Finding FOCUS: A Cameraman’s Unlikely Journey from French Hill to the French Chef

Finding FOCUS is the engaging memoir of a runaway kindergarten kid who, against all odds, survives, damaged but unbroken. Bill is the fifth of six siblings— a priest, a nun, a state trooper, and a nurse— who set a high bar for success in their French-Canadian family. His keen childhood imagination could have easily lost focus in a tenement with no running hot water and the heartbreak of living with an alcoholic father. But instead of feeling sorry for himself, he enters the world of adulthood with a dose of humor when he snags a job as a vacuum cleaner salesman. As luck would have it, he leaves the dead-end job when another door opens to the wide world of television and a series of adventures within: Working with Julia Child and Martha Stewart, getting hired and fired by Bob Vila, sitting amongst the musicians in the Boston Pops Orchestra, his camera trained on John Williams conducting the theme from Raiders of the Lost Ark. And even a side gig filming Arnold Schwarzenagger-Maria Shriver’s wedding. In bypassing what might have been, Bill is forever grateful for eventually Finding FOCUS . —Judith Stiles, author of Cape Cod mystery HUSH LITTLE FIRE (release 2025) Prologue: One of my earliest memories is sitting on the toilet in our cramped apartment, wondering how the people who were secretly filming my life were handling the times when I was in the bathroom. This was fifty years before reality programming became a ubiquitous part of our culture. Long before I made a living framing the world through a video camera viewfinder, I made mental notes of my experiences and surroundings while growing up in a post-war blue-collar family in central Massachusetts. It wasn’t until I joined a Memoir group that I finally began to put those memories into writing, at first to leave a record of my roots for my children and grandchildren and later because I found it enormously therapeutic and rewarding to be part of a group where it was safe to let it all hang out. In a video interview a couple of years before she died, I captured my mother’s brilliant telling of her history. My father was not a storyteller in the too short time he spent on this earth, so we don’t have his version of his life outside of our collective memories. I miss not having heard directly from him about his growing up, and I would love to have stories, in writing, from my grandparents. When I joined the memoir group I had as much intention of writing a book as I had of becoming an astronaut. This collection of essays is my humble attempt to do what my forebears did not. — ASIN: B0DDJPV2T1 | ISBN13: 9798882544521 | ISBN-13: 979-8882544521