A 99-year-old WWII veteran becomes a children’s book author after buying his first computer. Sam Baker was only 19 when he enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1942, a few months after the attack on Pearl Harbor. He served for five years before returning to civilian life and joining the agency that would later become the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), where he worked for three decades until he retired. Then at the tender age of 95, Baker bought his first personal computer and was inspired to write a children’s book.
After he got the new computer, Baker’s son suggested that he write down some of the stories that he’d told his kids when they were young. With his granddaughter in mind, Baker took the suggestion and wrote his first book, “The Silly Adventures of Petunia and Herman the Worm,” which he published in 2018. He followed that book up in 2020 with “Oscar the Mouse,” a story inspired by a pet rat someone had given him as a child. You can buy his books on Amazon here.
Now Baker is working on his third book, the next adventure of Oscar the mouse, which he expects to publish later this year. Baker’s books get good reviews and seem to be selling, but he’s not in it for the money, he just wants to encourage kids to read. "If I could just get one child to learn to read, that would be worth all the problems and the costs," he says.