Former engineer Rody Johnson’s first attempt at writing was criticized by a reviewer because it had “too much wrench and not enough sex.” “That set me back about 20 years,” he jokes.
It took a life-long Dodgers fan and long-time Vero Beach resident to tell the colorful story of the major league baseball team and the history of Vero Beach as the two rose and fell along parallel tracks between the years 1948 and 2007. That storyteller is Rody Johnson, author of The Rise and Fall of Dodgertown (University Press of Florida, $24.95), a book he recently discussed with members of the Vero Beach Literary Society.
Johnson started to write in the 1960s while he was working as an engineer with the Harris Corp. in Melbourne. An early attempt at fiction during a creative-writing class left him discouraged when a critic said his work had “too much wrench and not enough sex.” “That set me back about 20 years,” Johnson joked.
He eventually turned to non-fiction, and The Rise and Fall of Dodgertown is his third published work. If a few literary society members passed on the book because they don’t like baseball, they missed not only a good read but a fascinating lesson in local history.
Read the entire article in the March 2009 issue
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