The Valley Rat is a coming of age story of myself while growing up in the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas during the 1960's. The book is divided into ten chapters that cover my early life through college years, elaborating the hard scrabble struggle from finding my way in a lower/middle class upbringing and escaping the mediocrity of this life and finally flourishing into a productive, happy soul. The book highlights my exploits as a competitive swimmer, surfer and waterman in the vanguard of these early sports, including month long surfing surfari's to Matzatlan and San Blas on the Pacific Coast of Mexico. Three chapters encapsulate my relationships with three of my most influential friends, including the unsolved murder of my roommate and best friend, who died at the hands of a notorious Mexican cartel in 1967. My exploits in hunting and fishing trips and my struggles in getting to know the opposite sex are also portrayed. Finally, all of the odd job, work experiences that I held illustrate the desire to better my current position in life and point me in the right direction to escape the Valley and prosper.
About the Author: I have a BS in Psychology and an MS in Management from Texas A&M University. I spent eleven years with Southwestern Bell and AT&T in marketing before starting my telemarketing company. I also started Conference Pros International, an audio, web and video conferencing business, which I operated for ten years and sold to Vialogue in 1999. I then founded A+ Conferencing, which I still operate today. I have written two other nonfiction books. The first one was titled, "Telemarketing, Setting Up for Success", which was published in 1987 by Technology Marketing Corporation. The book was a "how to" book on establishing a telemarketing operation for small to medium sized businesses. Since I was in the telemarketing business for twenty four years, I used this book as my business card to recruit new customers to my telemarketing company, TeleSystems Marketing, Inc. The second book that I wrote was " The Boomer's Guide to Recovering Your Lost Retirement, The Bill Fisher Story", which was self-published on Amazon through Create Space in 2012. This book is about my father in law, Bill Fisher, and how he used the investment strategies of investing in DRIP stocks, municipal bonds and residential rental properties to build multiple sources on income for his retirement.