Dr. Larry James Ford was born September 1, 1951, in Albany, GA. In 1956, his family moved to Aberdeen, MD, and later to Havre de Grace, Maryland, where he grew up and attended the Havre de Grace Consolidated School, C1. He attended this legally racially segregated school from 1957 to 1964 and then transferred to Havre de Grace High School, an integrated school, from 1964 to 1969. He graduated as vice president of his class, a lettering member of the football team, and an officer in the National Honor Society, Dr. Ford has three siblings: an older sister, Patricia, and three younger ones, Wayne, Pamela, and Pelbea. He attended Syracuse University for one year and then the Johns Hopkins University, graduating in 1973. He graduated from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in 1977 and completed an internal medicine residency at the University of California, San Francisco, in 1983. He practiced in
Georgia in the US Public Health Service, Alaska, and California before retiring in 2011. Dr. Ford retired from medicine after he was diagnosed with systemic mastocytosis, a rare clonal disorder that affects a white blood cell critical to the immune system. Thirty thousand people in the USA have it, and the incidence is 1 in 10,000 people. New effective treatments have recently been introduced, and significant progress has been made in treating this life-changing condition. One of the memorable experiences in writing this book was reuniting with
Mrs. Mabel Hart, a revered second-grade teacher from the Consolidated School. His mother suggested he speak to Mrs. Hart as he started writing. At the time of the release of this book, she was 104 and had recently published a book of her own. Throughout his professional career and journey, Dr. Ford could repeatedly call upon the commonsense knowledge and wisdom imparted by his teachers from the "Colored School." The knowledge was essential to handle the many challenging situations that were coming. In 2020, he returned to his hometown, completing" C is for Colored." He continues to enjoy his passion for playing music, spending lots of time with his guitars (playing anything slow), reading, writing, and wrestling with commas. He has twin daughters, Lauren and Leslie, and three grandchildren, Isabel, Elias, and Karina. They call him LoLo and remember and laugh at him for being moderately obsessed with anything having to do with mathematics and the related game of craps.
