The roads that lead a person to becoming a writer are varied, but for John Stanley, it was a taste of “hard, physical work” that sparked the notion of a writing career — that and an irresistible fascination with words, stories, and the boundless world of the imagination.

“My life seems to be eclectic,” Stanley mused on a recent visit to the Register newsroom to talk about his new book, “I Was a TV Horror Host.” (subtitled, “Close Encounters with Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, Willam Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, Ray Harryhausen, Roger Corman, Robert Bloch — and Many More!”) Stanley reflected on his colorful life as a puzzle maker, newsman, novelist, filmmaker, entertainment writer and then as a star himself as host in the 1980s of the popular “Creature Features.” It’s all driven by curiosity about the world around him — both the seen and unseen.

“In 1968,” he said, “I met Ray Bradbury,” the science fiction author whose books Stanley had read as a boy growing up in Napa. “He told me, ‘It’s your sense of wonder you’re talking about. It’s what gets us through life.’”

Stanley moved from Oakland to Napa in 1946, when his father was still serving in the South Pacific. Two weeks after they arrived, his father, Myron Stanley, joined them; he was recovering from wounds he’d received on the island of Luzon. John’s parents bought a new house on two and a half acres of land on Soda Canyon Road — “for $7,500.” His uncle, Guy Hartman, built the Soda Canyon Store, and was later found dead in his apartment above it, his blood dripping through the ceiling. “My father and my uncle were both members of the sheriff’s posse,” Stanley said.

Myron Stanley however, was a “hardwood floor man” who founded the Silverado Flooring Company. Working with his dad from the time he was 11, Stanley recalled, “I was the Sandpaper Kid, nailing floors with a machine, filling the nail holes with a mixture of lacquer and sawdust. In enclosed rooms, I became the happiest kid in the Napa Valley.

“I worked in every neighborhood in Napa, and houses from Calistoga to Vallejo, including a tract of houses near where the Queen of the Valley is today. We did scores of houses in one summer. That was when I knew I wanted something else ... The hard work my father exposed me to inspired me to become a writer.”

Stanley had become hooked on the world of books, comics and movies at Napa’s now-closed Uptown Theater. “There was another theater in Napa, too, a Fox Theater,” he said. “It was 12 cents to see a double bill.”

In those days, he said, “there were not a lot of horror films.” Westerns, comedies, mysteries and musicals dominated, but he’d already had a taste of the supernatural, the creepy, the otherworldly thrillers that would later fill his life.  

“I’d grown up listening to ‘The Whistler,’ ‘The Creaking Door’ ‘Mysterious Traveler,’ and reading ‘Tales from the Crypt,’” he said. “These were my entree into the world of the weird.”

Then, he said,  in the 1950s, he saw his first enthralling horror films “The Thing From Another World” and “The Day the Earth Stood Still.”

By the time he was 16, Stanley was crafting and selling crossword puzzles, and writing for the Napa Sentinel. “The Register had the good sense not to hire,” he noted, although later, when he was a staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, he did do “an occasional freelance piece” for his hometown daily.

When he was a senior at Napa High School, an enlistment officer came to campus, “and two weeks after I graduated I was on my way to Ft. Ord,” Stanley said. After his military service he returned to Napa to study at the “JC,” as Napa Valley College was then known. He transferred to San Francisco State, and in the city he met Abe Mellinkoff, then city editor of the San Francisco Chronicle.

In those days, Stanley said, “the Chronicle was probably the most entertaining paper in the country. Its columnists were like characters from a Damon Runyon novel.” They included Terence O’Flaherty, Payne Knickerbocker, Art Hoppe and the immortal Herb Caen.

Melinkoff hired him as a copy boy, “a dead end job in those days,” and although he told Stanley “we wouldn’t hire you to do a dog report,” he’d actually opened the door to what would become a 33 year career for Stanley as a newsman at the Chronicle.

He got his break from Knickerbocker. Recalled Stanley: “He used to ruminate, ‘Wouldn’t it be terrible if we had to go out into the world and find a real job?’” Knickerbocker told Stanley he could write reviews of “B” movies. “I’d put (the reviews) under the paste pot on his desk and he’d mark them up.” In 1961 when Knickerbocker went to Europe for the premiere of  “Judgment at Nuremberg,” he asked Stanley to cover for him. “Within a year I had a writing job.”

Stanley became part of the team responsible for the Chronicle’s pink section, the Sunday entertainment section, and he began to write about the stars he’d watched on screen since he was a boy. “Fred McMurray was something of a disappointment because he was trying so hard to be a normal guy,” he recalled. “Barbara Stanwyck was very memorable — a tough old broad.”

The most memorable?  “When you meet Mae West,” Stanley said, “it’s something you’ll never forget.”

There was also the time he went to a hotel to interview Harrison Ford. “He opened the door and I thought ‘My God, it’s Indiana Jones.’ I was like a kid, awestruck.”

“I loved to meet the directors,” he added, and in time Stanley was inspired to make his own film, “Nightmare in Blood” — “something best forgotten,” he said. This film led to a meeting with Bob Wilkins, then host of “Creature Features,” broadcast by KTVU Channel 2 out of Oakland. Wilkins, Stanley wrote, was “the strangest of all TV horror hosts — he didn’t wear a costume.”

In his book, Stanley quotes actor Tom Hanks, “who grew up in the Bay Area watching ‘Creature Features:’ and said, ‘I would never have been scared by ‘The Night of the Living Dead,’ and countless Hammer horror masterpieces, were it not for gentle Bob Wilkins, cracking jokes in his rocking chair.’”

When Wilkins decided to retire in 1978, he astonished Stanley by asking him to take his place. Stanley auditioned, and then, as he wrote, “I told my wife, Erica, ‘there’s no way I’ll ever get this job,’ All I wanted to do was immediately go home. And immediately get drunk. I left thinking it was a good thing I worked for the Chronicle. I still had my day job.”

Two weeks later, when he was offered the job, “I collapsed on the couch in total fear.”

Thus began what he describes as “the worst of times, the hardest of times, ... the most challenging of times, and now in retrospect I can see that it was the best of times, the greatest of times, and I will never forget those greatest of times.”

For the host, he decided to create a character, “the ordinary guy who’s fascinated with the world — ghost stories, UFOs — and how it’s portrayed in the other world.” For the next six years he played himself and infused his wry humor and comic pranks to his introductions to the world of weird films. Along the way he interviewed memorable characters like Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, and Star Trek’s William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy, who almost refused to do the show when he discovered one of his relentless fans waiting for him at the door of KTVU.

This is among the anecdotes Stanley relates in “I Was a TV Horror Host.” His lively style echoes the same tongue-in-cheek humor of his TV days. The book is also a rich photo album with black and white images of everyone from Captain Satellite Bob March to Lucille Ball to Maila Nurmi, better known as “Vampira,” the first TV horror host.

When he sensed interest in “Creature Features” was waning, Stanley retired, and then in 1994, he left the Chronicle. In his usual eclectic fashion, however, this merely meant moving onto yet a new phase in his life, which brought him back to his old haunt, Napa. Telling him, “You have more useless information in your head than anyone I know,” a friend, David Kleinberg, recruited him to begin working with Elderhostel, which offers classes for senior citizens in various locations. One of the spots where Stanley begin leading classes in subjects like “The Golden Age of Movies,” and “Women of the Movies” and “Jewish Comics” was at the Chateau hotel and then the Embassy Suites in Napa.

In addition to teaching Elderhostel classes, Stanley, who now lives in Pacifica, works on his writing, which to date includes six editions of “John Stanley’s Feature Movie Guides.”

A monster-flick host or a “Creature Feature” guru, he wrote, “inescapably becomes a symbol for the enormous love and appreciation millions of devoted fans have for science fiction, fantasy and horror flickers. These impressionable, wide-eyed beings spearhead a special gang of tomorrow that loves and longs for the magical, wondrous things in life.”

But has he ever experienced the supernatural outside of a studio or off a movie screen?

“I’ve seen some weird things,” he reflected, “I haven’t been abducted by aliens, but I’ve got my fingers crossed.”

“I Was a TV Horror Host,” is available by mail order for $23 by writing to John Stanley, 1082 Grand Teton Drive, Pacifica, CA 94044, by e-mail at creature@netwiz.net or through the Web site at www.stanleybooks.net. Copperfield’s Books and Bookends Book Store in Napa also carry it.

When you order the book, the press release notes, “be sure to tell us to whom it should be autographed and John Stanley will sign it as you request.” The copy he left in the Register newsroom is inscribed, “Horrors looking at you, kid.”