After writing a dozen biographies and family histories for clients, I’ve been accepted by the Association of Ghostwriters. I’m often asked about the role of a ghostwriter. It’s fairly simple: a ghostwriter is hired to write a book for someone who may not have the time, patience, or skill to write it themselves.
Historians tell us that ghostwriters have existed for 5,000 years, dating back to ancient Egypt, when scribes penned words for their pharaohs. Many publishers learned early the power of an author’s name and hired ghostwriters to continue writing series even after the original author’s death. If you ever read Nancy Drew or The Hardy Boys, they were written by many different authors.

Today, it’s been estimated that at least 60 percent of nonfiction bestsellers are ghostwritten. Today’s ghostwriters are also referred to as collaborators, and they’ve been busy helping celebrity clients become bestselling authors. I’m one of the writers who collaborate with people who are not considered celebrities but have a life story they wish to preserve and pass along to their family and friends. I help them write their biographies, and sometimes, I’m acknowledged as a co-author, and sometimes not.

I began by penning biographies for two WW II veterans. In the past eight years, I’ve worked with and written about successful men and women from diverse fields, including real estate, economics, music, golf, banking, law enforcement, and more. Each person is unique, and preserving and sharing their life story is as much a gift to them as it is to their family. Capturing these memories in a book is a way of leaving a literary legacy and becoming a part of history.

Anyone who has led a life filled with extraordinary experiences has probably been told, “You should write a book.” It’s easier said than done, which is why many of them turn to someone with a track record of working with accomplished individuals and successfully completing biographies that paint a revealing portrait of that person’s life. And it doesn’t hurt that this biographer is also an award-winning novelist.
Maybe you have had a book idea streaming through your head but didn’t know where to start. Or perhaps you’re one of those people who have been urged to write a memoir or your family history, but life seems to have other plans, and time is slipping away. If either of those scenarios strikes a chord, let me show you how we can collaborate and make those dreams come true. Contact me at [email protected] for a free consultation.

If you read my rambling bio on the About page, you will see that I worked at WJCT for many years, Jacksonville’s Public TV and radio stations, now branded as Jax PBS. Highlighting that time were the eight years I produced the Jacksonville Jazz Festival. Once hyped in terms that would have made writers of fiction blush as “the largest free  jazz festival in the world,” the music of jazz greats blasted out of WJCT’s backyard—Metropolitan Park. The City of Jacksonville launched the event in 1980 as Mayport & All That Jazz, staging it in the tiny fishing village of Mayport, Florida, with performances by Della Reese, Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, and Buddy DeFranco. The Festival returned to Mayport the following year with headliner Dizzy Gillespie. WJCT became involved that year, producing a one-hour PBS special despite the rain that washed out some of the afternoon acts.

The City of Jacksonville partnered with WJCT to produce the Festival in Metropolitan Park the following year, although, at the time, the park was nothing more than acres of riverfront land used mostly for Gator Bowl event parking. Between the 1982 and 1983 Festivals, Metropolitan Park received a major facelift with the construction of the Florida National Pavilion and added amenities. It also came with a name change—Jacksonville & All That Jazz. WJCT celebrated with eight hours of live coverage hosted by Billy Taylor and Steve Allen.

Mike Tolbert produced the Festival for the City for the next few years until WJCT became the sole producer in 1985, and Dan Kossoff became the executive producer. Dan handed the producing responsibilities to me in 1993, and I was welcomed by “the year of the great monsoon.” We had some great times, despite the weather, and over the next eight years, we expanded the scope of the event, brought in more outstanding performers, and kept the music going through the year 2000 when WJCT decided to return the event to the City of Jacksonville.

I didn’t mean for this to be a history lesson on the Jacksonville Jazz Festival when I sat down to write this blog post, but when I read that the City of Jacksonville, which had moved the event to multiple sites in downtown Jacksonville starting in 2022—none of them named Metropolitan Park—was moving one of the stages back to the park for the 2024 Festival, I was overcome by nostalgia. It’s true that the covered pavilion is gone, but memories of the park are still strong. Not only was Metropolitan Park the venue for many jazz performers, but other entities, like the Jacksonville Symphony Orchestra, used it for a series of concerts titled Starry Nights with star performers like Tony Bennett. Other stars gracing the pavilion stage included the Beach Boys, Willie Nelson, Faith Hill, Chicago, and Mary Chapin Carpenter. And that Carpenter concert in Metropolitan Park is where the idea for this blog began. It triggered memories of our first feline companion, Chloe, and a column I wrote for a local newspaper about saying goodbye to Chloe. So, I’ll cut to the chase. Here is that 1993 column.

Time to say goodbye to Chloe

           Like Dorothy, who was swept away to the mythical Land of Oz, nothing would ever be the same again. Once Chloe padded into our lives that Saturday morning seven years ago, the change in our household was so drastic that we might have welcomed a visit by a cyclone.

            Little did we know that a show of compassion for a malnourished calico would lead to the DiGenti family opening a hotel for wayward felines. Perhaps if I hadn’t looked into those unwavering melancholy green eyes I might not have felt compelled to give her that bowl of milk. After a brief absence, she surprised us by moving all her furniture into our garage, along with five kittens. How could we turn our backs on this feline? We found homes for her kittens, but Chloe was now our cat. From years of petless living, we had taken the plunge, and with a cat of all things – it was beyond belief to me and everything I held sacred.

            Chloe was special, though. She was our cat, and she remained our cat even as four others entered our lives over the next five years. Like the lady of the manor who sees younger courtesans brought into the royal household, Chloe was not amused by our transgressions. We endured her fits of temper and her periods of surliness because we knew it was only temporary. And, sure enough, as my wife and I would sit watching television, our catless laps would beckon her and she would suddenly appear, her purring generator turned up to maximum intensity.

            Over the years, we watched Chloe grow into a major league fat cat approaching fifteen pounds, and I gave up trying to smooth out the claw marks she left on every piece of wood molding in the house.

            Then Chloe changed. She lost weight, and withdrew into herself. Tests revealed that our feisty pet had kidney failure, and nothing could be done to save her. The changes continued, and we watched her weight plummet to less than six pounds.

            Our devoted house cat now wanted to go outside for the first time in seven years. Each time a door opened she would rush out to explore the yard. We let her roam a bit during those last days, sometimes watching her emerge from the canal behind our house muddy and wet. Finally, she looked at us and cried as if asking us to take away the pain, and my dear wife, who loved this animal more than anything, bundled her in a towel and comforted her lovingly like a baby with colic.

           Chloe’s seven years with us were special, but the time had come to say goodbye, and we did that last week. The next night, I dragged us off to see Mary Chapin Carpenter in Metropolitan Park thinking, in my insensitive man way, that it might get her mind off Chloe. Of course it didn’t.  She was lost in her sorrow and I knew she would rather be home than here among the hundreds of people on blankets and lawn chairs. But in the middle of the plaintive song, “Only a Dream,” something funny happened. An orange balloon, illuminated by a full moon, climbed slowly above the sold-out crowd. I watched it spiral upwards over the pavilion until it was just a tiny speck glinting in the moonlight, and I thought of Chloe.

            “Goodbye, Chloe,” I said to myself. “Thanks for picking us to spend your days with, and for touching our lives and our hearts. You did your job well, and now you can rest.”

            Then, with a final twinkle, the balloon disappeared in the night sky like an ember taking its last breath.

We all know Einstein’s famous definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Well, old Al also said, “The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.”

We’re all creatures of habit. We embrace the familiar and find comfort in our customary routines, avoiding change whenever possible. The same can be true of author’s websites. I’ve held on to this parkerfrancis.com website for years, even as major changes have come that might confuse my readers. First of all, Parker Francis is my pen name, a pseudonym I adopted after writing and publishing the Windrusher trilogy which attracted many younger readers along with cat lovers of all ages. When I began writing harder-edged fiction with the Quint Mitchell Mystery series, I wished to avoid any confusion among the younger set and their parents. Hence, the Parker Francis pen name.

Since then, all my fiction—novels and short stories—have been published using the Parker Francis name. But to confuse matters further, I began collaborating with individuals to write their life stories. These literary legacies capture the lives of extraordinary men and women and the amazing experiences they wished to document. I wrote their biographies and Victor DiGenti was often credited as the co-author. The books have been published under my publishing imprint Windrusher Hall Press.

As those additional ghostwriting and publishing services expanded, my website remained fairly static. But now it’s time for a change to reflect the added services and different opportunities available to readers and writers. If you’re reading this, you’ve seen the reboot of ParkerFrancis dot into the Windrusher Hall Press website, the new home for authors Victor DiGenti and Parker Francis.

Change shouldn’t be feared, although as management consultant and engineer, the late W. Edwards Deming once said, “It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.” So, I invite you to check back on a regular basis to view the fearless changes coming to this site.

In 1956 Americans were glued to their TV sets watching the new game show Twenty-One, hosted by Jack Barry and produced by Dan Enright. Charismatic brainiac Charles Van Doren ultimately “earned” $129,000 (the equivalent of $1,188,665 today) and became so famous he appeared on the cover of Time magazine. Twenty-One’s popularity had networks scrambling to create even more quiz shows like Dotto, The $64,000 Challenge, and Tic-Tac-Dough. But things changed fast after Twenty-One contestant Herb Stempel went public with the scandalous news that producer Enright choreographed the show, and he’d purposely allowed Van Doren to win.

Stempel’s admission marked the beginning of the end for the TV quiz shows of that era, and three years later, my less than successful radio career would briefly intersect with one of the key protagonists in this drama. Like dominos falling, contestants from other game shows claimed their contests had been rigged, and in late August 1958, a New York grand jury investigated the quiz fixing allegations. At the time, there were no regulations or specific laws barring game show fraud, and the grand jury handed down no indictments. But Congress took up the investigation resulting in an amendment to the Communications Act prohibiting such actions. The notoriety caused by the inquiry caused CBS to cancel three more large-prize quiz shows in October 1959: The Big Payoff, Top Dollar, and Name That Tune.

Enright took most of the heat for the scandal, but the two men had worked closely together as part of Barry & Enright Productions. The scandals tarnished their reputations, and both men were effectively banned from television. Enright found work in Canada while Barry remained in New York but could not find any TV work for several years. In the fall of 1961, Barry moved to Hollywood, Florida, where he and Enright owned a small AM radio station, WGMA, which they had purchased in 1957. And this is where the coincidental intersection of Barry and DiGenti took place.

Like most Americans, I had followed the scandal in the news, but in 1959 I was in my first year at the University of Florida, worried more about passing my courses than what was happening on the nation’s airwaves. Ironically, I would switch majors the following year from English to Broadcasting (later changed to Telecommunications). As part of my interest in my new major, I took a part-time job at the college’s radio station, WUFT-FM, which was a classical music station at the time. Later, I would operate a studio camera for WUFT-TV when the station’s studio was located beneath the athletic department’s offices.

In the summer of 1962, I found work with WGMA, Barry and Enright’s Hollywood station as a part-time DJ and gofer, working whatever low-rated shift no one else wanted to work. I assume my WUFT-FM experience, paltry though it was, helped me land the job, or the program manager was either inordinately kind or quite desperate. I took that gig at WGMA (now WLQY), unaware that Barry and Enright owned it. I’m not sure how I eventually learned of the connection, but I only had one glimpse of Barry during my two months on the job. He came to the station with two other men—one of them might have been Enright—and I instantly recognized the man who had been a staple on CBS for so long. That was it. We never spoke, and he didn’t acknowledge me as they passed. Barry’s career, by the way, rebounded, and he went on to host The Joker’s Wild, but that wasn’t the end of my mediocre radio career.

I returned to Gainesville after that summer job to earn my degree and landed a job with WJXT-TV, then Jacksonville’s CBS affiliate. After two years on the production crew with some assistant directing experience thrown in, I departed and found work with WIVY-AM, Jacksonville’s first non-network independent radio station. Jacksonville radio pioneer Ed “Bell” Oberle owned WIVY. Ed Bell, his on-air name, taught radio communications at Rutgers before moving to Jacksonville in 1946, where he opened the Institute of Radio and Television to teach veterans about radio engineering. He started WIVY in 1950, and it became the number one station within a year, playing the more gentile popular music of the day.

I was hired in what must have been another act of desperation for the early-morning shift, signing on each morning at 6:30 a.m. My job wasn’t that difficult. I’d read the headlines, and spin a few of the pop hits of the day from the station’s playlist, including Dionne Warwick’s Walk On By, Everybody Loves Somebody by Dean Martin, and Where Did Our Love Go by the Supremes. At 7:00 a.m. (I think), I threw it to Ed Bell, who broadcast The Ed Bell Show from his home “on the beautiful St. Johns River,” playing the theme, The Sunny Side of the Street. After Ed’s two-hour program of easy listening music and commentary by the mellow-voiced station owner, I would pick it up again and play the pop hits of the days, read some commercial copy along with news at the top of the hour. I used the on-air persona of “Bashful Vic,” which many people said suited me well.

My radio gig started at about 5:45 a.m. when I’d stumble into the station, located, as I recall, in a small office building on San Marco Boulevard. I’d unlock the studio door with a key entrusted to me by the station program manager, assemble the records for that morning, and pull the wire copy from the teletype machines.

The Associated Press and United Press teletype machines were outside the studio in the hallway, noisily cranking out the latest news from around the globe. My job was to clear the wire each morning and select the most timely headlines to read. I loved these old machines with their clattering keys, ringing bells, and scrolling yellow paper. On rare occasions, a news flash rang a series of bells sending news editors all over the country running to discover the “transcendent important” event since the flash signaled only events of the highest priority.

On this particular morning, there must have been too few neurons flashing in my brain. When I stepped into the hallway to clear the wire for that morning’s news, I neglected to turn the lock on the studio door, which I quickly discovered when I attempted to reenter the studio. My keys, of course, were in my jacket draped across my chair inside the locked studio.

Can you say “Panic,” boys and girls? That early in the morning, there was seldom anyone else in the building, but I ran from door to door, floor to floor, searching for someone, anyone, to help me reenter the studio before the 6:30 sign on time. Alas, I was alone, and 6:30 came and went while I scrambled outside hunting for a telephone booth (remember them?) When I found one, I called the program manager, who I learned had been calling the studio when we hadn’t signed on—I’d been taught that the only acceptable reason for dead air involved cardiac arrest. Speaking with the harried PD, I told him of my plight, and he hastened to the studio to unlock the door. Unfortunately, by this time it was well past the 7:00 a.m. start time for The Ed Bell Show. After signing on, I made a few brief remarks, apologizing for the delay and joking about my problem with door locks before throwing it to the man broadcasting from his home on the beautiful St. Johns River.

Mr. Bell, sounding as cool and mellow as ever, covered beautifully for my error and introduced the first song. I don’t recall what he played, though I like to think it was either Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Crying or Under the Boardwalk, where I wanted to hide. Moments after the opening beats of that record, the phone in the studio lit up. I watched the blinking light with a sense of mounting dread before answering. Of course, it was the man himself, not so cool now, but still mellow of voice, informing me sternly that I was to never, ever again speak during his airtime and taking me to task for what had happened that morning. All I could do was gulp and issue a few contrite “Yes sirs.”

The following week I was asked to return the studio key and summarily fired.

After selling WIVY-AM and FM in 1971, Bell became station manager of WKTZ-FM/Jones College Radio. He had a storied career in Jacksonville radio and wrote and self-published his biography in 2006, Against All Odds: The True Life Saga of a Broadcast Legend. In the spiral-bound memoir, he revealed he had been kidnapped by his father at the age of five and never saw his mother again. Bell died in 2013 at the age of 100, but what happened to the recently engaged young man he fired in 1964? From failed radio announcer, I worked briefly as a less than successful Kirby Vacuum Cleaner salesman before landing a position as a director with WJCT-TV in 1965. But that’s another story.

One year ago, my wife and I were preparing to welcome friends from Virginia to spend a week with us and enjoy The Players Championship. This annual showcase of the PGA TOUR is played within walking distance of our home, and we’d been excited to host our friends to share the event with us. What is it that John Lennon said about making plans? “Life is what happens while you’re making other plans.”

Life, in the form of a pandemic certainly changed everyone’s plans, including the PGA TOUR, which canceled the tournament after the first round. Of course, our friends had opted out even earlier. That was only the beginning, of course, and I don’t need to remind you of how our lives changed over the course of the year, and how we’re still being impacted. Of all the worker bees in our nation, many who lost their jobs, and others who have had to adapt to working from home, full-time writers are probably the least affected. Most of us already work in isolated surroundings; home offices, kitchens, bedrooms, back porches. Wherever we can carry a laptop or pen and legal pad.

And that’s pretty much how I spent the past year. If you read my bio on this site and some of the past items I’ve posted on the News & Events pages (and I admit I’ve been lax in keeping these updated) you already know Parker Francis is Vic DiGenti’s pen name for the mysteries and thrillers I write. So, while Parker has plugged away on a new novel he’s titled PAPER, and written several short stories, Vic has busily worked at his other job of helping people write and publish their own projects.

Windrusher Hall Press is the publishing company I formed to publish my own work, but I’ve also used it to publish all of the biographies and family histories I’ve written for others over the past five years. My role as a writer has expanded from novelist to biographer, researcher, ghostwriter, book doctor, and publisher.

In 2020, I was privileged to work with several passionate clients to turn their dream projects into reality. The first was a slim book packed with commonsense advice for taking control of your life. AIYOBI: ACT IN YOUR OWN BEST INTEREST examines the self-destructive tendencies in all of us that make life more painful, and explains how to act in your own best interest. I worked with neuropsychologist Dr. Norman Plovnick to distill his 50 years of experience into a concise and easy-to-read narrative. AIYOBI is subtitled “Five Principles to Live By Because There is No Future in Staying the Same,” and is available on Amazon.com.

The other book was something totally different. You won’t find it on Amazon or in any retail outlet because it was created and published for a specific audience of family and friends. When my client—I’ll call her Katie because that’s her name—contacted me about turning her father’s Korean War letters into a book, I was instantly intrigued. Being a history buff, I saw her father’s letters as a history lesson very few people are privileged to learn. One from the perspective, not of dull history tomes or from school teachers, but from one of the participants. Katie’s father, Ebbie, served as a radio operator aboard vintage B-29 bombers operating out of Okinawa. Like most men and women in combat zones, his letters home were filled with details, both prosaic and enlightening. They bear witness to the extremes of war, telling tales of homesickness, boredom, close calls, and survival.

LOVE EBBIE proved to be one of the most gratifying projects I’ve had the privilege to work on. I was able to transfer several hundred letters to the pages of the book and illuminate the times and episodes surrounding his service with additional material.

In a future blog post, I’ll provide details on some of the fiction my alter ego, Parker Francis has written during the crazy year of 2020. These include the aforementioned work in progress, the novel PAPER, and my short stories, including one about a young Elvis Presley at the crossroads of his career. Until then, stay safe and as Dionne Warwick told us in her hit song, That’s What Friends Are For, Keep smiling, keep shining …

I’ve made no secret of the fact that Parker Francis is a pen name for a much more boring writer named Vic DiGenti. From time to time I’m asked why I chose to write under a pseudonym and respond by telling people I’m in the Federal Witness Protection Program. Not. The real reason, of course, is because my first series of novels, the Windrusher trilogy, has a much younger audience of readers. When I began writing the Quint Mitchell Mysteries, aimed at an adult audience, I didn’t want to shock my young readers who might think this was another fantasy about a heroic cat. I could see the outrage on mom’s face when 12-year-old Emily shows her mom the scene in Matanzas Bay where Quint and Sabrina are getting it on.

And so Parker Francis was born.  

I sometimes have to be reminded that most people aren’t aware of this fact, and assume the name on the cover is my real name. This was brought home when I was recently interviewed for a “Get to Know” feature in one of our community newspapers, and I explained the pen name game to the reporter. Like most writers, I’ve been interviewed from time to time, and some of the stories read like a work of fiction, leaving me wondering where I was when the interview took place. But Angela Higginbotham did a fine job, and I thought the finished article was worth sharing with those of you who are looking for an inside peek at my life story.

Click here to read the interview.