Ranger.
Toward the end of that stint, I started contracting,
consulting, designing and installing communications solutions for a wide
variety of corporate clients. My company also consulted for the 2002 Winter
Olympics. It was a busy and prosperous time.
Then one day my world went Wizard of Oz when I awoke
completely abandoned in the middle of the professional desert. A profound
dream, an overwhelming impression, several years in an intense commitment to
writing and here we are.
The work in my life has been so varied that occasionally I
feel like Jarod from the 1990’s TV series The Pretender. When people sometimes
comment, “Oh, you’re a writer?” I’m tempted to reply, “I am today.”
- Ranse
Parker
Author,
Circle of Doors
