Ken BeckBorn in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, writer Ken Beck enjoyed an all-American childhood while growing up in the 1950s and 1960s in Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas. The love of his young life was playing baseball in organized leagues from the ages of nine to ighteen as a center fielder and third baseman. A sixth-generation Tennessean, he began his writing career in 1977 with The Nashville Tennessean, a 31-year run, where he edited the paper's Sunday entertainment magazine and wrote feature and travel stories and also had the great fortune to interview hundreds of film and TV stars. He especially enjoyed talking with his cowboy heroes of yesteryear. As an extra in a 1986 western movie, The Last Days of Frank and Jesse James, Beck portrayed a deputy who gets shot and killed by Johnny Cash. While with The Tennessean, Beck teamed with friend Jim Clark in writing The Andy Griffith Show Book, released in 1985, which would lead the duo to co-author several other books about their favorite show including the best-selling Aunt Bee's Mayberry Cookbook, which sold over a million copies. He and Clark have partnered on more than a dozen books since such as Mayberry Memories, The All-American Cowboy Cookbook and Walking On, the story of Sheriff Buford Pusser of Walking Tall fame, as told by Pusser's daughter, Dwana. Beck has been telling stories about Tennesseans from all walks of life across six decades. He has interviewed hundreds of ordinary Tennesseans who have shared their extraordinary stories with him. These include World War II veterans, school children, centenarians, farmers, businessmen, songwriters, cooks, truck drivers, gravediggers, bubble-gum blowing champions, artists, whittlers, factory workers, waitresses, preachers and convicts.The sentimental Southern boy still holds on to the baseball glove his father bought him in the fourth grade and three sweat-stained baseball caps that he wore in junior high and high school. Among the few possessions that survived his youth are his Topps and Post Cereal baseball card collections and the Stan Musial Hartland statue he received for Christmas in 1963. Over a span of twenty years, while raising their daughter and son, Beck and his wife took them on summer vacations and spring breaks to see every Major League Baseball team. Read More Read Less
