Meet Irv Smith author of Pensacola Days at Bethany Beach Books, on Tuesday, July 22nd at 6:30pm!
About Irv:
Irv Smith is 78 years old and twice retired. He was born in Kansas, moved 17 times with his Navy family, attended five elementary schools in four states and North Africa, and ended up in suburban Washington DC. Like his father, a career Naval Aviator, he joined the Navy while he was in college .When he graduated, he completed AOCS and served almost four years in the Navy. After being honorably discharged, he went to grad school, completed a three year management internship, and spent the next thirty years working for elected officials, and then almost twenty years in the Real Estate business. He now lives in Bethany Beach, Delaware where he researched and wrote a copyrighted biography of Major Stephen Pless, USMC ,who he me years earlier at the Pensacola Naval Air Station. Two years after completing the biography, entitled Conspicuous Gallantry, he wrote his first novel, Pensacola Days.
Pensacola Days
In 1969, four recent college graduates, each with the dream of becoming Naval Aviators, meet in Pensacola Florida. Completing Aviation Officers Candidate School (AOCS), sixteen weeks of intense Marine Corps training, is the first step towards their dream. They soon realize that the Marine Corps training was far more rigorous than anything they could have imagined. In addition to the friend- ships formed with each other and their fellow AOCS candidates, the four men make other new friends: two young women who moved to Pensacola to start new lives after experiencing personal losses, a Naval Aviator who returns to Pensacola to reunite with the love of his life, and a recently divorced nurse who returns to continue her career. The young men, Striker, Sticky, Hound, and Bulldog, are faced with tragic accidents and altered choices in their careers and personal lives.