Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is now available in paperback and eBook at Amazon (click here), other online bookstores, and is orderable at all bookshops.

* * *

A recent note, out of the blue, from a key mentor in my life whose praise can still put birdsong in my heart and helium in my stride, inspired me to reshare this column (with the time frame revised) from my Star archives…

*

It is hard to imagine anyone being luckier in Las Vegas than I was 43 years ago come this September. Freshly graduated from UC Santa Barbara, but jobless, I got a phone call that proved to be like a Jackpot-Jackpot-Jackpot spin on a slot machine.

A newspaper editor had tracked me down on my honeymoon, no easy feat before cellphones, offering an interview for a sportswriter position. That was the good news.

The bad news was the tiny twice-weekly publication, The Desert Trail, was in Twentynine Palms – a one-stoplight triple-digit-temperatures town where no young bride dreams of beginning her new wedded life. No matter, Lisa and I cut our honeymoon short and took a detour through the yuccas landscape on our drive back to Goleta.

I not only got the job, I got a blue-ribbon boss, life-changing mentor, and dear friend in the deal. The latter happened overnight, literally, as Dave Stancliff and his wife and their three very young sons took me into their home for a month.

Under Dave’s tutelage, I received a hands-on master’s degree education in journalism that made me a better writer.

More importantly, he imparted life lessons that made me a better person. For example, instead of giving a homeless person a few bucks for a fast-food hamburger, Dave would buy him or her a restaurant meal. Kinder yet, he sometimes surprised his family by bringing a hungry stranger home as a dinner guest.

Along with a heart of gold, Dave has mettle of steel. Straight from high school he went to fight in the sweltering jungles of Vietnam and Cambodia. Stories of his soldiering experiences gave me nightmares – and he did not even share the worst of the hell he saw.

Indeed, a decade before Tim O’Brien’s remarkable Vietnam War novel, “The Things We Carried” was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, I learned about “The Things Dave Carried” home from that war: PTSD as well as physical health issues caused by Agent Orange. He bravely battled those foes, and still does, as if they were fierce opponents in the ring when he was an Army boxing champion.

To say I admire Dave is an understatement of molehill and mountain proportions, so a blog post he wrote headlined “The Two Most Inspirational People I’ve Ever Met” caught my eye. After all, to be worthy of Dave’s highest esteem would require someone quite special. Eugene “Red” McDaniel certainly measures up. Now in his 90s “and still going strong,” McDaniel is a Vietnam vet who, after being shot down over Hanoi in 1967, spent six years as a POW before being freed.

“Red, who received the most brutal torture at the hands of his North Vietnamese captors, showed me how indomitable the human spirit is in the worst of times,” Dave wrote, having first met McDaniel in the mid-1970s while writing for the campus newspaper at Humboldt State. “His positive attitude about everything in life was actually therapeutic for me and my PTSD.”

Reading further along, I was suddenly struck by twin lightning bolts of shock and goosebumps: “The other really positive person in my life is Woody Woodburn…”

The laudatory dispatch that followed made me blush; made me feel privileged to have Dave in my life, then and still; and also made me think of something the late Chuck Thomas, my predecessor in this weekly space and also a dear Dave-like mentor to me, liked to say: “Don’t wait until tomorrow to tell a friend how you feel about them today.”

Wise advice for us all.

*

            Woody Woodburn will be the featured speaker at the “Books, Butterflies & Botanical Gardens” fundraiser benefiting the Ventura County Library Foundation on Sunday, October 19. Tickets are available online at: vclibraryfoundation.org/events/ … He can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com.

Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn