Life after Sigma Chi (1965-1969) at N.C. State University:

I signed up for Navy OCS in my junior year but my start time was moved to Jan 1970. I initially took a sales job with Union Carbide with the idea they would rehire me after the Navy. I was also accepted into grad school at UNC for MBA and medicine. After three months working with Carbide I decided to go to St Thomas Virgin Islands in September before I left for the Navy and was a bartender at a local place there.

I went to OCS in Jan finished in May and went to UDT/SEAL training. I was injured and rolled back one class and finished in Dec. I went to UDT 21 then SEAL 2 and finished in 1973, but stayed in Reserves for two years and met at Center right up from fraternity house. Decided at the last minute to go back to get MBA at UNC and slept on Luba’s couch a few weeks till I found an apartment. . Spent summer after 1st year sailing a 45 foot sailboat and campaigning racing circuit in New England. Finished in 75 and was recruited by CIA to work as agent and special ops with initial cover job as an Air Force Officer in Vietnam, but in May of 75, Vietnam collapsed so I scrambled to find job. Went to work for Allied Chemical in NYC and lived with girlfriend for 2 years there. Moved to Exxon Enterprises, the venture capital part of Exxon in NJ and helped start their Solar Energy business. Left after 3 years to join startup building material supplier in Saudi Arabia and was in and out of Saudi for several years. Terrible place. Business moved to Saudi and I found another start up in NJ taking a government sponsored radar type device and making a commercial business with it. Crazy owner so I moved to Schering Plough as mgr. of International Business which was about licensing/acquiring products internationally.

Got married in 82 (still married to same woman) and we decided it was time to leave NYC. Her job took us to San Francisco and she was VP of sales/marketing at Viacom Cable and we got great perks with her job and I took position running major accounts at National Semiconductor and stayed for 5 years. Was recruited to take over Electronic magazine that had belonged to McGraw Hill but recently purchased by large Dutch company VNU. They decided to sell all US businesses after just 6 months, and I tried to buy it but it was purchased instead by Penton Publishing in Cleveland where I stayed in CA and worked with them for 2 more years. Was recruited by Venture Company to rescue failing publication and ran that for about 8 years built it up as technical publishing company and sold it to large British corp. in 1999. Stayed with them under contract for another year and then went back to venture company and restarted a networking company but could not secure next round in 2002 as market was collapsed, so folded company. Later bought publishing company with Venture partner and built partnership with Microsoft. Venture partner taken over by Chinese firm and I left in 2004. In the meantime my wife had gone back to art school in 2001 and stayed to complete her MFA in Painting, as we had both started painting in the late 80’s and she decided to make a career of it.

I went back to school at California Institute of Integral Studies that is well known in field of psychology. Finished my PhD in 2011 in Transformational Learning and Change and wrote my dissertation on masculinity based on interviews I did with various former SEALs.

We moved to Istanbul in 2012 for a little adventure and will be here till 2015, so come visit as Chip Andrews has come by and it was great to see him.