A little bit about Rich... Richard J. May is an individual who has an insatiable desire to learn more about everything and his extensive and varied background attests to this. Born in McDowell County, West Virginia, his family moved to Indianapolis, Indiana when he was barely three weeks old. Except for summers at his grandparents’ farm in southern West Virginia, he spent most of his youth in Indianapolis. A child prodigy artist, at age twelve, he was the youngest person to be awarded a scholarship to the prestigious John Herron Art Institute. At age sixteen, his parents divorced and he moved to Akron, Ohio with his mother, the former June Evelyn Scott, and his two younger sisters. After high school, Rich enlisted in the Navy in 1958 and was trained as an aerial photographer. His duty stations included the Naval Photographic Center in Washington, D.C. and a NATO unit in Keflavik, Iceland, where he made numerous trips across the Arctic Circle. His duties also took him to various posts across Scandinavia, Europe, and French Morocco. His twenty-first birthday (August 13, 1961) coincided with the sealing of the Berlin Wall, and he was at the Brandenburg Gate, in Berlin, to photograph the event. After leaving the Navy in 1962, he returned to Akron, Ohio, married and began a family. Son, Gregory was born in 1963, Douglas in 1966, and daughter, Paula in 1970. While employed as a mechanical designer, he helped design the first operational hyperbaric chamber, air springs for semi-trucks, and obtained a patent for the machine that manufactures clear polyethylene cling-wrap. Rich later enrolled at the University of Akron and attended part-time while starting a career as a police officer in 1970. In 1978, after obtaining a BS in Technical Education from the University of Akron, Rich began to teach in the police academy, and also in the Akron University Community and Technical College, Department of Criminal Justice. He taught for fourteen years at the University of Akron. Upon his retirement from the Akron Police Department in 1990, he received his Masters in Public Administration from the University of Akron Graduate School. It was while he was in Graduate School that he developed an idea for his first novel. In 1990, he took a full-time teaching position in the Department of Criminal Justice at North Central Technical College in Mansfield, Ohio, for one year, and then moved to Lawton, Oklahoma, where he became a faculty member in the Department of Politics, Sociology and Criminal Justice of Cameron University. In 1993, Rich enrolled in the Criminology PhD program at the University of Oklahoma and completed the course requirements in 1998. While at Cameron University, he became a member of the Oklahoma Criminal Justice Research Consortium, and helped develop new goals, legislation, and standards for the Oklahoma Criminal Justice and Corrections Systems. In 1998, Rich was diagnosed with Prostate Cancer and resigned his position at Cameron University. Upon successfully completing a grueling radiation therapy, he moved to Heidelberg, Germany to complete research on his first novel. After a year in Germany, he moved back to the United States, to Charlotte, North Carolina, where he completed and published his first novel, "The Killing Frost: An American Tragedy.” Since returning to the United States, he has concentrated his efforts on writing. While still in Graduate School at the University of Akron, he published several articles in the Journal of the Ohio Policy Information Network. He has also completed a number of other short stories and poems, and is busy working on several other novels simultaneously. A descendant of noted Scottish author and poet, Sir Walter Scott, Rich and his wife, Pam, currently live in beautiful Scottsdale, Arizona, a city named for another of his distant relatives, Chaplain Winfield Scott. Now retired, he enjoys golf, travel, hiking, camping, fishing, bicycling and working in his Scottsdale church. He is a life member of the National Association of Naval Photographers (NANP). Scott Family Tartan Winner: International Library of Photography's Editor's Choice Award, 2006 Recipient: Time Magazine's Man of the Year Award, 2006 Recipient, Congressional Order of Merit, 2005 Life Member, National Association of Naval Photography Member, Scottsdale Artists League, 2005-present Member, American Legion, Scottsdale Post 44, 2005-present Member, American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) In July 2005, negotiations began with a major publisher in the People's Republic of China to translate and publish all of his novels and most of his short stories and poetry. |
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