Judith Skilllings Biography

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Judith Skillings was born in Portland, Maine and spent her first years in Skowhegan. When she was seven the family moved to Holden, Massachusetts. Entering second grade was traumatic because her classmates already knew how to express themselves in cursive writing, while she was still printing. However an early assignment was to design a book jacket and print (not write) a synopsis of the story on the inside flaps. She got an A for neatness and thus began her love affair with books. Around age eleven, her mother convinced her to enter a poetry contest sponsored by the local American Legion. “Flag, Guardian of Our Nation” garnered her a $25 gift certificate and her first thrill of having someone pay for her writing. It would be a long time before that thrill was repeated.

Her high school education at Wachusett Regional had the usual ups and downs, exacerbated by the fact that her father was the school’s principal. She likes to think he did not influence her sophomore English teacher when

she wrote in the margin of a paper: “You’re like a breath of fresh air in a stifling room. Honestly.” That comment was better than money and probably planted the seed that decades later resulted in her actually finishing an entire manuscript. (Mrs. Owen had asked the class to use more dynamic verbs. Judith used laid in the Biblical sense; it got the teacher’s attention.)

After high school Judith went west—about an hour to the Berkshires of western Massachusetts. Her brother John, who’d apparently spent his undergraduate years analyzing coeds at the Seven Sisters colleges, suggested she attend Mount Holyoke. He announced that his kid sister wasn’t smart enough for Radcliffe, pretty enough for Wellesley, rich enough for Bryn Mawr or snobby enough for Smith. As it turned it out, Mount Holyoke College was the perfect choice for a superb liberal arts education. Despite taking classes in poetry and theater, Judith ended up a history major, which would lead to a real nine-to-five job later in Philadelphia at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

During college she was introduced to the vagaries of British automobiles when she “inherited” her brother’s 1957 MGA after he’d put a rod through the block. Replacement parts, on order from England, wouldn’t arrive for nine months. The entire car had been rewired using all black wires, so no mechanic could figure out why the turn signals came on with the windshield wipers. They blamed it on electrical components by Lucas (if you don’t understand this comment, ask anyone who drives a British car). If she’d known Richard Frawley was waiting in the wings, she never would have sold the MG. Any resemblance to the car that her heroine, Rebecca Moore, drives is very intentional.

A year after graduation she bartended for the summer at the Officers’ Club at the Naval Air Station in Brunswick, Maine. There she met Lieutenant J. R. Frawley, whom she married a year later. The Navy sent them first to Villanova University, where Frawley taught NROTC. The next billet was in southern Maryland, not too far from the fictitious town of Head Tide where the Rebecca Moore books are located. They relocated to the Chesapeake area with two Masters’ degrees, a pair of Siamese cats and a dismantled 1934 Rolls-Royce 20/25.

In need of everything, that car launched The Frawley Company, a repair and restoration facility in Chester County, PA, devoted to Rolls-Royce and Bentley motorcars, pre-1980. In 1995 Judith left corporate life to join the company, where she handled the books, the advertising, the employees and did an occasional valve timing. Evenings and down time, she dabbled at writing plays and reviewing them as a Barrymore Nominator in Philadelphia. Then one day while using the glass beading machine—arms stretched inside rubber gauntlets, spraying rust from a cylinder head—she thought, “You could fit a body in here.” And DEAD END was born.

She still works at the shop a couple of days a week and tries to spend two at home writing, supervised by her proofreaders, Alfred and Alexander. They were joined this year by Isabel, a stray who was pretending to be speed bump on Main Street when she was rescued. Although adorable, she’s not literary, which is just as well; the desk is already crowded. As is the office area at the shop. At current count there are five adopted strays in the shop and one clawing at the door.

Each year Judith and her husband try to get back to Maine for a couple of weeks to work on the family cottage. To get there, you cross a bridge onto the island and travel winding roads past the dangerous curve sign before heading down a dead end road. If you gaze toward open ocean you can watch gulls circle the islands near the spot where a certain sailboat might have capsized, radically changing Rebecca Moore’s life.