About me

Gender	Male
Industry	Automotive
Occupation	Wholesale Credit and Finance - Texaco and ExxonMobil
Location	Clodine, TX, United States
Introduction	Army brat, and proud of it! 13 different schools before I graduated high school. Three years in USAF. History degree from the U of MD. My wife and I decided to go to Denver, where we had met when I was stationed there for tech school. Got a job with Texaco in the wholesale credit department (absolutely NO prior experience or training for THAT gig). Managed to stretch it into a 32-year career, the whole time trying to avoid a transfer to the garden spot of the company, Houston. NOPE! Got here in 1979, swearing I’d leave as soon as I could. CAN'T! Kids and grandkids are in Austin and here, PLUS, I’ve found out I now despise cold weather and snow, though I went to high school in Anchorage. Retired from Texaco, worked for ExxonMobil for four years (same job/same customers, just a different brand name of products). Hung it up for good, or so I thought. Found the 1940 Air Terminal Museum at Houston Hobby Airport, so I’m volunteering there. If you’re ever in town, come see us! Let me know ahead of time, so that I can be there to give you the tour.
Interests	Photography, especially Aviation Photography, (but I’ll photograph just about anything that can’t tell me that my photos make their rear ends look big, so I don’t do people - haven't had an airplane tell me that yet), history, architecture, museums. I have an Excel spreadsheet on which I'm listing all the places/things I want to visit/photograph (all in North America), but I’m running out of time; there are already over 5,000 line items on it. “HAVE CAMERA – WILL TRAVEL!” That's my main man Kizzy in the photo.
Favorite movies	“Casablanca” is #1! ALL James Bond movies -Yes, some are more ridiculous than others, but I’ll watch any of them at any time, “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”, “Midnight in Paris” (Not particularly a Woody Allen fan, but I love THAT movie), “Top Gun”, “Dr. Zhivago”, “Lawrence of Arabia”, “Dr. Strangelove”, “2001”, “2010”, “West Side Story”, “Blazing Saddles”, “It Happened One Night”, "Stalag 17", "The Bridge on the River Kwai", the three original “Star Wars” (haven’t seen the last three), and probably some others.
Favorite music	Everything by The Kingston Trio (I have multiple copies of everything they recorded, and saw them in concert a few times - once with Roger Miller opening), “Little Deuce Coupe” by The Beach Boys (the ultimate put-down and kick-something song for those of us who grew up back in the days of muscle cars), songs with great bass lines (tops, in order: #1 “Silly Love Songs” by Wings --- just Paul’s bass line; the rest of the song is, well, silly, #2 “My First, My Last, My Everything” by Barry White (wish he were still here), #3 “Rise” by Herb Alpert, #4/5 (interchangeable), “Let Me Be There”/”If You Love Me” by Olivia Newton-John --- Mike Sammes SANG the bass on both, #6 "Mr. Bass Man” by Johnny Cymbal --- Ronnie Bright SANG the bass. Of course, WE had the BEST music!
Favorite books	My absolute favorite series, which I’ve read more than once, is the original Millennium series (Lizbeth Salander/The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo trilogy) which Stieg Larsson wrote before he died. I thought the American movie with Rooney Mara and Daniel Craig was excellent, and I wish that his other two books had been made into movies with the two of them starring, but alas…. Just finished reading the relatively new (2018) Max Hastings book about Vietnam, and I’m finally getting around to plowing through Bernard Fall’s classic "Hell in a Very Small Place", about the siege at Dien Bien Phu, where the Viet Minh kicked the French out of Vietnam. I’m also going to finally read Fall’s "Street Without Joy", Another favorite of mine was "Area 51", the Annie Jacobsen tome about --- uh, Area 51, and the development of our spy planes.