After graduation from THS, I went into the Air Force for 4 years, trained in San Antonio, got bumped from the military school of my choice along with my entire squadron and made into an Air Policeman for SAC.  From there, a couple of years stationed in Plattsburgh NY and Greenland, followed by a much more interesting year near Marrakech,  Morocco for my last year.  While there I served as a K-9 handler and radio d-j for Armed Forces Radio.  After discharge in 62, I married my high school girlfriend, Marion, had two great kids, Bill and Bonnie, and…well, sadly the marriage broke up in the early 70’s. 

By that time my two brothers and I had started a Multi-Media business.  We began on the proverbial shoestring, and by the time I sold my interest in the business to my brothers in 1976, we were sending lighting, sound and projection equipment and personnel to conventions and meetings around the country, Mexico, the Islands and Europe.  I lived in Greenwich Village for a few years in there, and met my second wife, Joan, while hanging out at the old Jimmy Day’s Tavern on Sheridan Square.  In 1976 Joan and I were married by a minister some of you may know by sight.  He’s the guy who married Miss Piggy and Kermit in the movies, although he didn’t sing to us at our ceremony.  Joan and I drove to Cambria, CA and began a small woodworking business, while for income  I continued to work as a freelance staging consultant/tech on the road.  We had a daughter, Janine, in 1978, and then, in late 1980 dark times caught up with us. 

Joan was driving home from an aerobics class when she swerved to miss a raccoon and flipped her VW over.  Hardly a scratch, but she did have a C-3, C-4 permanent spinal injury.  Very similar to the injury Christopher Reeves, the actor, received.  We made it through the next 13 years, somehow.  We gave up the woodworking shop, and I was able to be her full time caregiver, except for about a week a month when I traveled to make enough to live on, and pay the attendants we hired while I was gone.  My Joan was a remarkable woman.  She got me to take art classes with her, make her a painting system that she could use for watercolors with mouth sticks, and rarely complained.  Joan was a social worker in NY, and it stood her in good stead in CA.  After her injury, she put together a women’s group that met at our home every two weeks with a psychologist.  My job was to first build a room onto the house for her group meetings, then provide the snacks, tea and coffee, and disappear.  She wrote poetry, and got me to do the same, some of it being published.  We traveled in our van, once going all the way to the east coast for a family reunion in Lidell Corners, a very small spot near Cooperstown, NY. 

Joan died in 93, and I came off the road for awhile, worked nights at mundane jobs, went back to school at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, CA, and finally got my bachelor’s degree in history to add to my military instructor certification, electronics certification from RCA Institute in NY, and the Associates in art I got while attending classes with Joan.   Needless to say, most of what went on during that period had pushed us beyond bankruptcy, but somehow we got through.

In 1999 I married again, to a good friend, Sally, who had been Joan’s hairdresser for years.   In 2003 we moved to the Eureka/Arcata area in northern CA. to be near my daughter Janine, who was attending Humboldt State University.  By 2005 that marriage was over, though we remain friends, and I am now living on my own in Eureka near Humboldt Bay (well, almost alone, I do have a cat, Anna Blume), am still working, making the occasional wood toy, and my only (I think) vice is collecting contemporary signed first editions. 

Life has been interesting, exciting, painful and enriching.  I’ve traveled the world with my jobs, eaten frog fat in Hong Kong,  staged an event on a riverboat on the Nile that included Fifi Abdou, the best known belly dancer in Egypt, got locked in one of the Pyramids at night by mistake, was in Singapore when the first Iraq war broke out, rode camels in Morocco, ate snake on the bullet train in Japan and hedgehog in Casablanca, walked the Louvre and the Dorset in Paris, rode gondolas in Venice, put on meetings under the Hughes airplane, the Spruce Goose, stayed in a small hotel in Florence that was once the home of the poet Dante’s wife, and lit candles for my late wife the year she died, with our daughter Janine, in cathedrals in France, Italy and Spain.  I have a great family, who some of you may remember: brothers Jim in NJ and Bob in Florida, sisters Nora in Manhattan and Vivian in Ca, son Bill and his wife Linda, living in NJ with their 3 children and one great grandchild, daughter Bonnie living in upstate NY, with her husband Tim and 2 sons, and daughter Janine, who lives in Portland, OR with her partner.  Whew!  See you at the reunion.