R.A. Montgomery, of the Choose Your Own Adventure books, dead at age 78.
Children of the 80's will no doubt remember the shelves and shelves of little white paperbacks with red piping from the Choose Your Own Adventure series, where you could play as anything from a deep sea explorer to a shipwrecked mariner, a volunteer time traveler, or anything in between. If you're anything like me, you also spent way too much time looking for mistakes in the sequence of pages to find more interesting twists and no shortage of endings (most of them bad). I can't say they went out of print for a while but they did become harder to find in stores for several years. More recently Chooseco was founded to pick up the torch, reissue some of the older books, and publish new ones. R.A. Montgomery's business practices were unique at the time, which is to say that every author who wrote books in the series was credited with having done so, instead of being credited as the series' founder (which was common in the industry then).
I'm sorry to report that R.A. Montgomery, one of the first authors of the Choose Your Own Adventure series and contributer for nearly the entire history of the series died on 9 November 2014 at the age of 78 at his home in Vermont. It is not known how or what contributed to his death at this time. He is survived by his wife, a son, two grand-daughters, a sister, and a daughter-in-law.
A private memorial service will be held in early 2015.
Mr. Montgomery, thank you for everything you've done and written over the years. Your were an inspiration to me when I was younger, and I still have a few dozen of your books in my collection. You will surely be missed.