• I was a farm kid with an interest in science and chemistry, raised on the old family farm just South of Breckenridge Michigan.
• By the time I entered Breckenridge High School my Mother had reached the point where she refused to set foot in the basement of the old farm house. (a story for another time).
• My first nine years in school were spent in a one room country school--Which was kinda' nice as after doing my work I could listen to the "big kids" in their classes. By the time I moved on to the next grade I'd already done the work which made school quite easy, but boring, as time went by. OTOH I never really did learn how to study.
• By age seven I was doing work in the fields, driving the smaller of our tractors. Dragging, disking, and cultivating with the tractor, but it still took manual labor, and a hoe, to get the weeds out. That was one thing I didn't like about farming.
• I took my first airplane ride in 1956 at the old Alma airport. Back when the Alma Airport (AMN) was on the North side of Alma. When landing from the East they had a right hand pattern to keep from flying over the Total Refinery on down wind.  The flight instructor liked motorcycles and I just happened to have an ol' Harley (weighed about four times more than I did.) The instructor would take the ol' Harley for a while and then we'd take the pretty Black Luscombe out for a ride.
• After surviving High School I had a few jobs here-and-there, farmed 80 acres and helped my dad farm 100 acres. It didn't take long to realize that there had to be a better way to make a living than farming. Well... at least one more to my liking.
• A correspondence course in electronics and another in process control, helped me work my way up to the General Class Amateur Radio license as K8ZKF and to get a job working on process control instrumentation for the Hemlock Semiconductor Corporation in 1961.
• I was married in 1961 and moved to Midland (2217 Virginia St.). Then two children came along. Daughter Deb in 1963 and son Brian in 1965.
• It was 1963 when I finally got back to flying. I joined a flying club that had a Piper Colt, Piper Tri-Pacer, and a "V" tail Bonanza. The Colt rented for six dollars an hour, including gas (wet). The Tri-Pacer was ten dollars, and I believe the Beech Bonanza was around 16.00 per hour.
• We moved back to Breckenridge in 1966 and built a good size Ranch Style home about a half mile West of my parents. There was plenty of room to put up a LARGE antenna farm for the Amateur Radio station. Unfortunately there was no time left for flying and I ended up selling my share in the flying club.
• I made Amateur Extra Class down at the FCC office in Detroit March 28, 1978 (IIRC) on the next to last testing session they offered the ability to request a specific 1X2 call, ending up with the present K8RI. 
• I ended up getting "single" in/around 1981.
• (PAUSE)
• Joyce and I met about a year later. We were married in 1984 and moved to Midland where we have lived ever since. We celebrated out 25th anniversary last year.
• My formal introduction to flying came in 1963, but the flying went on hold until 1987 when I Joined with Bill Albe and Todd Trainor to purchase an old Cherokee 180. That was also the year I quit work and went back to college  (SVSU).
• I had been taking classes in electronics and computer science at Delta College and SVSU part time since 1963, so I had quite a few credits by the time I went back full time. Even so, it took three and a half years to finish up as many of those credits didn't count. Made it with better than a three point too.
• I probably could have finished sooner, but I started out in engineering and discovered that I was going to need more math courses and could not take them concurrently with the engineering courses. That would have added another two years to my schooling and it was a bit more than I felt the budget could stand.
• After the first year I switched to Computer Science and did quite well. CS as opposed to CIS takes almost as much math as engineering, but I could take the required courses concurrently with my CS courses.
• Along with all this school work I managed to earn my Private Pilots License in the Spring of 1988 and since then have flown a little over 1400 hours, as well as earning my instrument rating.  I sold my share in the Cherokee and purchased a Beech Debonair that was built in 1959 which makes it the oldest one in existence. Airworthiness certificate is dated 7/11/59. It even had 30 hours of pre production flight testing in the log book.
• Graduation from SVSU came in December 1990 with a BS in Computer Science and minors in Math and Art. CMU picked me up on a full Graduate Assistantship, but a little over half way through the first term I was offered a good job!
• After over 4 years without a paycheck, I said "I'll take it!" before I asked "How Much?"

  WORK: I worked as a Sys Admin, DataBase Developmental Analyst, in-house consultant, and finally project manager which primarily involved Laboratory Information Management Systems (LIMS) for The Dow Corning Corporation at the Corporate level.

I retired on July 31, 1997 out on the flight-line at the Oshkosh fly-in. Now I'm able to devote my time to other things such as Flying (Including building a Glasair III and a stint of working as a volunteer in the Homebuilders Center at the EAA fly-in at Oshkosh --Also earned my Instrument Rating), Amateur Radio, Amateur Astronomy, Guitar, Computers, Photography, and Ice Skating. Oh! and... a whole lot of reading.

My Family is pretty well spread around the country, but we manage to keep in touch. The old Beechcraft Debonair really helps out when it's a 600 or 1200 mile trip to visit the kids.

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