Author
Biography

Lon M. Stevens was born in a small town in Northern Utah. His early years were spent working in his grandfather’s greenhouses and laboring in the large family garden. His free time was spent hunting and fishing with extended family members and participating in church activities. Scouting was a large part of his extracurricular activities and he earned the Eagle Scout award as a young teenager.

Once in High School his first real paying job was a dishwasher and later a prep cook, so during the school year he worked at a local restaurant. He then spent his summers as a camp counselor at various Boy Scout camps in Northern Utah, Southern Idaho, and the high mountain wilderness near Yellowstone National Park. He enjoyed teaching survival skills like knife and axe use, archery, cooking, swimming, boating, and nature to younger scouts. He greatly enjoyed wilderness hiking in the Grand Tetons and campfire skits. He enjoyed five-mile runs up wilderness roads and along frigid mountain lakes. And because it decreased his lap time and increased his heart rate, he did not enjoy face-to-face encounters with native wildlife such as Bull Moose and bears.

Lon studied electrical engineering in college while on a marching band scholarship. Hanging up his French horn after the first year, he became a missionary for his church. He spent the next two years tracking in the streets of southern Spain. While there he learned to speak both Spanish AND English. He also learned to adapt to a new culture and a variety of companions.

After returning home from his mission he was employed for a summer as a supervisor, also known as a Luna, on a pineapple plantation in Hawaii. In addition to supervising sixteen teenage boys from the mainland in the jobs of weeding, picking, and planting pineapple, he was their fulltime guardian and mentor. Today he considers that experience as key to helping him prepare for fatherhood of an ADHD child.

One summer later he worked at a military base as a student engineer. Another student engineer caught his eye, and the next summer he married the beautiful Jennifer Stenger. They still had another 2 years to complete college, after which they planned on working, building a house and starting a family. This plan only worked for step one- getting married. Their oldest child, the subject of this first book, was born 6 months before they graduated. He always was an impatient child. Their second son was born 4 years later.

After finishing college, Lon and Jennifer took jobs with Morton Thiokol Inc., the aerospace firm that provided the solid rocket motors for the Space Shuttle program. Six months later the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded during launch from Kennedy Space Center. For Lon, as a sensor development test engineer, the Challenger disaster opened the door to research and development of several sensor devices that were needed to validate the performance of the new solid rocket booster joints and material components. Lon played a key role in these efforts and holds a patent for one of the sensors.

With a successful return to flight for the Space Shuttle Program, he was offered a promotion and relocation to the Space Operations in northern Alabama. Alabama has been home ever since.

In the process of raising his two sons, he recognized the challenges facing his oldest son required a more hands-on approach. For his son’s seventh grade year the educational options appropriate for dealing with ADHD were limited. The Stevens decided to send their child to public school, and that one parent would quit their job and become a stay-at-home parent. The way he describes the decision process now, tongue firmly in check, is “We decided to choose straws for who got to stay home, and I won!” For the next seven and a half years he was a stay at home father, culminating in home schooling his sons for two years.

Later he returned to his old job and became an engineering manager for an avionics test group until the funding of the program was discontinued. With a little more time on his hands, he turned his talents to telling tales and authored his first book about his experiences as the father of an ADHD child.

Mr. Stevens continued to serve his church community in several ways including Scoutmaster and for five years as an early morning seminary teacher. He currently serves his congregation as their bishop, a lay minister in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.