Bio:Charles Lee Lesher

Charles Lee Lesher was born in Kansas, spent his childhood in Colorado and attended high school in Southern California.

After high school graduation, he moved to Phoenix, Arizona and enrolled in auto mechanics school. Over the next year, he worked as a bus boy, a fry cook, slung hamburgers, drove delivery trucks and sold vacuum cleaners door to door. After about of year of this, he joined the US Army.

Lesher trained at Fort Dix and Aberdeen Proving Grounds, and spent three years in Germany, completing his enlistment in El Paso, Texas.

He lost hearing in the high frequencies, and has a general hearing loss and has "this god-awful ringing in my ears all the bloody time!" This he attributes to listening to and playing Rock music.

After leaving the Army, Lesher lived in Phoenix again for a period and attended college. He then moved to Madison, Wisconsin at the invitation of a friend, and enrolled in the University of Wisconsin. Five years later, he graduated from the University of Wisconsin, Madison with a BS in Engineering Mechanics-Aerospace.

Lesher worked for a small aerospace firm that converted old military missiles into scientific sounding rockets. Later this firm was bought by a larger East Coast corporation. Still later, Lesher was laid off when Reagan’s Star Wars Missile Defense Plan collapsed, drastically reducing the size of the aerospace industry.

He decided to go back to school and enrolled in the graduate program at Arizona State University. Two years later, he graduated with a Masters degree in Materials Science.

He then worked as Quality Manager at a small electronics manufacturer for several years, before deciding to become a writer.