D.G. "Rocky" Denton

Douglas G. "Rocky" Denton was born in Tallahassee, FL literally at the end of WWII, to a P-40 fighter pilot and a South Carolina belle. Before she died, that Southern lady offered to let him read his father's love letters to her. He was enthralled. He knew his dad was quite the wordsmith, but here, in these carefully preserved epistles, was a living human drama. From off the yellowed pages leapt romance and adventure, comedy and tragedy, sorrow and triumph. As he gingerly, but eagerly, turned the pages of those missives, he suddenly realized that his fascination with the unfolding saga had little to do with the fact that these were his parents. The letters needed no biological connection to hold him in their vice-like grip. They took on a life of their own. That was when he decided they deserved--in fact--demanded a wider audience. Anyone who has ever sighed at a love story or cried over the loss of a friend would surely want to read letters which opened a window into another time, another world. A world at war where brave men and women fought and died, waited and sacrificed to keep that world free. And so, he compiled and transcribed the 70 plus missives his father had written and his mother had kept. Written from the North African desert between battles with Messerschmitts and ack-ack guns, they made their way to a sweetheart back home who kept them and passed them on to her first-born son, who now passes them on to you. Carl Molesworth, author of 57th Fighter Group: First in the Blue, as well as many other books on military aviation, said of this book, "[Mr. Denton] did a great job, and the book is now a prized member of my collection."