My wife Debbie and I have lived in the South Puget Sound area of Washington State since 1987 and our home is just outside a small town called Yelm, which is about an hours drive south of downtown Seattle. We moved here from Alaska where we married back in 1983 and we called that place home for about eight years. Alaska was my original home though as I was born in Anchorage back in 1955—before statehood.

After graduating from Marshall-U, I learned to fly via civilian flight schools in Minnesota and then earned my first flying job for hire in Fairbanks Alaska back on a Halloween day in 1978. After eight years of “surviving” the Alaskan aviation elements and their fantastic beauty, American Airlines thought I may be qualified to begin a new career with them as a Boeing 727 flight engineer so that opportunity brought us back down to the “lower 48” to begin a new life.

I have flown both domestically and internationally and I presently enjoy my duties flying to the Far East—mostly Narita (Tokyo), Japan, but Taipei, Taiwan, as well. London is also one of my “home-away-from-homes” but I do prefer Asia. I have also flown as co-pilot and captain on several different aircraft and I presently fly the Boeing 777.

Debbie and I have two children, a 15 year-old boy and an 11year-old girl. Our quasi-rural home is situated on two acres in a residential airport community where I continue my personal flying passion right outside my door with a vintage Cessna 180 aircraft that I restored to modern-day standards. Looking at it today, one wouldn’t guess that it is four months older than I am.

Other passions of mine include our two horses. Today we rode for about ten miles up in the nearby mountains on our Quarter Horse mare and our Appaloosa mare. When the kids want to come along, as they did today, we have to borrow from our neighbors stock. Lucky for us we have such understanding and generous neighbors. Our Yellow lab also came along and got whipped into exhaustion so I think he prefers the duck hunting that he is bred for.