CHIP HILL

chiphill70@gmail.com

I was born on Columbus Day, October 12th, 1948 at Mitchell Field, a since-retired Air Force Base on Long Island, New York. My dad and mom were native Texans, who married shortly after his service as a bomber pilot in the south Pacific during World War II. He was a career Air Force officer, so my siblings and I lived overseas in Nagoya, Japan, Bangkok, Thailand, and a variety of places around the U.S. I attended 13 separate schools growing up.

As I grew into my high school years, (literally - I grew from 5'2” to 6'2” between the 7th and 9th grades!), I began dabbling in poetry and song writing, and played a cheap electric guitar in a rock 'n roll band my senior year. College (Texas A&M University - Aerospace Engineering) and grad schools were followed by a 20 year career as an Air Force officer with interesting test and research projects like testing an air-to-air instrumented range (think Top Gun) near Sardinia, Italy; nuclear underground testing; missile reentry system testing at Kwajalein atoll and spacecraft survivability technologies for the “Star Wars” program. 

After a decade with research & development companies, I got the chance to come back and work at my alma mater in several senior positions for Texas A&M Engineering.  I am now retired and live with my wife, Carmel, in College Station, Texas. We are blessed with three children and five grandchildren. Things I like to do are read (history is a particular favorite), watch sports (especially local college sports), play guitar, travel, simple woodworking, and explore my curiosity about things. And retirement has allowed me the time to pursue creative and artistic projects.

I have developed a children's book series called Cloudland, about a magical world hidden from our eyes in the clouds. After the first three books, I lost

my illustrator due to his failing health and it took two years to find another artist. Happily, Book 4 is now out and Book 5 in development. I also wrote a book I call Thoughts from an Observationist: Recorded from 2014-2021. It contains some of my thoughts gathered over the years on who we are and why we do what we do, ranging from the serious to the silly. My principal focus, though, has been my musical called Finding, about a teenage girl trying to filter out the noise in her life to discern her feelings about God. I think its message is timely (and I think the music's pretty good too). It premiered in College Station in April, performed by the Brazos Valley TROUPE, and I'm on a quest to get other performance groups to take a chance on this project.

You can catch up to me on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/chip.hill.1048 or my website, https://www.chip-hill.com/.

(Go to the Book Store to discover how to purchase Chip’s books.)

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MY ESSAYS

1 Politics

2   Reading

3  Listen to Old(er) People

4  From Children to Friends

5  Driving

6  Family

My Poetry

Go to The Poetry of Chip Hill>