Tim Koster was raised in Ohio, graduated from high school in New Jersey in 1967, and attended Boston University until he “won” the first draft lottery (his birthday was number one) and was drafted. He applied for and received a conscientious objector deferment and did his two years of alternative service at a hospital in Minnesota. He then returned to school and received his B.A. in international relations from the University of Minnesota in 1976. He began his career working for the Minneapolis Housing and Redevelopment Authority, then as a planner for the Twin Cities Agency on Aging. Tim served as a board member for charitable institutions and was a member of the Twin Cities Area Health Planning Board. In 1984, he moved to Southern California and in 1989, founded Search Systems, a research company that is now a successful corporation with a popular public records website at www.searchsystems.net. Tim’s wife, Prudence, is his business partner, his son Darryl is the company’s IT manager, and his daughter Dana is working toward her MFA in creative writing at Cornell.

Tim is co-editor of “Time It Was: American Stories from the Sixties” due out this Spring from Prentice Hall publishing. According to the publisher:

“Time it Was” is a collection of personal memoirs, each written for this book, covering different aspects of “Sixties” experience. Dr. Karen Manners Smith and and Tim Koster created this book to make the Sixties accessible and alive for today’s college students, who know only that the period was unique and exciting, but have no real understanding of how young people’s individual choices made it what it was. The authors felt there was a lot that today’s students could identify with—idealism, commitment, risk, hard work, fear, hope, disappointment—if they could read the stories of people who, at their age, did important things with their own lives during a volatile historical period.

With one exception, the stories in this collection are not oral histories; they are first person narratives, many of them by unpublished writers. In test sampling of some of these essays, students responded most positively to the writers’ bravery and sense of adventure and to the genuine risk and hardship many of them had undergone. The advantage of memoir over oral history lies in the pace of the narrative. Oral history is sometimes dulled by a ponderous question and answer format, and collections of oral histories often end up sounding somewhat uniform, since the editor or interviewer is shaping the story. These stories in this book are dramatic narratives and speak for themselves. The individual “voice” of each story is a strong part of its authenticity and appeal. This book is unique in the marketplace in that it is an entire collection of fresh personal narratives, startling in their honesty, presenting real people with real dilemmas, real fears, and real triumphs. There is no other Sixties reader currently on the market which responds as this book does to students’ need for narrative and personal experience to connect them with history.