Candidate for
Council Member; City of San Clemente

I was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. From childhood, I was fascinated with electronics. I received a requested vacuum tube voltmeter for my 10th birthday, which I used to fix neighbor's radios and TVs. I was the skinniest kid in my school of about 1200, so someone got the brilliant idea of nicknaming me "Moose." I hated it back then, and got rid of it by going to a vocational high school in a different part of the city, where nobody knew it. It got revived decades later when I told some surf bros about this. It's an endless source of amusement now.

I went to Chicago Vocation High school where I "majored" in electronics-- 3 years of "electronics shop." The late Tommy Campana, inventor of Blackberry Technology, was in shop with me. I remember also this cool, older than me, big guy who sat in front of me in geometry class, whose name might have provoked laughter, but didn't, given the way the nasal-voiced Miss Kotney mispronounced it at roll call every morning. He said he didn't have a major because he was only coming back to finish this one class, and that he was a football player. I can still hear his named being called at roll: Butkus!

By the early 70s technology was fascinating me less and less, and philosophy and classical music more and more. By the autumn of 1972, I was studying with well known Aristotle Scholar Richard McKeon (himself an engineer as an undergraduate), better known today as "the Chairman" in Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. When McKeon retired, I began attending the lectures of Paul Ricoeur, who is today much more famous than McKeon. They were both equally brilliant minds, however. Fortunately, I had the foresight to tape record everything these two men said in high quality sound.

I worked many years as an engineer, mostly at large aerospace companies. Never fared too well in office political struggles which were commonplace. It also bothered me when my boss would tell me to do something like pass software that actually failed its tests. I'd refuse, and management would then regard me as something less than a loyal patriotic American as a result. They got even more upset when they found out I'd sent copies of internal memos and accounting information regarding one Air Force program called LANTIRN to the Senate and House Armed Services Committees. My old idol from my teen years, Sen. Goldwater, was on the Senate Committee back then, and I was reading in published SASC reports that he couldn't understand why the cost "was going through the roof" on LANTIRN. I was one of the original "Barry's Boys" from 1964 (the Chad Mitchell Trio had a song about us), so I couldn't let old Barry down. I had to tell him. Let's just say, that didn't win me any promotions.

The electrical engineering job market, due in large part to outsourcing and H1B visas, collapsed some 15 years ago. I was among the first to be let go-- but not for any lack of technical competence. I've done other things since, like learning to write my favorite kind of music.