I was born in Coventry, England in 1941 during an air raid or so my mother told me.  I spent the first fourteen years living in Exhall, a quiet village just north of Coventry.  At eleven, I went to a comprehensive grammar school in Bedworth, which had a curriculum that included the sciences, languages, arts and mathematics.

In 1956, my family emigrated from the UK to Aurora, Ohio where I later graduated from the local high school.  After a brief stint at Northeastern University in Boston, I went to Kent State University and graduated with a degree in chemistry.  While in college, I worked full-time at a variety of jobs, such as glazier, landscaper, lab technician in a number of businesses that ranged from a sponge factory to high-performance adhesives and urethane foams.

Upon graduating, I had to fulfill a promise that I had made to myself.  You see, to stay motivated while attending college, I’d vowed I would travel and see the world.  Three years after graduating, money saved and possessions sold or given away, I set out to see the world.  These travels took me first to California, then New Zealand, Australia, where I stayed a while and taught science at a suburban Sydney boys’ school.  After that, it was off to Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey and then back into Europe.  After a stay in Paris and London, I returned to the USA, having traveled for over two years.

 

I discovered being out of the work force for more than two years immediately raised suspicions my absence was due to being ‘a guest of the state,’ which made securing a good job difficult.  Nevertheless, after a short stint in the ‘itchy-twitchy’ factory (fiberglass lay-up shop), I managed to get a technician’s position and subsequently eased into a position doing geoscience research.  Along the way, I obtained an advanced degree in economics and changed my career track to finance, first in an oil company and then in a bank.    

 

Meanwhile, I became a registered petroleum engineer, which helped with asset value questions in financing oil companies. Later, I obtained registration as a P.E. in environmental engineering.

All went well until oil prices collapsed in 1986 and there was no longer a need for petroleum engineers / economists. That required another career change.  At first, I wrote business-economic studies before going into construction project management.  I did projects as small as heavy equipment road crossings to as large as a waste-to-energy power plant that burned fifteen hundred tons of trash per day in Long Beach, California. California regulators made that job more than challenging and convinced me to never seek employment again in California.

Upon early retirement, I began to write more seriously and take courses in Spanish.  In addition, I began aviation ground school and eventually obtained a private pilot’s license. 

 

During this time, I began to coordinate the fiction critiquing section of the West Side Writers (http://westsidewriters.blogspot.com) and become a regular presenter at the Western Reserve Writers Conference at Lakeland Community College .