After World War II Adelphi College in Garden City, now Adelphi University, made the leap from women's college to a co-educational institution and to help it make it on the map in its new form the college began offering scholarships in sports like football. A young graduate of Christopher Columbus High School in the Bronx, Will Manus, was offered one such scholarship and became one of about 100 men to about 500 women on the Garden City campus. Manus described it in his recent interview with Garden City Life as "a very colorful scene" and remembers his time living on campus and renting apartments in the surrounding area (one at 65 Terrace Avenue in Hempstead) during his four years fondly. In fact, after graduating in 1952 he remained on Long Island for a while and has continued to stay in touch with fellow alumni and professors.

Manus was so impacted by his time at Adelphi and life in Garden City that when he made his way to Los Angeles to further his writing career decades later, he met up with four or five of his old college buddies and met every Sunday at the home of Adelphi friend Sam Denoff. Denoff, one of the top writers of The Dick van Dyke Show attended Adelphi for three years and left before graduation, but stayed in touch with the friends he met on the Garden City campus and hosted the weekly paddle tennis matches. Manus also remains in touch with Professor Bill Curry, now a professor emeritus, and says he was also significantly influenced by Professor Donald Koster.

Five years after graduating, he published his first novel, The Fixers, based on the basketball scandal of the 1950s involving student athletes at City College, NYU, Manhattan College and other colleges and universities shaving points after accepting payoffs from professional gamblers. Manus' story was a fictionalized work which used a considerable amount of factual details from the case. His love of writing fostered in college and his own athleticism drove his early work.

Manus' next project was the internationally famous underground '60s comic novel, Mott the Hoople. Manus says, "There was a lot of notoriety from this book. A very popular English rock band of the

70s led by Ian Hunter --the Hooples-- took their name from the book. Fans of the band still look me up." Following the publication of the book he married. Manus says, "My wife is Scottish and we met in NY where she was working for the Theater Guild, which had recruited her from London theater. We went over to Great Britain to visit friends and a Greek American friend of ours said that while we were in Europe we had to make a trip over to Greece. We planned to stay for a week, but when we got to Lindos, a village on Rhodes, we fell in love with it and moved there from 1966 to 1979, rebuilt a house and raised two kids there."

The love affair with Lindos never ended even through a military dictatorship. The Manus family rubbed elbows in the village with some famous tourists, including S. J. Pearlman, Germaine Greere, and the members of Pink Floyd. Manus says, "There was a fantastic mixture of people." In 1979 they returned to the United States because of the poor health of his mother and so that his children could pursue an American education, but he and family still return to their home in Lindos for several months at a time. The Greek Isles provided the backdrop for his novel Connubial Bliss and his play In My Father's House, now in rehearsals at The Jewel Box Theater in Hollywood, is about a Greek American family. His latest project, This Way to Paradise -- Dancing on the Tables is a memoir of his life in Lindos. He was also a freelance reporter and served as the Mediterranean corespondent for the Financial Post of Canada and wrote travel columns about the Mediterranean for a number of publications.

He is also the author of the novel The Fighting Men, a story about Vietnam veterans who meet for a reunion and end up fighting in the jungles of Central America. Manus says in the writing of that novel he "interviewed people who served in Vietnam and did a vast amount of research." He adds, "It did pretty well for a small press book." As the author of a number of plays he has seen his work enjoy particular success in Europe and Australia. Junk Food and Love Boutique are performed often in London and on the continent. He's sold a few television scripts, but finds theater calls him more and has had 15 or 16 plays staged in Hollywood and some have hit the road, one gaining positive reception in Washington, DC. Reap the Whirlwind is going into rehearsal now at the Jewel Box Theater in Hollywood.

"When I went to Adelphi writing courses weren't offered at colleges quite the way they are today. I took a course in radio writing then which really had a long-term impact on my life. Then I got the rights to Irving Stone's Sailor on Horseback, a biographical novel about Jack London and I wrote something for the class. Since then I have written my own two character pieces on Jack London for the radio. We have a fairly active radio drama scene here in LA," Manus said. He added, "I've written a lot about Long Island literary figure Walt Whitman. I did a radio play on his time on Long Island with passages from his writing. I've retraced his footsteps in Huntington and around Long Island."

He went on to say, "Whitman went to New Orleans as a journalist and I wrote a play, Congo Square, featuring him connecting with the spot where slaves were allowed to congregate on their so-called one day a week of freedom where they would talk, sing, and chant. I showed the play to composer Robert Strassburg to get some music for it and he thought it should be turned into an opera, which we did. The concert version was tried out last December and got terrific reviews including one in the LA Times. Now we're working to get backing and struggling to bring it off."

Manus also is a member of both the LA Film Critics Association and the American Theater Critics Association and writes a number of reviews for various publications, including a regular column on blues music for the monthly What's Up. He is also the Southern California corespondent for Playbill Online and e-mails pieces on theater news to the NY based online publication.

His latest novel, fresh off the presses, is Pigskin Rabbi. Manus says he just starting supposing what if a guy happened to study to be a rabbi, but ended up playing professional football. He says, "When you start thinking that way -- with what if -- it turns you on to develop that idea. What if someone felt they had to study something, but they never felt their true calling doing it? The hero of the novel always played football privately and eventually gets recruited under a pseudonym to play for one of the European teams playing American style football abroad. Eventually he gets recruited as a fill-in place-kicker for the NY Giants who think he's Albanian. He brings luck to the team and becomes an integral part of the team. It's a madcap comedy with the team getting in touch with his Jewish heritage as he rediscovers it and they call signals in Yiddish." Tying his love of football with his talent for humor and writing, Pigskin Rabbi in many ways brings his career full circle. Manus says, "I do like satirical writing."

His two new titles Pigskin Rabbi and This Way to Paradise -- Dancing on the Tables are now available through Amazon.com, as are many of his other titles.