Biography

I was born during the last year of World War II and feel like I have spent my life running one step ahead of the Baby Boom Tsunami that followed the outbreak of peace. That war was the reason my parents met as my father was a draftee stationed in Great Falls Montana primarily tasked with guarding lend lease warplanes being sent to Russia.

My father was a native of Oakland, California and that is where I grew up during my formative years. I was the first in my extended family to attend college and graduated in 1967 with a BA in Interdisciplinary Social Studies (don’t ask, it was a very sixties thing).

Almost immediately following graduation I left the country to spend two years (1967-69) working as a Peace Corps volunteer in India. After my return I decided that the life of a librarian suited me fine, and so pursued a Master of Library Science Degree at Drexel University.

After working for seven years at the University of Pennsylvania Library, and another seven at the Norwalk Public Library, I became the Chief Executive Officer at a non-profit organization that provided technology support to libraries throughout Connecticut. That organization survived my thirty years at the helm and is still a vibrant and successful endeavor.

In 2009 we held a get-together of returned volunteers from my group in California to celebrate the 40th anniversary of our end of service in India. During that reunion we shared some of our most significant memories of our time in the Peace Corps. We felt that many of these stories deserved a wider audience, so four of us formed an editorial committee which put together two volumes that cataloged our experiences, as an exercise as much to help us make sense of the past as to share those adventures with others.

Information on those volumes can be found at: www.India44.com.

I contributed three chapters to these two volumes. For your convenience those three chapters have been copied on this site under the “India Writings” tab.

Aside from my time in India, the most unusual chapter in my life was the time I spent in the world of Internet dating. In 1996 I was a single dad with no clue how to find a new partner. I began a five year quest on what was then the fledgling service of match.com. During that journey I would meet seventy five women in person, and correspond with at least three times that number. The list includes a movie actress (I have an autographed cocktail napkin), a talk show host from NPR, a retired Romance Novelist (I have an autographed copy of one of her novels), a Moslem woman from Pakistan who had been married to the son of a tribal chief in the Khyber Pass, a Public Defender in the South Bronx, a writer who worked with JFK Jr. on his magazine "George", an unreconstructed Hippie who has her own practice in plant shamanism, a Methodist Minister, an aspiring Stand-up comic, a professional astrologer, six teachers, one high school principal, three college professors, two consultants, two therapists, a doctor, three nurses (including one who had worked with that doctor) three lawyers and a truck driver.

For the last several years I have been working to record this bewildering array of adventures, disasters and intense learning experiences in a single monograph that I have entitled “75 Women”. Chapters in that book can be found on the webpage titled, appropriately, “75 Women”.

I have tried to present this epic in bite sized chapters that can be read at one sitting. But the reader should be aware that the full work runs to over 400 pages and a quarter of a million words. That’s long I know, but there were 75 women after all. And I couldn’t leave out the Fairfield County Commercial Real Estate Agent who taught firewalking on the side, now could I?