The Blue Zoo a novel by Steve Greenwell; Stone Ridge Publishing, 2026; $23.95; 686 pages; available on Amazon, Kindle and through the author.
The Blue Zoo is a humorous, fictionalized story of a brainy, awkward boy growing up in Kansas in the ’fifties and ’sixties. Arty dreams of becoming a cadet, inspired by The West Point Story on TV, but ultimately forgets his childhood fantasy. His father, however, remembers and buys a brand-new, sky-blue, 1966 Ford Custom four-door sedan—with the intention of driving Arty to West Point in style. This act unleashes a series of slap-stick adventures as our hero struggles to gain admittance to West Point but instead earns an appointment to the U.S. Air Force Academy, affectionately called the “Blue Zoo” by the cadets.
On his first day Arty walks under a giant stone portico that famously announced, “Bring Me Men.” Based on events of sixty years ago. This is a story of a “country bumpkin” adventuring out into the world. Proving himself in pursuing his boyhood dream, Steven Greenwell’s Arthur Greenspring transforms from a “would-be” into a cadet and a newly mature young man.
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Born in Winfield, Kansas in 1949, Steven Greenwell, like his alter-ego Art, had childhood dreams of going to West Point. He entered the United States Air Force Academy in 1967, completed jump school at Fort Benning in 1970, and graduated from USAFA in 1971, a proud member of the 13th Class. After serving five years as a Staff Officer, he left the Air Force to pursue a career in medicine. He completed his Internship and Army Flight Surgeon Course in 1982 and became an Army Medical Corps Officer, assigned as Flight Surgeon to Camp Walker in Taegu, Korea. Twenty years later, The Blue Zoo is the happy result.
