About the author
Multiple Sclerosis Forces Door Of Opportunity Open
E. Earl Kendrick, a native western Kansan, knows what it is like to have the door of opportunity begin to close. Earl was born and raised on the ranch that his maternal grandparents, John E. and Alice M. (Ebersol) Currah, had homesteaded in the late 1880's. He is the youngest of four children born to A.L. (Roy) and Adah B. (Currah) Kendrick, who also raised two nieces and a nephew, consequently there was always something going on. His playground was a 2300 acre ranch with neighbors who either didn't know or didn't care that Kendrick kids rode horses on their land. Horses, there was a pasture full waiting for or defying you to ride them, range cattle, the main source of income, milk cows, goats,hogs, chickens, ect. Everything that a kid could need to get into trouble.
After sixty years of living, which consisted of beginning school in a one room country school, where a saddle horse was the school car for the five mile trip, graduating from high school and from the Porterville (Ca.) Horseshoeing School, farming,ranching,horseshoeing, managing a power transmission store, owning and operating a commercial hay harvesting company and driving big trucks, along with he and his wife being on a mission team on two occasions in Mexico. It came to a sudden stop in Feburary 1998 when the bottom fell out of his life with the attack of M.S. which rendered him disabled, feeling helpless and hopeless.
Over the years he had written some poetry and stored it in a dresser drawer but with the encouragement / insistence of Marilyn, his wife of forty years, who said, "the drawer is full! What are you going to do with them?" he published his first book entitles, "The Prairie Sentinel", in February 2001. It has been well received and with the encouragement of many friends, released his second book, a novel entitled, "The Neighborly Thing". Earl is currently working on his third book.
Earl hopes that his writings will be an encouragement to others who, because of a chronic illness or some other misfortune, are experiencing a closing of the door of opportunity in their lives. You, too, can force open the door, maybe not by writing but by developing and using some of your talents that have laid dormant and / or unrecognized in your life.
"Sometimes we must experience the bad before we can appreciate the good."
E.E.K.