From The Potato to Star Trek and Beyond

Escaping The Potato Was Just The Beginning Chester L. Richards, retired aerospace engineer, and inventor (19 patents), views life as a series of adventures. After narrowly escaping serious injury from The Great Potato, on a lark, he and college friend Judy Burns co-authored a spec script for Star Trek, “The Tholian Web” — one of the series’ most popular episodes. A veteran writer advised the young man, “You should write…your passions.” “But I have nothing to say,” he thought. Ah. The real message? Fill your life with adventures. And he did — adventures in surfing, learning and performing music, travel to exotic places for whitewater rafting, rocket science. Along the way, he’s met fascinating characters. He did write — essays (over 50 have been published). But it was the loss of Sarah, the love of his life, that caused Chester to write his first book of stories. The hair-raising adventures Sarah loved continue, though as the author says, he no longer has much hair