John (1936-1995) was born in Boston, Massachusetts. During the early 1960s, he worked as a radar technician on the Distant Early Warning (DEW) radar line in Alaska. Subsequently, he became a writer for industry and worked on a variety of writing assignments for defense and electronic firms. In 1967, he headed a team of technical writers on a project to document communications in South Vietnam. In 1972, he received his Bachelor’s degree in English from Northeastern University, and in 1973, he earned a Master’s degree in Education. Because of his various assignments and travel, it took him 13 years of night school to earn his degrees.
In 1977, his job was relocated, and a 10-minute commute became a very long one-hour commute. To combat the tedium of the ride, he started to tape-record notes for a possible book about his different writing jobs. Quite quickly, the notes became voluminous, so he selected one of his earliest and most interesting jobs – on the DEWLine at Icy Cape, Alaska
[The above biography comes from John V. Griffin’s original “About the Author and the Book”.]