Fred T. Perris in Deseret

About the Book

Perris, California in Riverside County, was named for Fred T. Perris (1837-1916), who is remembered in the region as a civil engineer with the Santa Fe Railroad. He built, among other things, the railroad lines from San Diego to San Bernardino, and up over Cajon Pass. Before that time however, he lived in the Utah Territory, which the Mormons called Deseret. It was the tumultuous post-civil-war era, when opposing forces struggled for economic and political control. His legacy there, vastly different from his work in Southern California, reveals an entirely different side of this remarkable man.

About the Author

Neil Jensen grew up in a house full of books, forever curious about their content. Yet, despite the reverence, almost awe, that he acquired from his bibliomaniac father, for scholarship, for having the wisdom of the ages on a bookshelf nearby, Neil did not pursue a scholarly career. Rather he got a degree in engineering, and spent 15 years in hard labor, doing penance for that misdeed, compelled to build rockets, and nose cones for missiles, and nuclear fuel for fun and corporate profits. Then, one day came that ah-ha moment in the turmoil of a mid-life crisis, when he realized that engineers do all that they do with only ten numbers, arranged in a variety of ways; whereas there are twenty six letters, meaning that there must be at least 2.6 times more ways to combine letters than numbers, maybe more. And from that day on, his interests turned to the theatre, the written word, and the spoken word. He served, for a period of 20 years, on the board of the Play- wrights' Center of San Francisco, which produced, during that time, more than 1,000 concert-staged readings of original plays. It was inevitable that he would eventually return to the passion of his youth, historical research. He set out, one day, to find the famous Uncle Fred, his great grandmother's brother, who, his father said, had two towns in the country named after him. This book is the result of that search. He still lives in the Silicon Valley with a house full of books, a patient wife, and an overbearing cat.