Having returned to Portland in 1964, he met a local girl, his first wife, Dawn Halliday, the daughter of Portland's Lord Mayor, Reuben H. Halliday. They were soon married and he remained in Portland, working hard in the family's hotel, until 1972, when, he began to understand that he was not as ideally suited to the hotel business as he had once thought, and that he really wanted to become a writer, and that writing was far more important to him than operating the ever more lucrative family business.