A Note from the Editor:

My father, Thomas Cyril Corbett, was born in 1895 and died in 1976. By 1912 he had taught himself Morse code and communicated with ships on the Great Lakes. In 1918 he piloted Army biplanes fifteen years after the Wright brothers made their historic flight, and then Cy lived to see man land on the moon and return safely. The fact that man had progressed technologically so quickly in one lifetime simply amazed him.

As editor, I have assembled his various writings and attempted to put together works of interest to an audience beyond members of our immediate family. You will learn about the life of my father from several sources: journals he intermittently kept from 1916 through his death; the Greenwood Avenue stories he wrote in the early 1970s; a novel he kept revising over a thirty-year period; and letters and other writings, including a partially-finished history of his alma mater—St. Ignatius College—and various vignettes he wrote from time to time.

Following the Great War (WWI), Cy was honorably discharged from the fledgling US Army Air Corps. He worked in a variety of jobs, finally landing at the Chicago Tribune in 1921 as a copywriter and editor. After nearly twenty-five years he resigned and moved to Michigan. He built a small summer resort on six and a half acres overlooking the big lake. The revenue from summer vacationers helped him live and send his kids to college. And in the off-season, he wrote.