Early Years

I was born Nov 9, 1967, in Summit NJ. I grew up with my parents and sister Pam (who is 3 years older than me) in Warren NJ. Most of my relatives on my mother's side lived in Pennsylvania. My grandparents on my father's side also lived in NJ (in Lakewood) about an hour away from us. They lived in Rahway when my father was growing up. My father's sister lived in Mississippi with her family. I have many fond memories of visiting all these relatives during holidays and vacations as I was growing up.

My sister and I were always interested in producing artwork. My sister, Pam, has gone on to pursue a career as an Illustrator and graphic designer. She has an art gallery in Sedona, Arizona.

When I was a child I remember playing army men and ball tag with some of my neighborhood buddies. Sometimes we would run around outside shooting each other with toy guns. We liked to hike around in the woods and go exploring. During the winter, we could walk on the frozen river in the back of my neighbor's house. Often the ice would break and we would fall into the river. This added to the fun. It was definitely a simpler time back then. There were only 2 genders, and there was no internet.

One of my fondest childhood memories is of building dams in the creek behind our house. My friends and I would wallow in the mud and use the clay from the riverbed to engineer elaborate aqueducts and dams. Sometimes we would release an upstream dam to see if a dam further down could withhold the torrent of water. So much fun. Afterward, we would have to hose off thoroughly before mom would consider letting us back in the house.

Some summers my hands would swell up and feel very uncomfortable. I had to hold them in a bucket of ice-water to get some relief. Benadryl helped a little. It must have been some strange sort of allergy. Fortunately, I outgrew it at some point before puberty.

My father was a structural engineer and my mother was a statistical programmer. I remember watching my mother use a teletype connected to a server when I was very young. My mother played lots of board games with me. She even helped my friends and I create casino games like roulette, so that we could learn about probability and why the house had an advantage.

Even though my parents had good white-collar jobs, we lived quite frugally. I don't think that we were ever poor, but my parents had a way of making us think that we were. In their childhood, they had experienced the effects of the depression era and it profoundly influenced how they lived. They were both on the same page when it came to spending money. Mostly they didn't. Every penny that they did spend was manually recorded in a journal. They kept those journals for decades. My parents went to great lengths to ensure that we would not ever have to depend on the government or anyone else for survival. My dad, in particular, was worried that the Carter era policies were going to have disastrous consequences. As a result, we stocked up on supplies and were very frugal. We worried about nuclear war a lot.

I can recall quite a few funny stories, from when I was growing up, which illustrate the great length that we went to avoid unnecessary expenditures.

• My sister and I cut all of our napkins in half so that we would have twice as many. A whole napkin is over-kill for most needs. We probably saved 10s of dollars by doing this over the years.
• We re-used tin foil as many times as was possible.
• We had a very large garden and grew most of our own vegetables. We canned vegetables for the winter. My sister and I were put to work in the garden. We weeded, watered, harvested, etc. It seemed like slave labor, but my parents worked much harder on it than we did.
• One year there was a Japanese beetle infestation. Instead of calling in professionals to take care of the problem, my sister and I were directed to go around to all the trees and pick off all the Japanese beetles and put them in jars that contained some gasoline. We killed thousands of beetles this way - perhaps as much as 1% of the total that were on our property. I wonder what we did with all those jars of beetles.
• We were directed to ignore the commercials that advocated using an inch long swath of toothpaste on your brush, and instead opt for just a microscopic veneer of the stuff. I'm sure that each tube of toothpaste lasted 5 - 20 times longer this way - adding up to many dollars in savings.
• We ate rabbits that my dad shot in the backyard. My mom even cooked a squirrel once, but only once, as it tasted like a rat, my dad said.
• Any excess fat or lard from meat was kept in a big jar for use in cooking later. The lard at the bottom must have become decades old. Nothing went to waste. We ate all leftovers.
• At Christmastime, when sending cards, we wrote on paper instead of the card, so that it could be reused. When wrapping gifts, we sometimes used newspaper. If we used actual gift wrap we were very careful when unwrapping the gift so that the wrapping paper could be re-used in following years.
• When we bought lox for bagels, we always got the lowest quality scraps. It had the tendons and other inedible parts mixed in. It wasn't until I was an adult that I found out what real lox was like. My wife only gets the good stuff now.
• Another favorite food was scrapple. I think we got it because it was meat-like and very cheap. My sister joked that it was made from whatever was swept off the floor in the butcher shop.
• My parents kept a very strict budget and carefully recorded every single expenditure in a journal. Mom wrote programs in Excel to compute annual taxes rather than using Turbo tax.