WHO I AM
and
WHY THIS WEBSITE IS HERE
I grew up in the northwestern corner of Pennsylvania. My father owned a gas station, then a tavern, then a supermarket, then a Western Auto Assoc. store, so while I was growing up we lived in the country and in several small towns.
I attended a Catholic school, two one room schoolhouses, then a couple conventional schools, and was finally graduated from high school in 1955 in a small town 20 miles from Erie. I had had the opportunity to absorb the first eight grades by the time I was a fourth grader in the one room schoolhouses, but after that the stifling limitations of conventional classrooms had been torturous. By the time I got out of high school I had read every book available in two small town libraries (and everything else I could find) but I’d had my fill of classroom boredom, and college was unaffordable anyway, so I enlisted in the Air Force for the "educational opportunities" (which I quickly discovered to be non-existent).
In the Air Force, while stationed in South Dakota, I married an "army brat," but divorced her in Pennsylvania in 1960, shortly after being discharged.
In 1961 I married a lady who had three sons, then we had two daughters. I served a Tool and Die appprenticeship at Talon, Inc., worked briefly in a job shop, then for General Motors (designing dies and molds) until my father died in 1967. To keep the business in operation, I converted his Western Auto store to True Value Hardware and managed it until my brother was discharged from the Navy in 1970 and took over, allowing me to return to the machine trades. But unable to find a decent job due to a recession in the area, I finally went to Albuquerque, NM in 1972 to find one. Let’s just say the marriage didn’t survive those twists and turns, so I was single again in 1978 when I quit my job there (machining aircraft engine components).
Meanwhile, I had noticed various incongruities in the way everything seemed be working in this nation. Somehow almost everything seemed to function differently from --or even inversely to-- the way I had always thought it should. I began to accumulate a collection of notations I had scribbled in little notepads. I had a lot of pads. In 1978 I began to organize and condense all those into an "explanatory paper" to clarify my understanding of all those seeming inconsistencies. By 1981 I had written enough to compile into a book, so I typed the whole thing and copyrighted the rough draft. By 1989 I had rewritten and reorganized and retyped it several times. But rather than providing a clarification of what IS, during this process it had transformed itself into a new concept of Economics and Politics which incorporated all the qualities I had always thought (during my innocent youth) to be contained in the hallowed "Constitutional American Free Enterprise System."
In the interim (1981-89) I worked intermittently (3 times) as a Tool & Die Maker for a small manufacturing company. Several things I invented and/or designed and fabricated were patented by the company, but I "walked" when they demanded my signature on an overreaching "patent and confidence agreement."
So in 1989, shortly after marrying my long time girlfriend/fiancee, Alfriel, I became an OTR (over the road) 48 state truck driver. My wife rode with me full time. During that adventure I further developed the concepts in my book, and I spent every spare moment rewriting and retyping it on a word processor in the sleeper berth of the truck.
Upon retirement in 1999 we bought a motorhome, so I installed a used computer, converted all the files, rewrote some more, and finally --in 2001-- it was published.
We lived in the motorhome beside her son's home in the mountains southeast of Albuquerque, NM, where she helped care for my step grandchildren (3 boys) while I finished the book and began to develop this website. Meanwhile, Alfriel began chemotherapy for ovarian cancer in 2001, but appeared to be in remission in late 2003 when we moved to my daughter's forested 18 acre property south of Montgomery, Alabama, where we intended to help develop a campground.
However, my loving, beautiful and courageous wife, Alfriel, lost her over 5 year battle with Ovarian Cancer on June 15th 2006. She will also be indelibly remembered by innumerable acquaintances, friends and relatives.
I have since had the unbelievable good fortune to meet and marry an equally wonderful lady and now live in southern Indiana.
The circumstances of these past few years have precluded any effort to market my book other than developing this website (and I haven't even made an effort to enhance the website's search engine rankings).
This brief synopsis has covered my life experiences only enough to sketch the main chronological sequence, but to tell even half would be a book in itself. (Which I don’t intend to write.) Voracious reading and various other jobs and educational explorations have broadened my comprehension of the precarious state of Mankind. So, although it was with great trepidation, I was compelled to publish my ideas in the public forum. Because I believe wholeheartedly in the concepts my book "FutureAMERICA?©" propounds, I could do no less. This website is only an extension of those concepts, that conviction, and my obligation to humanity.
(Yet, in contrast to the urgent but deliberate tone of the book, when I observe this website objectively it seems that I am exhibiting more and more impatience of late.)
If my ideas, or similar concepts, were beginning to be implemented today, I probably would not be around to see the end results, but if these or similar ideas were beginning to be discussed by the time I drop dead it would be very gratifying. -- At least I might think there was some hope that my grandkids would have a chance to live their lives in a state of relative freedom. However, today the world is running at top speed in the wrong direction. Unless a dramatic turnaround occurs soon, I don’t expect to spend the rest of my life in conditions that resemble the Freedom and Liberty of the Constitutional United States of America into which I was born.
We are the only people on Earth who have any opportunity or ability to bring about such a turnaround.
It is almost too late.
