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William Pack
Born in a rural Montana mining town, William C. (Bill) Pack grew up in an environment beset by addiction, abuse, poverty, and mental illness. At 15 years old the courts emancipated him. At 16 he dr...view moreBorn in a rural Montana mining town, William C. (Bill) Pack grew up in an environment beset by addiction, abuse, poverty, and mental illness. At 15 years old the courts emancipated him. At 16 he dropped out of high school. At 17 he married and at 18 he became a father. He worked variously as a truck driver, a bartender, a fry cook, a dock worker, and a broadcast ad-man. When he was 21 he began a successful career as a broker with Merrill Lynch in Billings, Montana. A few years later he was divorced from a woman with whom his wife of two decades now occasionally yucks it up on the phone, but that's not important. Anyway, he was broke.
With his brokerage license and GED, Bill moved to Silicon Valley where he rose to become the youngest of 25 Executive VP/Divisional Directors at Citigroup Smith Barney, the largest financial concern on earth at that time. His business and financial acumen became renowned and respected. Bill ran a division managing billions of dollars and met regularly with people who were then or are now the chief executives of the world’s largest financial firms. He spoke to thousands of investment professionals and investors, sharing podiums with a Presidential chief economic adviser, a governor, the executive director of the California’s Debt Advisory Commission, and many other notables. For his skill and fairness, Bill received a prestigious three-year appointment with the NASD (now FINRA), the S.E.C.’s enforcement partner of rules and regulations on Wall Street. Given the subsequent wreckage in capital markets, clearly Bill had either no influence or a poor one. On the side, he was CEO of a business associated with Beatrice Foods that dealt in milk and doughnuts.
Through Menttium 100, Bill served as a volunteer mentor for female executives at Hewlett Packard and at JPMorgan. He has donated his time and funds to many charities, particularly women’s and children’s advocacy groups.
When Bill’s health failed, he quit Wall Street to pursue lifelong goals. At 43 he took the SAT college entrance exams and earned acceptance into Stanford University as its oldest undergraduate at that time, but he looked to be 38, tops. He became Stanford’s lone undergraduate director for an archaeological project and won the Annual Reviews Prize in Anthropological Sciences for his thesis. In three years he graduated college, Phi Beta Kappa (la-te-da), during which time he published a poem under the reverse pen name, Eman Nep. Shortly afterward, Saints and Patrons, his first short story, was published. The Bottom of the Sky is Bill’s first novel.
Bill and his wife have mostly grown children, some of whom are self-supporting. When he’s not in Montana, he lives in Northern California. He has a big dog and two more pairs of blue jeans than necessary.
This bio is all true. The book is all fiction. Really.view less