Bio
Biography of John J. Mutter, Jr.
John was born in Racine, Wisconsin during the only year our treasury minted a steel penny.The first seven years of his education was in a one-room school. At age 11 he had a near-death drowning experience in the Wolf River. He graduated high school in 1961 and joined the U.S. Navy for three years, becoming a third-class personnelman. During his enlistment he participated in the first Bomb Shelter Test, to determine humor behavior, at Bethesda, Maryland, (that’s when he learned not to volunteer for anything in the Navy—losing ten pounds in two days).
After his military time he worked at two dozen different jobs, including five years in the Merchant Marines as an Oiler/Fireman. His last full time job was working inside a maximum security prison for 15 years. During his shipping days he sailed on four of the five Great Lakes and four of our world’s oceans. He visited 14 countries, eight islands and Antarctica. In 1969, while serving on the USNS Breten, he became a Vietnam War Veteran.
John was in the fifth grade when he received his first writing credit, a story that was published in the one-room school newspaper in 1954. In 1980, he attended the Rhinelander School of Arts for one week, taking a creative writing course and tutored by Tere Rio Versace. Since then he has 166 writing credits in newspapers, magazines, newsletters, anthologies and historical journals; ten writing awards and has published four books, To Slay a Giant; Out in the Country; his autobiography, No Time to Count, The Life of a small-town writer. and The Oddball, a biography of George Putz, Jr.
John and his wife Karen live on an 80-acre farmstead in Shawano County Wisconsin. He cuts firewood from their woods to heat their home, hunts white-tailed deer in their woods, and fishes the nearby Wolf River, (the river that rejected his life), every spring. He eats the fish he catches all year around. John has been working as a Circuit Court Bailiff at the Shawano County Courthouse since 2012.
