I was in my final high-school year when a war started in Korea. Uninterested in being drafted into the army, I enlisted in the Navy's O-2 program at the Akron, Ohio Naval Air Station and received bell-bottom pants, a dark uniform, black shoes, "dress whites", blue work shirts, p-jacket, and a couple of funny looking white hats.

Trained as an air crewman and taught to calculate weight and balance for R4D's (C-47's), I flew with trained pilots at every opportunity in a variety of planes, including aerobatics in the SNJ (Texan) trainer, collecting what were called "flight skins" (five dollars), a great way to make extra money. Although personnel attached to the F4U (Corvair) squadron were sent to Korea, my squadron (VR-651) remained in the USA.

I wanted to get my "wings" as a Navy pilot. The problem was that college graduation was required for admission to flight school at Pensacola, Florida. That was when I got very lucky. The Navy had a program that awarded paid college scholarships to aspiring Naval career applicants. With a commendation from my C.O., I was awarded one and assigned to the Naval Rewerve Officer Training (ROTC) program at Ohio State University.

Transferring from "the fleet", I was one of omly four men in the country commissioned directly by Secretary of the Navy Dan Kimball. I wore my uniform with gold-braided hat visor at Ohio State University with pride. At age nineteen I was probably the country's youngest man with a Navy commission. Students at Annapolis received their commission following graduation.

After my second year of college I was ordered for cross-training during the summer aboard the battleship USS Iowa, one of the four largest warships built (Iowa, Missouri, Wisconson, New Jersey} and had the opportunity to visit Edinborough Scotland, London England, and Oslo Norway. A major change in my thinking occurred aboard the Iowa during that summer. I attribute it to elective college courses and my hobby of reading on a variety of subjects. As a committed pacifist today, I cannot recognize myself as that young man ambitious to have a military career.

When I returned to college that fall, exercising a clause in my contract, I disenrolled from the Naval Reserve Officer Training Program in which I had excelled as its sole commissioned member. When the Naval captain at OSU threatened to send me to the front lines in Korea if I persisted in resigning, I pointed out that he could not do so legally. As a full-time college student I enjoyed the discriminatory 2-S military draft deferrment. Frustrated, he said that I was in college only thanks to the Navy and that he was going to watch me carefully. If I were not enrolled for any quarter in the future he would see to it that I was immediately sent to Korea.

No student ever had a greater incentive to remain in college. With my Naval pay gone, I struggled financially with various part-time jobs. By the time I received my BS degree the Korean war had ended. After forty months of Navy involvement I was awarded an honorable discharge.

Following college graduation, having earned a BS degree I worked for two years in interesting but low paying laboratory jobs. Saving some money, I returned to Columbus, Ohio and enrolled in OSU's graduate school. Thanks to having a high undergraduate grade-point average, I unexpectedly and gratefully received a paid graduate teaching assistantship. I taught basic biological sciences to undergraduates for one full academic year while following my advisor's recommended path of study and independent research designed to earn a PhD.

When that year ended, after considerable thought and discussion with my brother who was enrolled in graduate school, his college costs being paid by an employer, I decided to leave academia permanently, bypassing a teaching career in favor of greater financial opportunity. I realized that scientific curiosity could be pursued throughout life as a hobby. It wasn't difficult, in those days, to find a job offering training, a company car, and a steady paycheck.

For the next twelve years I worked with corporations, learning as much as I could. Six years were spent with Lever Brothers Company, the U.S. division of Unilever LTD, one of the world's largest corporations. After working with the company in Ohio for two years, and having had two years of corporate sales training, I was promoted to New York City.

I spent the next four years with the company in key-account sales, sales scripting, new product introductions, and brand marketing. I bought a house in Cold Spring, New York above Hudson River's Bear Mountain Bridge. A trip to midtown Manhattan by train took an hour and a half each way.

After working for six years with Lever Brothers' consumer products, I decided to move into industrial sales. For the next six years I carved out a strong career in the truck equipment industry, handling distributor marketing, customer procuct development, and direct sales to the nation's leading truck leasing companies (Hertz, Avis, Ryder, Leaseway, National). Spearheading sales for two major truck-body manufacturers, I was recruited to turn around Lyncoach and Truck Company, which I was able to do in less than four months, saving the employees their jobs. The company is prospering to this day.

Having become a single parent of my twelve year old son, after researching Ohio's public schools I teamed up for roughly a decade in Worthington, Ohio (location of the state's top rated public high-school) with a professional nurse practitioner, a divorced highly responsible mother of three, including a boy my son's age.

After reading a shocking booklet about life insurance, published by Consumer Reports, and needing to work close to home, I began a business by conducting two financial training seminars and one public seminar weekly. I created Unified Financial Services and Unified Data Systems.

Within three years my business had grown with over thirty licensed agents in three offices, each managed by an agent trained by me to become a General Agent. I wrote Financial Recovery, expanding material presented by Consumer Reports and scores of others.

After my son was married and working, in order to reconnect with my younger brother who had earned his PhD in geology (Dr. Rock), I moved to Sarasota, Florida. Bob lived in Tampa, Florida. We had ten years together again before he died from cancer. I miss him greatly.

For six years I spent evenings at the Cook Library of Florida State University's nearby New College until its 1:00 a.m. closing time with the objective of acquiring a comprehensive self-directed liberal arts education, augmenting my science background.

When the public digital information revolution arrived in 1992 I bought a Personal Computer and spent hours figuring out how to operate it, studying the book, DOS for Dummies. I created the earliest online networking resource, The Email Club, for more than four thousand persons in over fifty countries.

After teaching myself to write HTML code I constructed The Big Eye, an educational website. When the Netscape web-browser arrived, The Big Eye appeared in Newsweek Magazine's November 20, 1995 issue. It received more publicity as the result of a full page St. Petersburg Times article that was syndicated by Scripps Howard to the nation's major city newspapers.

I changed The Big Eye's original URL after selling the domain name. Today "The Big Eye" can be found at WWW.BIGEYE.ORG

Sadly, after retiring from her exemplary nursing career as oncology nurse specialist at Ohio State University Hospital, my former Ohio partner died, ironically, of cancer.

Easily passing FINRA's Series65 examination, I registered Wisebird Financial, LLC. Having studied Henry Abts' book, The Living Trust, and working with the business he founded, I placed online Estate Planning Documents

By studying Google's algorithms I was early to grasp what soon came to be called "SEO" (Search Engine Optimization). Promoting several product lines, I developed profitable affiliate marketing.

Using The Big Eye website and traveling throughout Florida, my assistant, Sherry, and I trained mortgage brokers for four years explaining HUD's HECM reverse mortgage to many financially struggling seniors, saving their homes for them from greedy "line of credit" (2nd mortgage) banks, and relieving them of disheartening lifetime financial struggles.

When the real-estate market crashed in 2008 I bought a tall-rigged sloop and spent the next four years day-sailing with friends. In the evenings I enjoyed reading, as usual, and worked on improving my writing skills.

As a consequence of certain articles written by me and placed on The Big Eye website, I was overwhelmingly flattered, recruited by Gordon Duff, the Senior Editor of Veterans Today, to write as one of their columnists.

Over ten years (2007-2017) that popular website published thirty-four of my columns. After many columns that appeared on Veterans Today were oddly deleted (including mine), I retrieved several of mine and placed them on BigEyeBlog.com, a "sister" website containing personal and other esoteric articles.

Finally, 100% RETIRED, May 14, 2025