About the authors

At the end of 2024, I retired from my 40 year, 4 month, and 25 day career as an air traffic controller, supervisor, and control tower manager (I loved every minute of it), and along with my wife, Betty, moved from Florida to North Carolina. Admittedly not the credentials you’d expect for an aspiring author, but, as I like to say, “we make plans and God smiles when the plans He has for us are totally different.” Betty and I had been planning for several years to retire and move to North Carolina. Like so many of our friends, we made plans to spend as much time as our health allows, traveling, being active in our church, and spending time, lots of time, with our children, grandchildren and other family members. Developing a website and devoting time to researching and writing a book was not on either of our radars (to use an air traffic control term). That was, until one day, while I was driving north on Airport Road in Port Orange, Florida, with my daughter, Hailey, and we passed a roadside cross in front of Creekside Middle School. Hailey told me the cross marked the spot where Summer, a friend and classmate of hers when she was in middle school, died on Thanksgiving Day in 2017. I don’t recall the exact year, but I remember the details as if it happened yesterday. It all hit me at once, the emotions of my daughter telling me the story of the tragedy, seeing the tears streaming down her cheeks, hearing her voice quiver as she told me what happened, the overwhelming sorrow that came over me just thinking how Summer’s parents must have felt losing their 18 year old daughter, me also thinking that it could have been my daughter and not Summer who’s life was marked by roadside cross. After all, my daughter had been in an accident in 2016, not far from where Summer died, totalling the Chevy Avalanche she was driving when a driver changing lanes didn’t see her next to him and hit her so hard that it spun her out of control and into concrete road barriers at 55 miles per hour. The voice I got telling me of the accident was her voice telling me she was okay, but that I needed to come to the emergency room to get her and not the voice of a police officer informing me there had been an accident and my daughter had not survived. In Hailey’s case, the driver’s side airbag and her seatbelt and shoulder harness prevented her from being seriously injured. As these thoughts rushed through my mind, so did a sense of guilt, yes guilt…a lot of guilt, when it occurred to me that I had likely driven past Summer’s roadside memorial hundreds of times and never given much thought to why the cross was there. I hadn’t thought of the life lost, of the family and friends whose lives were forever altered by Summer’s death and of the pain they all have that will never go away. In the midst trying to come to terms with what I was hearing and thinking, I also recalled that I had a classmate, Ronda Rolston, who, I had read about years earlier on our class’s high school website, was killed, along with her two children, in a traffic accident in Texas. Was there a roadside memorial that marked the spot where their lives were abruptly ended? I wondered. Somewhere in the moments right after hearing Summer’s story for the first time from my daughter and trying to come to terms with the ensuing bombardment of thoughts and emotions, I think God planted the thought in my mind to write a book about roadside memorials and tell the stories of the precious lives the memorials are suppose to remind us of.

Fast forward to 2026…Betty and I are comfortably situated in our North Carolina home, we’ve joined Calvary Baptist Peace Haven Church, we’re both active in Bible Study groups and I sit down one morning determined to begin writing my memoirs. No kidding! That’s when I got the God nudge…a gentle reminder that the book that I needed to write first wasn’t about my life and 40 year spiritual journey as an air traffic controller, but was instead about the lives of others…lives not fully lived. The stories of Summer and Ronda and others I did not know then, and many I still don’t know, all cut short by traffic accidents.

It’s time to get to work! Betty is on this journey with me and has been invaluable in helping with researching and telling the stories that will form the chapters of our book. With the help of my brother, Steve Zeiler, and close friend, Greg Willman, we’ve established www.crossroadsthestories.com to share our progress towards the ultimate goal of publishing Crossroads…50 States and 50 Unforgettable Stories. Please join us on the journey…not only will this website chronicle our progress, but we’ve designed it so viewers can share a story if they have one. Simply go to the dropdown menu of states on the homepage or click on the states still in green and send us a story you’d like to share. Who knows, if we like it and still don’t have a story from that state, we might just feature it in our book, Crossroads…50 States…50 Unforgettable Stories and on our website www.crossroadsthestories.com.

Be blessed and be a blessing!

Jim & Betty Zeiler