Christmas morning in Escondido, and the house was finally quiet. The family was sleeping off the arguments from the drive down. I was seventeen, bored, and hiding from all of it, so I wandered into the kitchen, and there was my grandfather, already deep into Christmas dinner.
He stood straight as a rifle while he diced onions for the stuffing, every movement precise, the timing worked out to feed fifteen people without a single dish going cold.
Every few minutes he made a sharp sucking noise through his teeth, the one that drove everybody crazy. My parents had warned me he was moody and kept to himself. Watching him work, I saw something else: a man who could not stand the thought of anyone leaving his table hungry.
That afternoon he settled into his worn leather easy chair, and I pulled up one of the metal folding chairs from the hall closet. I asked about the war. He looked at me, made that noise with his teeth, and said, “It didn’t start with Pearl Harbor for me.”
Who was my grandfather?
Franklin M. Hoeffer was a mess cook in the United States Navy, born in 1914. He joined the Navy young, and by the late 1930s he was cooking for the crew of the USS Oahu, a river gunboat on the Yangtze Patrol in Shanghai. He cooked through the years when the city filled with refugees and Japanese troops stood at every checkpoint, and he was aboard when survivors of the sunken Panay were pulled from the river.
In November 1941 the orders came to get out. On November 29, the Oahu and the USS Luzon left Shanghai for Manila. The Oahu was built for river water, not the open Pacific, and a storm in the Formosa Strait nearly tore her apart. At one point a Japanese task force surrounded them with guns trained, and my grandfather filmed it with his 8mm movie camera. They dropped anchor off Cavite on December 4, 1941, three days before Pearl Harbor.
What happened to him after Corregidor fell?
He was on Corregidor when it surrendered in May 1942.
The Japanese packed the prisoners onto an old freighter, dumped them off a landing craft into four feet of water five or six miles outside Manila, and force-marched them four abreast into the city while their guards beat back Filipinos who tried to hand them water. Family retellings later turned that into the Bataan Death March. His own account is clear that it was the march into Manila.
That October he was shipped to Japan in the hold of a rusting freighter called the Totoru Maru.
He spent the rest of the war in camps at Osaka and Matsumoto, starved, beaten and worked to exhaustion. On the morning of August 16, 1945, the Japanese foremen stopped the work at 8:15 and sent the prisoners back to camp. In three years and four months, they had never stopped work early.
He came home through Oakland. His first phone call was to his wife, Jeanette, in Auburn, New York, and she told him about their daughter, Valerie, born while he was on Corregidor. She was six, and he had never met her.
I think about that phone call more than any other part of his story. The camps took his health, and they took the first years of his daughter’s life along with it. Nobody ever gave him those years back.
Why did the family call him difficult?
Because they only saw the surface: the moods, the noise through his teeth, the distance.
What I understood by the end of those Christmas conversations was the kitchen. He always made too much food. He watched everyone’s plate. He pressed second helpings on people who didn’t want them. A man who had been starved nearly to death for three years and four months was fighting that war every time he set a table.
The gruffness came from the same place. So did the silence. He had carried those memories for decades without anyone asking about them, and when someone finally did, it was a bored teenager on a folding chair. The word “difficult” is a flimsy excuse when a family uses it to stop asking questions. The label kept a houseful of relatives away from the biggest thing that ever happened in that family, and it kept them from ever hearing him tell it.
How did those Christmas conversations make me a ghostwriter?
They taught me the whole job before I knew it was a job.
The story came in pieces over several visits, never in one sitting. Sometimes a question opened it. Sometimes it came out of a long silence. Details about Shanghai or Manila would arrive mid-sentence, between that noise with his teeth and a straightening of his already perfect posture. The only thing I had to do was keep asking, keep listening, and not flinch.
They also taught me that time runs out.
The conversations happened just in time. Within a few years, Alzheimer’s began taking the stories, and then the man. By Christmas 1979 he was checking the same pot three times in five minutes and saying, over and over, “Make sure there’s enough.” He died on January 18, 1985. I’ve written about that urgency in Witnesses Are Dying, and it’s why I tell families not to wait.
How long did it take to write Behind the Wire?
Nearly half a century, start to finish. I interviewed him at seventeen. I wrote a version of the book in 2014 and never published it. In 2025 I wrote the final version, working from my memory of those conversations, a handful of informal interviews with family, and the journal he completed after the war. It was published as Behind the Wire: From Manila to Japan, with none of the names changed.
Writing it that way, decades apart, taught me something I now tell every memoir client. The first draft of a life story is rarely the last, and memory and family legend drift. Where my recollection and his journal disagreed, the journal won. That’s how the march into Manila got its name back.
Families hold on to the legend because it’s the version they grew up with, and I understand that. A memoir that picks the legend over the record does its subject a disservice, though, and it hands the next generation a story that falls apart the first time someone checks it. Find the letters, the journal and the service record before the writing starts.
What happened between that Christmas and my ghostwriting career?
A long detour. I spent 33 years in enterprise technology, including 20 years as Director of Computer Operations and Technical Services at Trader Joe’s. When I came back to writing full time, I came back to what my grandfather had taught me: stay with someone’s story long enough to get it right.
I’ve now ghostwritten 54+ books, and the range would have surprised the kid on the folding chair. One of my first was the memoir of an Afghan politician who fled regime change.
I’ve written a survivor’s memoir, business books on cybersecurity, AI and IoT, and books about dentistry, insurance and cleaning. One client’s book helped him raise $30 million in venture capital. Another landed a TEDx talk. My own consulting book was adopted for a course at Purdue. The subjects change. The method is the one I learned in that living room.
What did my grandfather’s story teach me about ghostwriting?
That the most important question is usually the one nobody else has asked. His family had known him for decades and never asked about the war. My clients’ families and colleagues often haven’t asked either, and the story that makes the book is sitting right there.
That people tell hard stories in pieces. I still see it.
A client of mine needed four interviews to tell me about the abuse he survived as a boy, a little further each time. Another had to come back to his daughter’s death several times before he could get it all out. I let them set the pace, the way my grandfather set his.
That the surface lies. The man everyone called difficult fed everybody. The executive who seems all numbers usually has a story like that underneath, and finding it turns a business book into one people remember.
And that the story belongs to the person who lived it. I didn’t sand down his anger at his captors in Behind the Wire. It was his, he earned it, and it stayed. I give my clients the same respect.
Who in your family has a story nobody has asked for?
Most families have one: the grandparent who never talks about the war, the parent who crossed a border, the relative everyone calls difficult. Too many of those stories get buried with the person because everyone assumed there’d be another Christmas to ask. Ask now, and record the answer, even if you never do anything else with it, because the memories go faster than anyone expects.
If the story belongs in a book, my memoir ghostwriting starts with the same kind of patient interviews I learned in that living room, and the Book Discovery Intensive is a smaller first step that ends with a sample chapter. My ghostwriting services cover the full book. You can read more about my grandfather on his tribute page and in how Behind the Wire came to be written.
