New-About

I am the middle child of five; an older sister and brother, Nellie & Paul, and two younger sisters, Agnes & Elizabeth. We lived in Downers Grove, Illinois, until I was three, then moved to Sheboygan, Wisconsin. We rented there until I was five, when Mom & Dad bought a house barely a stone’s throw from Lake Michigan, in the woods a couple of miles south of Sheboygan in an area known as Black River. I lived there until I enlisted in the Army in 1968.

Didn’t take much notice of what a magical and idyllic place it was for a kid to grow up until later in life. I just knew I loved it and spent as much time out in the woods and on the beach and in the lake as possible with all the critters and birds who lived there. Still don’t care much for cities and with the exception of family and a handful of friends prefer the company of critter and feathered things to people.

In the Army, I served in Vietnam twice at Camp Holloway, near Pleiku in the Central Highlands, with the 604th Transportation Company, 14th Transportation Battalion, supporting the 52nd Combat Aviation Battalion. Was proud of my service then and still am.

Worked many jobs in many places after the Army: factories, canneries, landscaping, sales, telemarketing, fishing, bar tending, medical research, driving, construction, dish washing … others I can’t remember ... in Wisconsin, Florida, Michigan, Washington, Alaska, Washington again, Louisiana, Washington again, Georgia, Oregon, Alaska again, Oregon again … runnin’, I guess. But wherever you go, there you are. Self-medicated (yeah, PC for drugs & alcohol) off and on until rehab in 1981. Good thing or I’d have killed myself with it one way or another if I’d continued. Pulled myself, then, pretty steadily out of the morass the war had left me in and went to college in 1989. I graduated in 1995 with a B.Sc. in Psychology from Portland State University, Portland, Oregon, with a 3.8 GPA . Not bad for as befuddled as I’d been for those oh-so-many years.

During my senior year, I pulled a card off of the college employment office bulletin board that led to what became my full time work until I retired in 2013, managing income property, apartment communities, in the Portland area.

My ‘great escape’, if you will, after the lost years, was my motorcycles. I’ve ridden over 250,000 miles in and through all but a hand full of states, plus all but four of the Canadian provinces and have dipped my front tire in both oceans and the Gulf of Mexico. It’s been the BEST … and, God willing, those states that I missed will see me yet.