Early Years

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 withstand 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.

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.

I played a lot of board games with my friends. John Collard always seemed to beat me at RISK and Stratego. When we met up and played those games decades later, he could still beat me.

Other fun activities that I recall were starting fires in the driveway, shooting water rockets into the air, exploring in the woods behind our houses, building tree forts in the summer and snow forts in the winter. I spent hours building plastic models of aircraft carriers, spaceships, and monsters, then spent minutes blowing them up with firecrackers.

I started practicing karate when I was in 3rd grade at the adult school program (taught at the high school). Not sure why I signed up for it. I think that my mother suggested it and I went along with it. It was taught by a tough buxom young woman called Sensei Carol Tarantino. It was fun and I remember getting a participation trophy for it in 1973. When I took the test for my orange belt, one of the questions she asked me was where the solar plexus was. I pointed to it on her body instead of my own and all the parents watching laughed. When Sensei Tarantino left (to go to college or start work - I don't recall), and another instructor took over, I dropped out for a couple of years, but I later rejoined when I was in middle school.

Some summers my hands would swell up and feel very uncomfortable. It felt like there were things moving under my skin. Holding my hands in a bucket of ice-water gave some relief. Benadryl also helped a little. It must have been some strange sort of allergy. Fortunately, I outgrew it at some point before puberty. It was a major downer because I could only watch others play and have a good time while I sat there with my hands plunged in ice-water.

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. It was on the dining room table. To operate it, you called a special number, waited for the telephone to make a strange modem noise, and then plugged it into the teletype modem. There was no screen, just a spool of paper. Fascinating.

My mother played lots of board games with me. She even helped my friends and me create casino games like roulette, so that we could learn about probability and why the house had an advantage. I remember that she even played games with me that I knew she didn't like much - like "Tank Battle" and "Surprise Attack!". I'm grateful that she did. Later, I played lots of games with my son - even the ones that I did not like - such as "Yu-gi-oh" and "Magic: The Gathering".

My grandfather on my mother's side also liked to play games with his grandchildren. He had a large collection of puzzles and games for us to play whenever we visited him. One of those games was Go. He had read the rules that came with the game and taught Pam and me. However, we played it on a rudimentary level. It was not until I was in my late 20's that I decided to visit the Palo Alto go club with my friend Bill and learn the true depth of the game.

My grandfather was a remarkable man. He built his own house when he was in his 70's after his wife died. He had an incredible work ethic and was very involved with his church, Trinity Lutheran church in Reading PA, throughout his life. While working at the lumber yard as a young man, he took drafting classes at night so that he could design a house for his family. The depression hit shortly after the house was built and they had to rent it while he took his family to live with a relative. Eventually they were able to move back in. He worked at the post office for most of his career. After retiring, he read a lot of non-fiction books. He knew about the biology of all the local plants and fauna. He knew about science and space and all kinds of things that you would not expect your typical postal worker to be familiar with.

When I was 13, my grandfather wrote me a letter about what life was like for him growing up and how it was much different than mine. They lived in a rural area without a lot of other kids around. His main friends were the farm animals. He did a lot of work on the farm. They did not have a TV, refrigerator, or other household appliances that we take for granted today. Every week a man would bring around a big block of ice for the icebox - which was their equivalent of a freezer. He never rode in or owned a car until he was an adult.

When my mother was accepted to Stanford, he drove out to California with her, and then flew back. That flight home was the first time he had ever been in an airplane.

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 - until Pam and I finally threw them out before moving them to assisted living. 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 lengths 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 overkill 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 TurboTax.

As a result of these measures, my parents were able to save up enough to pay for college tuition for me and my sister. We received no financial aid, unlike many of our peers whose parents likely had higher incomes. It's as if the government rewards people for acting irresponsibly. They also saved enough for a reasonably comfortable retirement. I consider myself risk-averse and frugal, but I feel that my parents were quite extreme in this regard. All of their decades of cost-saving measures combined would probably pay for just a couple of days at the memory care facility where my mother currently resides.

My father didn't have a lot of vacation time through his employer, but we did have some nice vacations. When I was about 5, we traveled in our family's baby blue Dodge Polara out west. There was no air conditioning in it and we often traveled 8 hours or more a day in sweltering heat. My sister and I squabbled endlessly in the back seat of the car. We drove through the Grand Canyon and stopped at every scenic overlook. I recall being bored and thinking that they all looked the same. Until my father's death in 2023, he could remember what we saw and did every moment of that trip. He enjoyed it so much.

We drove to Niagara Falls one time. I climbed on the railing and almost fell in, but my father stopped me in time. I liked to climb things. A park ranger scolded me for trying to climb the ranger station when we were in the Grand Canyon.

We had 2 trips to Sanibel Island in Florida with our cousins Heather and C.J. These were fantastic trips. I remember there being so many spectacular shells on the beach - especially on the first visit. Shells that would be considered rare anywhere else, were commonplace there. Pam and I got along great with our cousins. We had a good time playing card games like hearts. I recall playing in the back of a rental truck while my father drove.

I read a lot of science fiction and fantasy books in middle school. One of the first fantasy books that I read was A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin. It really captured my imagination and transported me to another world. I feel that a pre-pubescent mind is particularly susceptible to such suggestion. I read the solar system exploration books by Hugh Walters, Tolkien's Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, Stephen R. Donaldson's Thomas Covenant chronicles, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and many others.