About the author
John Wilson was born in California in 1935, John fondly recalls his earliest adventures, as his family moved from home to home in Northern California, sometimes living in the country, (the gold mining regions of the high Sierra Mountains,) and sometimes living in town. (Palo Alto) Their wasn't much work in those pre-war years of the lingering depression for a University of Missouri trained journalist, so his Father, a restless adventurer, tried his hand at many jobs.
The year John was six, The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. The following year his Mother died, so his Father drove with him to Missouri, to stay with his Aunt and Uncle, who lived in the town of Camdenton, in the Missouri Ozarks. Later they all moved to his family home in Warrensburg, where he grew up.
Some years later John attended Central Missouri State College in Warrensburg and became a drama major. During the summers of both his junior and senior year, he was put in charge of both lighting and sound for the Shepherd of the Hills summer theatre in Branson, which was then being operated by the college. The town of Branson warmly welcomed the summer stock players and the long hours of intense work are remembered as one big adventure.
After John was drafted into the Army, he helped found a unique community theatre group in Wiesbaden, Germany where he met some highly educated theatre people. John was eventually, picked by the group, to direct two plays and a small musical.
Returning to the states, John attended the Yale University School of Drama for a year and after New Haven and then summer stock in Connecticut, John moved to Washington, D.C., took graduate courses in theatre design and directing at the American University. During the decade he lived in Washington, John married and had a son. While in Washington, John worked closely with a wide variety of experimental and idealistic dance and theatre groups And in 1969, John was a member of the staff of Ford's Theatre, when it re-opened after being dark for a hundred years.
In 1970, soon after the birth of his Son, John took a position as the technical manager of a new state-of-the-art 1,200 seat school/community auditorium. This was at the well-known Montgomery Blair high school, in Silver Spring, Maryland. (Both Goldie Hawn and Connie Chung had graduated from that school in the sixties.) For the next twenty-six years, John was on the staff of the high school where he worked closely with teenagers and was involved with every one of the hundreds of community and school productions that were to take place in that very busy school/community auditorium. (John eventually would have the opportunity to meet one of his life long musical heroes, Pete Seeger, whose concerts at Blair drew large crowds.) Inspired by meeting Seeger, John completed some research, based on a chance discovery and wrote his first book, The Day America’s Music Went Bye, which rather proves that Don McLean’s famous song was never about Buddy Holly, but was rather about The Weavers. He could not get the controversial book published as a magazine article, so ended up self-publishing it as a booklet.
On the 4th of July, 1996, John "Retired" back to his family home in Warrensburg and, then began traveling around Missouri, and even as far as De Moines, Iowa, conducting interviews and gathering photographic material and interview recordings for the video movie, Whispering Waters, which eventually became the full-length DVD, Whispering Waters. Released in April of 2001, Whispering Waters, produced, written and directed by John, is the unique story of a long gone Ozark town, frozen in time. Today, John describes himself as a Jack of all trades, involved in way too many projects.