I live in the Erie Canal town of Spencerport with my wife Francine and daughter Samantha.

If you came to this page looking for a list of other books I have written, you will not find any.  In fact, if anyone had ever told me that someday I would write a book, I would have questioned their sanity.  This is the first book that I have authored.  It is a project born from nothing more than a Dad that loves to read to his daughter.

The idea for the book came to me one night when Samantha was three years old and in the first year of preschool.  One night after reading her some bedtime books we started playing a rhyming game.  She said "There's a Whale in the Canal!" and after doing a double take on what she said, I figured that sounded like a good title to a children's book. 

Ron Mazzarella

So I started writing down some ideas on how or why a whale might be in the canal and soon the story started to take shape.  I would read the parts that I wrote to Samantha and she helped tweak the story.  Finally, one day the story just flowed and ideas came faster than I could write them down.  When the dust settled, I had a rough copy of the manuscript for this book.

Samantha enjoyed hearing the story, so I printed a copy and we gave it to her preschool teacher.  Without any pictures, we did not think it would captivate the class.  However, they loved it and surprisingly, it held their attention for the entire book.  At her urging, we decided to see if we could get it published.
I was very fortunate to meet Tom Fox who not only illustrated the book, but helped edit it in a way that allowed his drawings to tell the story.

Since this is a book about the Erie Canal, we chose Pyramid Publishing and North Country Books to publish and distribute it for us since they focus on NY based books.

This project has been a lot of fun and quite the learning experience for me, someone who has never been involved in authoring or publishing a book.

I hope you have enjoyed your experience with Humphrey and Samantha as much as I have in bringing it to you.

Thank you!