I started my journalistic career in 1977 with the Journal of Commerce in New York. After seven years of covering the financial industries and foreign trade, I found myself rapt by the commercial ties being forged between the East and West. I moved to Hong Kong in 1985 to freelance for local and foreign publications. After many assignments in Asia, especially China, I found myself more and more tied to that area of the world. I resolved to stay in Hong Kong to observe the transition in sovereignty of that territory to the People’s Republic of China from the United Kingdom.

After that momentous event in 1997, I returned to San Francisco, my birthplace. I began working for the Oakland Tribune in 1998 as a business reporter, initially covering technology and then banking and personal finance in the East Bay. In my 10 years at the Oakland Tribune, my beat shifted several times and I was happy to shine a light on the many entrepreneurs in Oakland. My final assignment before departure in 2008 was to cover the Port of Oakland. I produced several exhaustive profiles of the various skilled workmen and professionals at the port besides examining the many political and economic shifts the port experienced at that time.

During my last five years at the Oakland Tribune, one of the local businessmen I had profiled for the paper asked me to write his life story, and a remarkable one it was. I took him on as a client and he referred me to another distinguished individual whose life story I also recounted.  Both these people chose to keep their manuscripts within the family and not to publish them.

When I became a self-employed writer, I realized that writing a person’s autobiography, ghostwriting his or her memoir, was work I loved to do. I have continued pursuing this passion ever since.

Affiliations & Honors