About the Author

PJ Patrick Flynn is a retired public‑school administrator, teacher, and environmental consultant. She lives in the Sierra Nevada mountains, surrounded by animals and books, writing in the quiet of a high‑country retreat.​

A seventh‑generation Californian, she descends from a family with more than 420 years on American soil, beginning with early arrivals to Massachusetts in the early 1600s. From the Mayflower through the Revolutionary, Civil, and World Wars, her ancestors fought for freedom, trekking across the continent over generations of Manifest Destiny to the final frontier—California in the 1800s.​

Her great‑grandfathers helped shape the Los Angeles basin in the early 1900s as it grew from a town of a few thousand into a major metropolis. One founded an early auto‑parts enterprise that later folded into what became the NAPA Auto Parts distribution system, and was a 33rd‑degree Freemason and 32nd‑degree Scottish Rite Mason; the other (also a Freemason) built many of the public schools of Long Beach—campuses she would encounter again a century later when her own career in school business and construction leadership ended amid a battle over their reconstruction.​​

That civic legacy extended through her grandfathers and close kin. One grandfather served in the U.S. Navy and spent three decades as an engineer in Lockheed’s Skunk Works, contributing to the secretive aerospace projects that defined the Cold War era. Another served in the Navy in the Second World War and later became a Superior Court judge for Island and San Juan Counties in Washington State. A maternal uncle spent ten years in the U.S. Coast Guard before rising to vice‑president of foreign research and development for Occidental Petroleum, and a maternal aunt served for twenty‑seven years as director of research within the orbit of the United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency.​

Her father developed historic ranches in California and Nevada and worked in Republican politics alongside Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and Richard Nixon, later authoring two books about his time with Reagan. Until his death in 2024, he remained active in local affairs, modeling a life of engagement at the intersection of land, liberty, and public service.​

It is against this backdrop of faith, sacrifice, and civic engagement that she writes today. Politics, corporate development, international organizations, Freemasonry, law, the military and its industrial complex, history, land‑use development, and construction all appear in her extended family story, providing a living case study of the very systems traced in this book. These ancestral strands—crossing boardrooms, bases, courtrooms, campuses, and covenants—form the soil from which her understanding of global forces has grown, and the lens through which she explores genealogy, power, and promise in The Eternal Flame and the Children of the Promise.​