Home : Volume 23 : Fall 1996 :
Looking in ..... on College of Engineering alumni

Mike Hatch BSIE '72 Teacher and author Fond du Lac, Wisconsin (27K JPG)

Although he hasn't been a butcher, baker or candlestick maker, Mike Hatch has been a farm hand, migrant fruit picker, auto mechanic, industrial engineer and instructor for UW-Oshkosh. But it wasn't until he sold his prospering business that he could pursue his dream job--fiction writer. "I thought about it all my life, but I never had a chance to do it," Hatch says. "I never had the time until my company was sold in 1992." He spent much of the following year writing Horseshoes & Nuclear Weapons, a contemporary thriller in the high-tech, military-based genre popularized by Tom Clancy. Last year, Northwest Publishing released the trade paperback, which has since sold several thousand copies.

Horseshoes & Nuclear Weapons tells the story of the unlikely pairing--and subsequent romance--of a loose-cannon CIA agent, Nick Barber, and a by-the-books FBI agent, Sally Stein, as they race to prevent terrorists from detonating a nuclear weapon in downtown Chicago. To provide technical details for his novel, Hatch exploited the research skills he developed during his engineering training and years of experience in industry. "I get into libraries, and I send out for things, and I get into computer systems and do a lot of searching," Hatch explains, "and now I'm doing a lot of research on the Internet." He also drew on the nuclear-weapons expertise of his colleagues at the UW-Oshkosh, where he teaches classes in computer science and manufacturing systems. And to learn about the nuts-and-bolts of law enforcement, Hatch interviewed a CIA agent, two FBI agents and several police officers.

Also invaluable was his more than 20 years of professional experience as an engineer in Fond du Lac-based companies such as Mercury Marine--where he was manager of production planning and scheduling--and the Damrow Company, in which he was a vice-president and part owner. His in-depth understanding of how mechanical devices are built gave him a head start in explaining the book's sometimes esoteric technologies. "Since I have an engineering and manufacturing background," Hatch says, "I have a pretty good idea of how the weapons would be constructed and how you would have to set things up to disable them as well."

He also has completed a second thriller, Take it to the Limit, and is working on a third. And although he has since filled the "free time" that selling his business provided--Hatch carries a nine-credit teaching load, spends his university breaks on book tours, consults for Wisconsin businesses and writes nonfiction, such as a chapter he co-authored with UW-Oshkosh professor James Rice on manufacturing resource planning for the Production Inventory Management Handbook--he still manages to squeeze in a few hours of fiction writing each week.