John Forester's Background Including His Stay in a Mental Institution and His Failure in Calculus

Here is some more infrmation on Forester including his stint in the mental institution

My research, much of it involving the C.S. Forester papers at the Humanities Research center at the University of Texas,shows that John Forester came from a somewhat dysfunctional household, much of it the product of his father's obsessive womanizing.

He (John) started as a physics major at UC-Berkeley about 1946. He failed a second-year calculus exam and dropped out of college and worked in a warehouse in Boston for about nine months, then returned to UC-B as an English major, graduating in August, 1951. He went into the Navy in December 1951 and received a medical discharge in August 1952 after being hospitalized for several weeks at the psychiatric unit at Bethesda Naval Medical Center in Washington DC.

He married an Englishwoman, Jean Labada Clough Nicholson in September, 1953. A son, Geoffrey R. Forester, was born on 4 June 1954. He now lives in Muncy, PA. John Forester went to work in a steel fabrication factory about the time of his marriage and studied at night at UC-B for a certificate in industrial engineering. With this certificate, he received his P.E. from the State of California, probably in 1956. California no longer licenses P.E.s in industrial engineering, which is primarily a business methods discipline, but does maintain the licenses of those who received their P.E.s before they were eliminated.

In March or April, 1958 a daughter Pamela was born. She died in April (probably 11) 1962 of natural causes. Forester and his family moved from Berkeley to Fullerton in the LA metro area in late 1958. He worked at North American Aviation, and probably other places, got his master's in industrial engineering from Cal State Long Beach in 1964 and started to teach there part-time in the business school. He claims that he was an assistant professor, but his textbook, which came out in January, 1968, just before he moved back north, lists him as a "lecturer."

C.S. had a major stroke in 1965, and he and his second wife Dorothy moved to Fullerton in late 1965. C.S. died in April, 1966. In his will, he left John and his brother each $5,000. About twenty other individuals received testimonial bequeaths worth a total of $25,000. The bulk of the estate, about $700,000, went to Dorothy. John and his brother did receive all the literary properties. Dorthy soon returned to England and severed relations with the Foresters.

The will appears to have tripped him out. Within a year or two he quit his job, left his wife and family (he says because she discouraged his cycling, fearing it would bring the opprobrium of their upper-class neighbors) and moved back north to Palo Alto, where he became a bicycle racer, randonneur, and sports car enthusiast. He wrote an incredibly viscous biography of his father detailing every moral and personality shortcoming.
He could not get it published then and sat on it to 1987, when be had a brief excerpt published in American Scholar. In 2000 the whole thing was self-published in a 2-volume set limited to 250 sets. This is the last sentence in the 2000 postscript, which closes out the 800-plus pages:

"I can honestly write that I am better known in my field than my father was in his."

He worked at Xerox in 1970-71, but got fired in 1971. He was working at another high-tech firm in 1972. In 1972 he met Dorris L. Taylor, a cyclist and biochemist visiting from Minneapolis. he apparently talked her and her two daughters into moving to California. In late 1972 he became involved in cycle advocacy and in 1973 he quit work for what he says he thought would be two years full-time work in cycle advocacy while Taylor supported him.
He has, apparently, never worked as an employee since. In 1998 he and Taylor split up (she moved to Fort Collins, CO) and he moved to the San Diego suburb of Lemon Grove. He may be in financial straights; the Sunnyvale house he sold in 1998 had an assessed value of $390,000, while the sales price of the Lemon Grove house was only $143,000; it has only two bedrooms, one and a half baths, and 1043 sq. ft. and was built in 1950.