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Author: Wesley Hardin
"The Gift: The Unwanted"
Science Fiction & Fantasy
The story of Wesley Hardin
Wesley Hardin was born and raised during the Great Depression, in Southern Illinois. His parents were not, at all, well off, but for his three siblings and himself, things
appeared normal as it seemed that at least half of the population was in the same boat. Subsistence was made possible by growing vegetables, raising chickens for eggs and meat, and receiving dry products from government trucks that distributed them in town. (This small town of Elco is the setting for his book) He attended a one room school for the first four years of his education and after the start of World War II their Father found work in Granite City, Ill. a city about 150 miles north, of Elco and just across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, Mo. So, they moved there in 1943 and just as his older brother was graduating from High School, he was drafted into the Army and sent to Germany and Wes continued his schooling, though a bit more formal this time.
His parents had bought their first home in 1944 and things seemed okay but money was still tight and all the children had to chip-in and more-or-less support themselves. He enjoyed playing baseball and wanted to play on the High School team but he still had to work which took care of that. Wes worked as a short-order cook and soda-jerk all through H.S.
After graduation Wes attended So. Illinois University where he studied pre-engineering but that only lasted one year, at which time he joined and spent ten years in the Air Force. He served in Korea and Japan and In 1957, Wes met and married his present wife, Norma. They no sooner had their first son when they were shipped off to Alaska for 3 years. Wes was returned to Florida in 1961. By that time they had added a set of twin boys, and Norma was due to deliver a little girl.
His wife couldn’t take Air Force life any longer so Wes took his discharge in 1962 and headed to California, where he went to work for an Aerospace company, Litton Systems, as an Electronic Technician.
In 1965 Wes decided it was time to continue his education, so with the help of the GI Bill, he attended night school at Pierce College, where he studied Electronic Engineering, and became an engineer in 1973 and worked as an aerospace engineer until he retired in !999..After retirement Norma and Wes moved to Simi Valley, a small valley about 40 miles northwest of L.A.. They have just celebrated their 53rd wedding anniversary and their children are all married, and off doing their own thing.
Over the years, Wes never developed too many hobbies (his work was very demanding and ate up a lot of his time but he did take the time to play a little golf and actually got rather good (10 hdc). He is 77, now, and don’t do that much anymore, but he does enjoy tinkering around with electronic circuitry and reading electronic journals as well as reading novels by authors like Stephen King and Dean Koontz. He likes keeping the yard in good shape, spending as much time as he can with children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, but his real passion, these days, is writing.
A couple of years after Wes had retired, he began to do some thinking about those hard days during the depression, wondering how they ever survived and remembered the gift that his granddad had, where he could stop a person from bleeding just by being in their presence. Wes calls his sister, in Illinois, quite often and on one of those occasions she told Wes that her daughter had discovered that she too had this eerie gift. So, then and there, he decided that this should be written about. That’s when he began writing “The Gift, The Unwanted”.
Wes is writing a new book, a sequel to “The Gift, The Unwanted” with the title of “Pearl”. It’s over half finished, now, and he hopes to get it to press sometime around the summer of 2011.
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