| The Sandy Hook Lighthouse plays an integral part in Return of the Zytron Rebel and required a lot of research. I found and corresponded with Greg Jansky who offered to give me an off-season tour. Greg Jansky, the only character in the story who isn't historical or fictional, is in fact a real tour guide at Sandy Hook Lighthouse. He was especially supportive in my effort to make all the details about the lighthouse accurate and I described what happened during the tour on page 184 in the book. |
| Deciding where Rob was going to hide the locket in the lighthouse wasn't an easy choice. Remember, it had to stay safe for almost two hundred years. After some conversation with Greg Jansky, and much indecision, I sat down determined to get past the problem, and punched the keyboard of my computer until Rob finally found a suitable place to hide the locket. I described Rob's discovery of the locket's future-hiding place in the following manner: |
Two wooden beams crossed the ceiling of the window well and Rob found a crevice in the rubblestone on the ceiling just beyond the second beam. It allowed him to stick his fingers in and hold on as he stretched to peer outside before returning to the platform. |
| Of course, this is where Rob eventually hid the locket, and as it turned out, he had made a good choice. |
| About two months later, my wife and I visited Greg and he graciously gave us a tour of the lighthouse. We decided to inspect the chosen window well to check the plausibility of what I had written. We climbed in the window well and there, just beyond the second beam, exactly as I described it, was a rather large crack. Greg said he had never seen it before. Later, he e-mailed me to say: "I actually double-checked the crack about a month ago while giving a tour. Every time I go by the window I think of the story. I've attached some pictures of the window well with the crack in the rubblestone for you." |
I've included one of Greg's pictures below and the resultant illustration used in the book.
| Another interesting fact: The window well pictured below is one of only two window wells with the original rubblestone ceiling still accessible. Had I chosen any other, Rob wouldn't have recovered the locket. All the others were covered with brick. |
