Guest Post by Author Dr Tom Melvin

Hi everyone! Sorry I haven't been posting as much these last few weeks, I have been busy launching a my new novel. To those of you I have agreed to review books for I will get to them soon I promise and hopefully will be able to start accepting requests again.

In the Meantime though author Dr Tom Melvin has kindly written a guest post so everyone give a warm welcome to Tom!

Great writers are adept at capturing the essence of humanity in the trifles of life. Their skilled witness of human behavior allow them to reach the true soul of readers they may never meet. What better place to do that than in a tavern!




Bill Flynn was a bartender who had left behind boxes of stories about the humanity he witnessed at this neighborhood bar in a working class community. Upon his passing, his friend Muzzy edited the stories and published the book Danny's Tavern A Collection of Neighborhood Stories:1935-1975.

Tattoos from
Danny's
Tavern

One of the stories is about tattoos. Tattoos are a part of any tavern. I’ll bet you can walk into any city tavern and find three, four guys with a tattoo. And they’d tell the same story: Well, I was with a buddy in….and we were so drunk that…

Many of the regulars in Danny’s Tavern had at least one tattoo. Jack Walsh sports a ship on his forearm. Chico wears a large dragon tattooed near his shoulder – Shanghai, I think. Casey displays a crude self-inflicted needle and thread and ink L-O-V-E and H-A-T-E on his fingers.


My own obsession with tattoos started when, at 17, I joined the military and became a paratrooper. On my first week-end pass I went and got my first tattoo. I was so proud, and still am.

Tom's Bracelet 

Every tattoo has a personal story behind it though, and mine does too. Three years after I got my tattoo, I was in a major car accident. The doctors needed to insert a rod to secure the cracked bone in my arm - which meant cutting into part of my tattoo!

When it was time to remove the rod I asked the doctors if I could keep it for “good luck”. I then had part of it shaped into a bracelet and I’ve worn it everyday since. 

Is there a great story behind your tattoo?



Danny's Tavern A Collection of Neighborhood Stories:1935-1975 by Dr Tom Melvin P.E.

About the Author:

Dr Thomas Melvin P.E. graduated from the Doctoral Program at Nova Southeastern University in Boston, MA and received a Distinguished Research Award for his dissertation, in 1996. For over twenty years he worked as an Engineering Consultant for the Medcon Engineering Corporation. He has lectured throughout the U.S. on Construction and Facilities Management.

His career began at the age of ten having worked at everything from scraping barnacles off of tugboats, to shoveling coal on a steamship, jumping out of planes as a US Paratrooper, to teaching engineering, to project management consulting at Harvard University. He is also the author of Practical Psychology in Construction
Management published by Van Nostrand Reinhold and Danny’s Tavern – A Collection of Neighborhood Stories 1935-1975

His facebook page is: http://on.fb.me/GNLW5d

Readers can buy the book here: http://amzn.to/XcyCAn

Thank you Tom and good luck with you work!