Spokane Authors & Self-Publishers
Member Biography

Bill Tracy

In 1946, at the age of 11, I left the small town in southern Illinois where I'd grown up, and traveled with my mother and two younger siblings to join my father in Saudi Arabia. He'd gone there the previous year with a group of men from the local Lawrenceville Texaco Refinery to work with Aramco, the Arabian American Oil Company, which was then owned jointly by Texaco, Standard Oil of California (later Chevron), Standard Oil of New Jersey (later Esso) and Mobil Oil Company.

We three children and a sister born in Saudi Arabia in 1947 all attended the oil company schools in Eastern Saudi Arabia through our respective 9th-grade years. During high school I was a boarding student at the American Community School in Beirut, Lebanon, and then earned a B.A. in English at Duke University, returning to Arabia during summer vacations. After one year teaching Saudi employees at Aramco's Industrial Training Center and two years in the U.S. Army, I returned to Lebanon in 1961 to teach English in the French section of International College, the prep school for the American University of Beirut. While on the faculty at I.C. I earned an M.A. degree in Political Science at the neighboring A.U.B. During four summers I taught English for the United States Information Agency in Syria, Jordan and Kuwait.

As a free-lance writer I published articles in several magazines during this time, including Aramco World, which was then being edited and printed in Beirut for international distribution. After a few years I joined the staff of Aramco World and except for two intervals, I spent the rest of my professional career with Aramco (later Saudi Aramco) in Saudi Arabia, or with one of its international subsidiaries in Beirut, The Hague in The Netherlands, and finally in Houston Texas. During those years I worked as a writer and photographer, as assistant editor of Aramco World, as editor and supervisor of several other company publications, as writer of Aramco's Annual Report, as an executive speechwriter, and as a company spokesperson. I traveled extensively in the Middle East, North Africa and Europe.

During a one-year year leave of absence from the company, I worked for UNICEF in New York City. Another time I left Aramco for a number of years to write and lecture independently. While living in Santa Barbara, California, I taught classes on Middle Eastern topics at two local community colleges. There, too, I married my wife Marjorie, a librarian, originally from Springfield, Illinois, and acquired two adult stepchildren. I returned to work for Aramco in Houston until my retirement in 2000, when Marjorie and I moved to Eugene, Oregon. Our son John lives near San Diego, California, and our daughter Elizabeth near St. Maries, Idaho. We moved to Spokane in 2008 and now live in the Rockwood retirement community on South Hill. I continue to write occasional articles and book reviews for Aramco magazines and have finished a first draft of a futuristic novel set in Solar Arabia in 2033.

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Page revised 05/19/11 dam