As a young boy, Ron recognizes that he is shorter than his classmates. What begins as a feeling of inferiority grows into an unrelenting drive to achieve in all aspects of his life to show that he is worthy of respect-a journey marked by pain, perseverance, and performance.Teased and often derided by his peers, Ron is driven to try his hardest to excel in every endeavor-always striving to prove that being smaller doesn't mean being lesser. He fights to make the football team, strives for better grades, and quietly hopes to win the heart of a popular girl.This novel takes the reader through the ups and downs of a stressful life until five years after high school, when a potential disaster shows Ron that small can be big, and that the pain of growing up was the price of what he had become and accomplished. About the authorDon grew up in rural Pennsylvania. No one in his extended family had ever attended college, but he was awarded an athletic scholarship to Grove City College, so he enrolled in that small liberal arts school. His academic/athletic performance there resulted in an unsolicited invitation to graduate school at the highly regarded Carnegie Institute of Technology, where he earned a PhD in materials science. Immediately afterward, he accepted a post-doctoral appointment at the Ernst-Mach-Institut in Freiburg, Germany. After 3 years in Freiburg, he accepted an offer from the Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International), where he addressed failure problems in materials and structures under explosive and impact loads. During his 46 SRI years, he was a Tahoe ski patroller on winter weekends and a frequent Pacific coast abalone diver in spring/summer/fall. He has written his memoir, "An Improbable Journey," and a fiction novel, "Saved by an Avalanche," based on his ski patrol experiences. Nowadays, he hikes 4 to 6 miles daily in the open space preserves that neighbor the San Francisco Bay Area. He and his wife have 4 children and 9 grandchildren and live in Menlo Park, CA