RANNY GRADY’S BIOGRAPHY

 

    

 

    His father was a railroader. He worked for the Rock Island Railroad (49 years) until he retired. His mother was a “homemaker”. After the four children were grown up and out of the house, she worked as a cook, and then the coordinator for the elementary schools’ luncheon program in El Reno, Ok.

 

 

    When he was about to start the fourth grade, his family moved back to Herington, Ks. Ranny attended Lincoln Elementary until his father once again moved the family. When he was ready to enter the seventh grade, the family moved to El Reno, Ok. The homestead was a brown shingled, two story house on a corner at 803 S. Barker. Ranny attended Etta Dale Junior High School. Later he graduated from El Reno High School in 1958.

 

    He calls himself the “accidental basketball player”. His favorite sport was baseball, but his high school dropped the baseball program when he was a freshman. Thus his athletic career came to an abrupt halt. As far as he could tell, it was over.

 

    When he finished his sophomore year, he left school that spring standing 5” 10” in his stocking feet, and weighing less than 150 pounds. When he returned to school that fall, he was 6” 4” and weighed less than 160 pounds. While he couldn’t really “walk and chew bubble gum as the same time”, he was now the tallest boy in school. His coach, Jenks Simmons, was called “Mr. Basketball” for the state of Oklahoma, because he had won more state championships in basketball than any other living coach in the state of Oklahoma. Mr. Simmons came to Ranny and talked about the “potential” he saw in him. “Possibility Vision” is what it was! Before Ranny graduated from high school, he had become a star on the varsity and had won a college scholarship to Phillips University, in Enid, Ok.

 

    Ranny is the first one to admit that he wasn’t a great basketball player. Nevertheless, his love for the game allowed him to get a fine education. “When one is willing to do the ‘dirty work’ that goes with the game (playing tough defense and rebounding), one gets to play when others have to sit.”

 

    Ranny played in college, and he also had the privilege of playing for the United States All Navy Basketball Team while he served his military duty from 1961-64. He was stationed at Pearl Harbor, in Hawaii.  He also served aboard a repair ship—the Hector—which served in a flotilla that traveled to the Philippines, Japan, and China.

 

            On April 12,1963, he married Margaret Denise (the name she goes by) Rogivue, although his nickname for her is “Denny”. Ranny came home from Hawaii on furlough, and Denise came from the Chicago area to visit her grandmother. Ranny had been the grandmother’s paperboy while he was in high school, and she played cupid. Ranny and Denise had four actual dates; then they were separated for ten months.  When he returned,  they were married, while she was still in her senior year of high school( no they didn’t have to get married). Through a foul up with orders, they were again separated for another 10 months. They wrote a total of 565 love letters during their forced separation. As he tells it, “There is another book just waiting to be written about that correspondence”.

 

    Ranny finished his military career, just in the nick of time, as he tells it. He left the service just before the Gulf of Tonkin crisis and the Viet Nam war. Had he not been discharged when he was, he would have been in for the duration of the war. He returned to Phillips University to get his degree and play basketball. He graduated in 1965 with a B.S. in history, political science and a minor in physical education.

 

    After graduating, he taught at Longfellow Junior High School, in Enid, Ok. Later, he would teach at Northeast High School, in Oklahoma City (it was an all black—ghetto—high school, before integration was forced into the school system by the courts of law). He also was a coach in various sports.

 

    After a few years of teaching, he left the education profession and worked for Prentice Hall Publishing Company. He was a sales rep and a marketing rep for the state of Florida for seven years. He promoted his company’s books, and he worked with best selling authors helping to set up radio/T.V. interviews and book store promotions for the authors to meet and sign books for fans.

 

 

    His greatest blessing from God is his wife: Denise. His second greatest blessings: Sean Kelly, born on October 28, 1967, and Brannon Spencer, born on July 24,1969.

 

    Ranny Grady is a 67 year old Grandpa; he lives in a log home in Monticello, Ky. at the foot hills of the Smoky Mountains. Three years ago, Ranny and Denise moved from Rushville, In., where they owned and operated a bed and breakfast: The Greystone Inn B/B. While they lived there, Ranny wrote a weekly column for the Rushville Republican Newspaper, until the paper fired him for being “politically incorrect” because he used the Bible as the foundation for all of his writing.

.

    He quickly tells anyone who will listen that he “has been vaccinated with graphomania” (the need to write). He has been writing poems, polemics, apologies, short stories, and now, novels, either on paper or in his head, all of his life.

    

    His passion is to write biblically based stories that will challenge the believer to draw closer to Jesus Christ, and challenge the unbeliever to question why he keeps his distance from the Creator of the universe.

 

    He is convinced that God has given him all of his stories, because he doesn’t need to outline them. He just starts writing, and the story develops. “It’s as if the Lord Himself has taken hold of my hands as they glide along the computer keys.”

 

 

    His only goal in life is to use his talents to enrich the Kingdom and continue to write until the Lords comes again, or the Lord calls him home.