A delightfully entertaining collection of stories spanning the 1950s to the 2000s, filled with meaning, humor, charm, and many surprises along the way.

With his debut short story collection, Capers and Switcheroos, Chip Cater writes with satire, humor, and heart, bringing places to life with adventures in New Jersey, escapades in Alabama, summers in Wellfleet on Cape Cod, business in the South, career mistakes in Boston, trips to Aruba, London, Vietnam, and a second home in Barbados.

Readers are in for a treat with boyhood capers in “Chestnut Street,” “The Krimpet Caper,” and “Chenango and Otsego,” featuring a sailing battle between the boys’ and girls’ camps with unexpected results.

Finally, “Red M&M’s,” “Saved by the Belle,” “Snake Pit,” and “Switcheroo” include a business context, interspersed with the usual shenanigans and capers that occur in the workplace with fellow employees and customers.

Charles “Chip” Cater grew up in northern New Jersey. He graduated from Hamilton College with a B.A. in English and later attended Boston University and the University of Montana while pursuing his passion for creative writing.

The bulk of his career was spent with Thomson Reuters, where he ran sales, marketing, and technology, and was Chief Marketing Officer and Global Head of Customer Experience. As the electronic information business grew and evolved, transforming “must have” content from being trapped in books to being delivered digitally through CD-ROM and online, he was a key leader in driving the transformation of the corporation to digital. This provided professionals, such as lawyers, tax practitioners, and others, with near-instantaneous delivery as opposed to the cumbersome weeks-long research required by traditional print.

As the business grew by building new digital offerings and acquisitions, he and his family moved from the Boston area to Rochester, NY, to Raleigh, NC, to Edina, MN. He and his wife, Mary, an accomplished artist, have three grown children and are now based in Kiawah, SC. When they met in their early twenties, they quickly figured out that their families both had family ties to F. Scott Fitzgerald, hers through Baltimore and his through Montgomery, AL, where his grandparents’ house is now the Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald Museum. They continue to summer in Wellfleet, MA, on Cape Cod, where they were married, and still love the pink light there.

His many years in running large sales and marketing organizations and focusing on his customers’ needs have influenced his storytelling, as have his childhood and teen years, and sense of humor, as will be readily apparent in this book.