Date of Birth:  Approximately 3:30 PM, November 24th, 1959

Location of Birth:  Union Hospital, Terre Haute, IN (The building was tore down in 2008 or 2009)

My Entry in to This World:  My mother started in to labor and a neighbor, Ann Jerry, drove her to the hospital at around 2:30 PM.  After birth, mom and I stayed in the hospital for five days, (who, how things have changed).  My father was driving a truck for Motor Freight in Terre Haute and was near Chicago when he got the work through some type of teletype machine at a truck stop. 

First Home:  18xx South 3rd Street, Terre Haute, IN 47802.  This house was demolished in the many years ago and is an empty lot today. 

Second Home:  2205 South Center Street, Terre Haute, IN  47802.  I lived here from five years old to about ten years old.

Third House:  2128 South Center St, Terre Haute, IN  47802.  I lived here from about 10 years old through my college years at Purdue.  I lived at home during the summers.

Fairbanks Elementary School:  Kindergarten through 6th grade.  The building I attended was demolished in the 1990's.  The structure was a very old brick building with open stairwells, (a very dangerous fire hazard), wooden floors and very tall ceilings.  The playground was all asphalt.  The only grass was the front lawn which we tore up on one damp day playing football.  After the school administration discovered the actors in this act of vandalism, and our parents were contacted, my father opted to replant the grass.  So, we had our first lesson in lawn planting. 

Junior High School:  Sarah Scott Junior High School:  7th through 9th grade.  The original buildings for this campus were also demolished and replaced on the same site. 

Terre Haute South Vigo High School:  10th through 12th grade.  The original structure still exists today. 

Purdue University: 

Boeing, Wichita, KS:  On My Own:  Wow, I made it!  I graduated from Purdue and took my first job with the Boeing Company in Wichita, KS, in January 1984 as a junior electrical engineer, assigned to a design group. My first project was a flight test design project.  This was a box that monitored the traffic on the serial data buses on the B52 aircraft, selectively recorded data on to a hard drive.  This was the first hard disk drive certified for flight.  It was also a big breakthrough in that, intelligent, on board data processing occurred real time.  Prior to this, all data on the data bus was captured and recored on data tapes, requiring the flight test crew to change these large tape every hour and hours of work on the ground after the flight to process the data, (filtering out the undesired data).  Below is my Mom and Dad's credit card statement from the card I borrowed when I first left Terre Haute and traveled to Wichita to start my first job.  Note the hotel in route for $38. 

Boeing Edwards Air Force Base:  In the summer of 1984, the project manager on the flight test project, Dave Eslinger, asked me to loan in to his group and follow the completed design to Edwards Air Force Base.  I was so excited to get to go to California.  I have a lot of family members that live in LA and this would give me a work assignment in LA that would allow me to spend time with my West Coast family.  Little did I know that I would end up here and never return to the Midwest.  I put together a website for the folks that worked at Edwards together, click here to see the site. 

Boeing Commercial-Seattle:   I worked from March 1991 to March 1993 on the 777 Program. 

Mentor Graphics:  I started working for Mentor Graphics as a contract consultant in August 1993 and became an employee of Mentor on March 17, 1997 and still here today.  I detail my work on a separate page, click here for this page.