A Journey Through Lloyd Lofthouse's Remarkable Life and Career

Ten Things You May Not Know about Lloyd Lofthouse

1. The day he was born, bells clanged coast-to-coast celebrating Japan’s defeat, the end of World War II. 

A nurse talked his drunken father (born 1911 — died 1991) into adding Victory as another middle name. The newborn’s full name: Lloyd Frederick Victory Lofthouse.

2. It took him over 50 years to learn why his mother (born 1909—died 1998) named him after one of her two brothers. They were born in the same month on the same day. Uncle Lloyd Johnston’s birthday was August 14, 1912 (died 2008).

3. At three, in 1948, a lethal virus invaded his heart. The first few doctors his mother went to said there was nothing they could do to keep him alive…  Until his mother found a younger doctor who said he could, and it took that doctor about 15 years to succeed.  

During those years, Lloyd could not exercise or play sports until the day that doctor said he could live a normal life. 

 By then, he was 6’4,” and weighed 125 pounds. Healed and old enough to do as he wanted, he joined the U.S. Marines. 

By the time he graduated from MCRD about three months later, he’d gained 30 painful pounds. And off to war he went.

4. When Lloyd was 7, his mother was told by so-called education experts, who worked for the school district where he was in 1st grade for two years, that her son would never learn to read or write since he was retarded. 

Desperate, his mother went to his teacher, who said he might need glasses. When that worked, his mother asked the same teacher if there was anything she could do at home to teach her little boy to read, now that he could see what was printed on pages. 

The teacher told his mother what to do, and Lola followed through. By ten Lloyd was an avid reader, often reading a book a day. In high school, two books a day. 

Still, most of his teachers all the way to 12th grade in high school thought he was retarded, because it said so in his “education records.”

5. His nickname as a child was Skip. Long after he outgrew that sobriquet, his sister Nancy (born 1931) said they called him Skip because when he was a bossy child, acting like he was the skipper of a ship and they were his crew.

6. He had three uncles who served in World War II. Richard, his father’s older brother (born 1909—died 1981), served in the U.S. Navy on an aircraft carrier until it was sunk by the Japanese. 

He and most of the crew survived.

The uncle he was named after served in the U.S. Army in India and Burma, where he was almost captured by the Japanese.

Robert (born 1928, his mother’s youngest brother) lied about his age so he could join the Navy near the end of the war, and stayed in for 33 years, retiring as a lieutenant commander after climbing the ranks.

7. In 1968, the writing seed sprouted in the younger Lloyd’s brain. After being honorably discharged from the U.S. Marines, during his first semester in a community college, he attended

an inspiring lecture by Ray Bradbury, the king of science fiction, and left wanting to be a writer.

8. In the early 1980s (a busy decade) while teaching English in a middle school, he worked nights and weekends as a maître d for a few years in a nightclub that was also a restaurant called

The Red Onion. What he experienced in that job found its way into his noir crime novel,  The Redemption of Don Juan Casanova.

9. While working toward a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in the 1980s, he wrote a memoir about 1966, when he was in the U.S. Marines serving in the Vietnam War. 

A few years later, while taking creative writing classes offered through UCLA Extension, his professor talked him into turning his memoir into a thriller with fictional characters in Running with the Enemy.

10. In the late 1980s into the early 1990s, now teaching English in high school, and wanting to escape, Lloyd learned how to count cards and gambled on weekends in Reno and Las Vegas,

winning more than he lost. It wasn’t illegal counting cards, but if caught, the casinos could refuse to let him play, and he stopped a few years later. Counting cards was stressful and exhausting.

About Lloyd Lofthouse

Multi award winning author, Lloyd Lofthouse is a former US Marine (1965—1968) and combat vet managing PTSD. 

After the Marines, he went to college and earned a BA in journalism and later an MFA. After working as a nightclub maître d, he taught English and journalism in a public high school. 

For his first published novel, My Splendid Concubine, Lloyd visited mainland China several times to learn more about that country’s people, culture, and history.

He’s the author of the award-winning novels My Splendid Concubine, Running with the Enemy, The Redemption of Don Juan Casanova, and the memoir Crazy is Normal, a classroom exposé.

His short story, A Night at the Well of Purity was named a finalist in the 2007 Chicago Literary Awards.  You can find out more about Lloyd Lofthouse and his books HERE