General Interest Writing

Most of my current writing focuses on aviation-related subjects, but I started my professional career in the late 1970s as a freelance writer. For about 10 years, I covered a wide variety of topics for regional and national publications and served as a staff writer and editor on newsletters at NewsData.

This page includes links to Adobe Reader (.pdf) versions of some of my early work in the 1980s for a variety of (mostly long-defunct) publications, including Spokane Magazine and Pacific Northwest Magazine, and an earlier incarnation of The (Seattle) Weekly, before it was transformed by The Village Voice.

While on the staff at Marple’s Business Newsletter (now Marple’s Pacific Northwest Letter) I was also a (usually uncredited) contributor to such national periodicals as Advertising Age, Business Week, and The Daily Bond Buyer. For the Bond Buyer, I covered the saga of the Washington Public Power Supply System (WPSS), and I later continued energy-related reporting as the editor of OverSite and as frequent contributor to Clearing Up, both published by NewsData.

I was also a technical editor and multimedia producer at Microsoft in the late 1980s. But I’ll spare you samples of the Printer Information Guide for Microsoft Word 5.0 (for the PC).

To see other examples of my writing, visit my Aviation Writing and World of Flight pages here at BruceAir.

Features for Pacific Northwest Magazine

I wrote many features for Pacific Northwest Magazine, a Seattle-based, general-interest monthly published from the late 1970s through the 1980s by the Bullitt Foundation. It has since morphed into Seattle Magazine, published by Tiger Oak Publications. My editor at Pacific Northwest Magazine was Peter Potterfield.

• “Forgotten Fleet” (.pdf) describes the warships mothballed at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard at Bremerton, WA.
• “The Private War of James Ennes” (.pdf) profiles the author of Assault on the Liberty. Ennes’s book describes his experience on a US Navy intelligence-gathering ship that was attacked by Israeli air and naval forces at the start of the Six-Day War in 1967.
• "On the Waterfront" tells the story of the Port of Seattle during the development of containerized cargo.

Features for Spokane Magazine

Spokane Magazine was a monthly city magazine published in the late 1970s and early 1980s in Spokane, WA.

Its publishers, Larry Shook and Judy Laddon, now publish Camas Magazine, an online magazine that covers Spokane and the Northwest.

• “Saving Babies” tells the story of the Army Air National Guard MAST program, which makes military helicopters and their crews available to transport critically ill patients, in this case, premature babies.
• “Sidewalk Superintendent” is an observer’s guide to the construction of a skyscraper in downtown Spokane.

Reporting and Features for The Seattle Weekly

I reported for the original Seattle Weekly in the early 1980s. Here are links to some of the spot news and features that I wrote during that period.

• “Inferno Towers’ explains some of the difficulties involved in fighting fires in tall buildings downtown.
• Boeing 757 Rollout
• Boeing 767 Rollout
• Finding a site for a new general aviation airport
• Horizon Airlines