About Me

I grew up in Marshall, Texas, a city of about 25,000 in the Piney Woods of Northeast Texas. I graduated from Stephen F. Austin University in 1968 with degrees in both Journalism and English. While in college, I served on the editorial board of the University’s newspaper, The Pine Log, and I also was the Sports Editor for one year.  

After an extensive business career that took me throughout many parts of the world, in partnership with my son Paul, I began importing original art from the former Soviet Union just two months after its formal dissolution, making us among the first in the world to bring fine art from the USSR to western markets. Our gallery, PAUL SCOTT GALLERY (formerly Gallery Russia), celebrated our 33rd year of business in February of 2024.  

I married my high school sweetheart, Kay Hightower, while we were both college students. Our daughter, Mary, and her family live in Austin, and our son Paul lives with his family in Scottsdale. We are blessed to have four wonderful granddaughters, two in Arizona and two in Texas. We are fortunate to call Scottsdale, Arizona our home.

A number of people have asked me what inspired me to start writing books at age 70. After giving that question some thought, I realized that that my love of family, the friends with whom I grew up, and the fun times we shared are what drove me to the keyboard. I further realized that those folks combined their time and talents to make me a happy person. I was happy as a kid, happy as an adult, and I am happy as an old man. I think “happy” ought to write.

My first book, MAD DOGS, MARBLES, AND ROCK FIGHTS (2017), chronicled my life through age 12. The stars of that book were the boys and girls with whom I shared my early adventures. Those comical and heart touching memories have always brought me great joy, and I wanted those kids to know the time they spent with me wasn’t wasted. They had a profound and wonderful effect on me.

MAD DOGS… struck a positive chord with many readers, and lots of them urged me to continue my Marshall, Texas saga by writing a book about our junior and senior high school times. I accepted their challenge and Stephen F. Austin University Press published PUBERTY DROVE THE CAR, I WAS JUST ALONG FOR THE RIDE in 2020. Since puberty and trying out our new wings dominated those teen years, my writing about those times had to wend its way through the minefields of propriety. I think I managed to zig and zag at the right times and avoid saying stuff about my friends that would cost me their friendships. It was a fun book for me to write and it helped me relive the priceless times and adventures of those tender years.

For my third book, I decided to give the memoir genre a rest and I wrote a biography of Homer Eubanks, my dad. His story began in 1908 with his being the sixth of eight children born to sharecropping parents in Hamilton, Texas. Like others of that era and armed with an eighth-grade education, he struggled through poverty, the Spanish Flu, two world wars, the Dust Bowl, the Depression, and occasional bouts with alcohol to achieve a modicum of success in Marshall, Texas. He was a fighter – both literally and figuratively - from early childhood, so much so that his dad called him "a tornado wrapped in barbed wire.”  That description of him led to entitling the book, HOMER, A TORNADO WRAPPED IN BARBED WIRE, which was published in late October 2021.  

I wrote ‘AGING COMES WITHOUT A MANUAL’ because, for me, aging has been one hell of a trip, and because I am old enough to write about it with some authority.