A Little About Me For Those Who Might Be Interested

And maybe even for those that aren’t

6 min readNov 13, 2021

Well it’s 5:30AM on Saturday morning and I can’t sleep as usual. So I thought, what would any self respecting insomniac do when they can’t sleep — how about write a biographical article. It seemed like the logical thing to do — at least at the time, but I’ll leave that for you decide.

So where do I begin? Okay, I guess the beginning is as good a place as any.

Here we go. I was born in New Jersey and grew up on the Jersey shore. I am the oldest of three children, I have a brother and a sister, both wonderful people who I love dearly.

My father was a parts manager for a car dealer, and my mother was a homemaker (both are now retired). They were terrific parents and I’ve done my best to let them know that.

Anyway, I had a wonderful childhood living along the Barnegat Bay. This brought along with it a life-long love of the the ocean, and everything that comes with it, swimming, boating, fishing.

Barnegat Lighthouse at the mouth of the Barnegat Inlet (Image by Unknown)

As a result there came some interesting jobs in my youth. I performed beach maintenance at a private beach club. I know, this sounds so glamorous, picking up trash, raking up seaweed, and cleaning the restrooms. Really who wouldn’t want a job like this.

I followed this by becoming a commercial shell fisherman with my brother. We harvested clams using a method called “treading”. This involved anchoring our boat in the shallows of the bay, jumping into the water and shuffling backwards while driving the toes of our shoes into the mud. When we hit something hard we’d reach down into the mud and pull out whatever we found. Most times they were clams, but sometimes we were surprised with a crab. I did this for several summers while in school.