AUTHOR, 82, To Hold Book Signing at Barnes & Noble starting 5:30 p.m. Friday (March 16). A trek back in time to the 1920s and 30s in 65 short stories.

LONGMONT, Colo.-What happens when a 79-year-old writer returns to his New England childhood home after 61 summers to solve two mysteries and w rite his own epitaph?

David Alter, reporter, author and World War 11 Guadalcanal Marine, now 82, will hold a book signing Friday (March 16) at 5:30 p.m. at . Barnes and Noble Book Sellers in Boulder.

The book , Intrepidations & Funny Business, is a "sort of fictionalized semi autobiographical account of my unorthodox life," said Alter.

It is told uniquely in 65 short stories as he and his wife of 52 years trek back in time 61 years to the 1920s and 30s to East Nassau, the New England settlement where he grew up. His mission there is two fold: unravel the mystery of a missing country doctor who was his mentor and the nagging vow to his father to remove a pistol buried in the plastered bedroom wall of his parents Dutch home, now little more than a junk structure.

Alter was an aerospace, medical and science writer on the Atlas ICBM and Apollo and Space Shuttle programs following a 12-year newspaper reporting career. His six year stint on the Chicago Tribune produced 95 archived bylined stories. He is the recipient of the Pall Mall writing award for freeing a man imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit.

Alter travels back in time to East Nassau, New York, a hamlet of about 75, which was settled during the early 1700s by Killaen van Rensselaer, a Dutch pioneer .The Alter home was among the earliest in Rensselaer County, in one of many hamlets in hollows along the Massachusetts, Vermont and New York State lines.

David demonstrates his story-telling and writing ability as he drifts back to an East Nassau he left 61 ago in 1942 when he enlisted in the Marine Corps during World War 11. He reminisces with "those still around." He envisions Yosha's Bar and Grill as the hamlet's brainy hill-folk square off for a night of competitive Euchre in Intrepidations & Funny Business. He drifts to his former place of worship, the synagogue, wherein now lives an Irish lady. He envisions the fishing of Kinderhook Creek, the medical visits of Ol' Doc Taylor, his mentor; the one-room school house that gave way to a fancy three-story junior high; the night of the Ku Klux Klan; the town drunk who reigned as well digger and privy cleaner; the battle to save Snake Hill from the sledge-hammering Lane Construction Company; the church for whom the bell no longer tolls and his hilarious naked streaking along state route 66 to the horror of East Nassau's Pollyanna's..

And there's the day he drifted (telepathically) through the home that the current caretaker wouldn't' let him tour.

"He contrasts his mentor, Ol' Doc Taylor, with physicians whom the author charges with hypocrisy and the overwhelming desire to place making a buck more important than treating a patient," writes one book reviewer.

David saw action during the invasion of Guadalcanal in the South Pacific. Discharged in 1945, he completed high school and earned a degree in Journalism at the University of Missouri. During his college days, he free lanced historical stories-- several on covered bridges-- and began a news-reporting career that spanned twelve years, progressing from a small daily in Pontiac, Illinois, to newspapers in Iowa and Louisiana where he met his wife and current writing partner. Then on to metropolitan newspapers in Texas, Ohio and Chicago. Alter was lured from the Chicago TRIBUNE in the 1960s by a West Coast aerospace firm as a writer on the Atlas ICBM, then on to the Apollo man-to-the-moon program and then

to NASA's Space Shuttle program at the Manned Spacecraft Center. He authored the award-winning Apollo News Reference Book -- the news media's encyclopedia on lunar space flight.

David and his wife, Lynette, are the parents of a son Paul and daughter, Deborah of Boulder. He is an ardent critic of today's medical practitioners and hospitals, which, he says, are too much enamored with fees and less with patients." His home is in Longmont, and can be reached at owlbeara@comcast.net.

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