Comments:
After NAHS, I attended Indiana State on a diving scholarship, graduating in 1967. During a brief stint teaching secondary school, I met and married Frona Murphy from Jeffersonville in 1970. We moved to Bloomington in 1973, me to attend graduate school and Frona, law school at Indiana University.
After completing my Ph.D. (Speech Communication and American Studies) at IU, and Frona, law school, we moved to Greenwich, CT in 1978 where I took a job with a management consulting company in the NYC area. After a few years of living on the East Coast, we moved back to Bloomington and I continued to work for the same company, spending more time than I liked traveling throughout the United States and Canada as part of the job. After a few years, Frona became a tenured professor of Business Law in the Kelley School of Business at IU thereby cementing our commitment to Bloomington. So, in the early 80s, I started my own management consulting firm focusing on executive training and development for corporate clients (media training, speechwriting, witness prep, presentation skills, critical thinking, etc,) in more than 30 states across the country.
Upon approaching retirement, I briefly took a leave of absence from my consulting work to serve as Governor Frank O'Bannon's executive assistant in 2000 tasked, among other things, with writing and managing the state of the state address. After returning six months later to the private sector, I worked a few more years before retiring for good in 2005. I also served as a member of the state board of trustees of Ivy Tech from 2001 until 2005.
Finally, our respective careers have demanded/given us an opportunity to travel extensively, for better or worse. We lived in Philly when Frona taught at the Wharton School at Penn and I worked in D.C. and spent six months in Maastricht in The Netherlands, while I shuttled back and forth between work in the USA (No glory in international travel, for the record.) We also did two stints in Hanover, Germany when Frona was teaching at the German International Business School there. Recently, we spent time in Zagreb, Croatia on two occasions on similar gigs.
Weary of travel, but fans of irony, our "happy feet" led us to purchase a second home in Playa del Carmen, Mexico and we recently acquired Mexican residency visas so we can spend as much time out of Midwestern winters as we want. It seems that all that time in Spanish classes at NAHS and in college turned out not to be a total waste of time after all. ¿Quién supo?
