Posted on: May 12, 2022 at 4:33 AM

Posted on: Oct 20, 2017 at 6:18 PM

After graduating from MA, I spent two years at CSM, and then moved south to San Diego State where I graduated. While there, a couple of friends and I started a small guitar repair company called "The American Dream Musical Instruments". We went on to open a factory in Lemon Grove, CA, where we built custom acoustic and electric guitars, Appilacian dulcimers, and did repair work for most of the commercial music business in San Diego at the time. Not long after I graduated, and didn't see much of a future in sawdust, I sold my partnership and migrated back up to my folks place in Atherton. Not long after, the small company was sold, and later grew into Taylor Guitars - one of the foremost acoustic guitar companies in the world. So I guess if I had staid with it, I could have retired before I was 30. 20-20 Hindsight. Since then however, I have kept my hand in instrument building, and produced this copy of a Gibson F-5 bluegrass mandolin, about 10 years ago, which took about 600 hours to build, along with a number of other guitars, basses, and other instruments.

So after working in microwave telecommunications for GTE Lenkurt in San Carlos for a couple of years, I packed up my backpack and took off for the South Pacific. First spending 4 months in a small village in Western Samoa, building a house for the Chief of the Village, and then moved on to New Zealand, where I spent a year, as part owner of a boat building company, designing and building catamaran sailboats and cruising the beautiful Hauraki Gulf near Auckland.

Once my visa ran out it was time to head back to San Diego and get a real job working in electronics manufacturing. From there I moved into Physics Research, designing large nuclear experiments for 13 years involved in Underground Nuclear Testing and spending 3 months a year living in a trailer about 100 miles north west of Las Vegas. Once that activity collapsed in 1993, it was time to get back into commercial electronics, working for Sun Microsystems for 18 years designing their large mainframe network computers., They were bought by Oracle in 2010, and I found it was my time to retire in late 2011.

So since I was a young kid, sailing has been in my blood, and I've been actively racing 40 ft sailboats here in San Diego Bay for the past 25 years. In addition to that I've logged over 3000 miles of blue water cruising under my keel, including a transit through the Panama Canal, and many trips up and down the California and Mexico coastline from San Francisco to La Paz, Mexico.

My joy of travel has also taken me on three driving trips trough Europe, including England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Spain, Italy, Switzerland and Austria. Several vacations in Fiji and a number of scuba and bare boat sailing trips through the Caribbean, and I always seem to end up back in Hawaii, where I have a condo in Kona. Enjoying the good life....... Pura vida!

Posted on: Oct 20, 2017 at 4:50 PM

Posted on: Oct 20, 2017 at 2:21 PM

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Posted on: Oct 20, 2017 at 1:15 PM

Posted on: Oct 20, 2017 at 1:15 PM