About THE AUTHOR
Dan spent boy summers camping with his family on Phantom Island in the Lake George Narrows where he excelled at catching crayfish and paddling a canoe in expectation of accompanying his father on a promised 40-mile canoe round trip to the fabled fort at Ticonderoga, when he was ‘old enough.’ He matured sufficiently, but so did his father, so Dan resorted to sightseeing boats to travel the length of the Lake on his own. Scrabble with his mother was the drill on rainy days. The view of Black Mountain from the family campsite appears on Page 136 of Carl Heilmann’s book ‘Lake George.’
When home in Brooklyn, his father taught American history and his mother taught literature and together kept an ample library in their apartment home, so he dove in with predictable result. Graduating from Erasmus Hall, H. S., he was awarded for being an ‘Athlete, Scholar and Gentleman,’ attributable to a weak field that year, particularly in the latter category, and a connection to the staff member in charge of selections. He majored in English at Dartmouth and after graduating with a law degree from George Washington and passing the Pennsylvania Bar, he began a career of assisting wild and crazy entrepreneurs from both a legal and business perspective.
Predictably, he often could not save them from themselves, but one client did a stretch on Forbes’ Richest Men in America list. Another sold his company for just under $1B in watered stock. A software maven asked Dan to CEO his flailing company, and after applying some much-needed structure, focus and team building, the two divisions were later sold to two different NYSE companies.
The writing bug, long channeled into marketing copy and business plans, re-asserted itself, more creatively this time, and novels began to materialize, remain unpublished, but a fourth effort, this one set on Lake George, with the help of his excellent editor, Susan Schwartz, seemed worthy of seeing the light of a broader day. Only the historical and literary characters are real, at least in the form in which they existed until he began to tinker with them. All the modern-day folk in the story are his creations although bits and pieces of physical and character traits may have been borrowed from friends and acquaintances encountered along the way.
From watching the flow and ebb of the fortunes of his clients he realized just how fleeting their days in the sun could be unless they learned to anticipate and adjust to inevitable change. So too the Lake. It’s quite different these days. Just ask Ben, Tom, James or George if they venture by. They’ll give you an earful. If you encounter General George Lord Howe, the most ethereal of all, patch Dan right in. He’ll have some questions and would love the opportunity. They don’t come often. Where was U-Tube when we really needed it?