I love art, poetry and the night sky. My many unusual hobbies have included model airplanes – the kind you actually take out and fly, wooden model ships, woodworking and recently, decorating with antiques. I’ve played enough chess to know just about how good I am – and am not. And how to accept the “am not” part gracefully.

I was born in Hammond, Indiana and raised just across the state line in Chicago, practically in the shadow of the Chicago Skyway. It was an industrial area, bordered on the west by steel-mills along the Calumet River, and on the east by oil refineries and more steel mills. And for all that it was still, in many ways, a beautiful area.

But since early childhood, my heart has always belonged to Wisconsin. My ancestrial home is Superior and the great Northland, where stars hang in the sky like diamonds in the night. A land of lakes and loons, where the spirit of Hiawatha still haunts the “dark primeval forest.”

But now my home is the Driftless aea of Southwestern Wisconsin. And this, to me is the best of all.
Through it all, I’ve always taken pride in my working class roots. I’ve bussed tables in a restaurant. I’ve worked double-shifts on a blast furnace in tripple digit heat. And I’ve mixed mortar and carried bricks up scaffolding, outdoors in freezing weather. It was a time of building and creating real, tangible things; of being able to point to something and say, “I made that!”

Most of my professional career, though has been devoted to computers and technology and management. Even now, in my “latter years” that seems to be the area where I can contribute the most. And if not for helping others, why else are we here?