About the Author
JOHN VAN GELDERN’s life often reads like an adventure novel in itself. While serving the US Navy in W.W. II, the author had two ships sink beneath him His ships were hunted by German submarine Wolf Packs in the North Atlantic and Japanese Zeroes in the Pacific.
These adventures gave him the fodder for what later became a March of Time documentary and a book he called The Fighting Lady. This story chronicled the lives, loves and fears of the men who served about his hard hit ships.
After the war, he lived in New York City and became an itinerant jokesmith, selling material to such radio shows as the Fred Allen Show, the Henry Morgan Show, the old "Can You Top This?" show and others.
In the late forties van Geldern moved to Hollywood and for several years wrote scripts for the early TV shows. In 1953, he put together one of the first TV Presidential campaign films for General D. Eisenhower. During that time, he married a young film actress and fathered 3 children.
By 1954, tired of Hollywood, van Geldern decided to return to his first love, the outdoors and mining. As a mining engineer, he worked throughout the western US, Mexico, Central and South America until retirement in 1986.
Throughout these years van Geldern continued to write articles, short stories and novels. In 1979, he began gathering research and the information for a trilogy of novels he calls "The Conspiracy Trilogy", the remaining two are presently being completed.
