David Arnold Sprecher

Looking for Karen Johnson David Arnold Sprecher

When developing the plot for a novel, Rick Harper remembered Karen Johnson from his graduate student days. She was a graduate student two or three years his junior taking different classes from his, and moving with a different crowd; a former graduate school buddy of his remembered that she married Jeff Smith. Karen's olive-toned skin, short wheat-colored hair, and green eyes were tailor made for the character that he built around this image, but Karen was no more than a static memory without a personality. A snapshot and nothing more! To identify the character with the image, Rick called initially also the novel character Karen Johnson, and once he used the name, it stuck and no other name sounded right. "Karen may like to know that she inspired a main character in a novel" said his daughter when he told her that the character in the novel was based on a person of that name: "Why don't you look her up and tell her? She may be thrilled to know that." This is the story of that search for Karen Johnson that took him to cities in Florida, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and South Dakota.