Before I ever had a job, I had tools.
My earliest memory is taking apart my mother’s Polaroid camera. I got in trouble for that one. But the instinct was already there if something worked, I wanted to know why.
The Hatboro-Horsham School District had an excellent industrial arts program in the 1970s. By the time I reached middle school, wood shop and metal shop weren’t electives you took casually. You worked through materials in order plastic, leather, then wood. You earned access to tools by passing safety exams with a perfect score. No exceptions.
That discipline stuck.
I still have my first wood project a small shelf I made for Aunt Dot.
By sixth grade I was on the AV crew, delivering and maintaining projectors, running auditorium light boards, and learning how systems fit together behind the scenes. Access to equipment meant responsibility. Responsibility meant trust.
Outside of school, bicycles were freedom. I worked part-time at the Hatboro Bicycle Shop, earning little money but gaining something more valuable spare parts, mechanical repetition, and confidence.
When I asked my Mom for a mini bike at age nine, she handed me a Craftsman socket and ratchet set and told me I could have one when I built one.
I was riding one the next day. I still have most of that tool set.
At home, while other families were adjusting to handheld calculators, I was required to learn a slide rule first. When early home computers appeared TRS-80s wired to breadboards to expand memory I was exposed to logic and programming before most people my age knew what that meant. I wasn’t interested at the time. But the exposure mattered.
By high school, I was splitting my days between wood shop and metal shop, meeting the minimum academic requirements to graduate while quietly wrestling with who I was supposed to become. The classroom never quite fit me, but the shop did. Wood and steel made sense. My senior wood project a large hutch survives to this day.
If I struggled anywhere academically, it wasn’t in understanding systems. It was in conforming to how systems wanted work presented.
But if something could be taken apart, rebuilt, improved, or engineered I could do that.
Learning with my hands became the foundation.
What I didn’t fully understand yet was that adulthood doesn’t wait for you to feel ready. By the fall of my senior year, life outside the classroom was already accelerating. Responsibilities came quickly. Decisions came faster. College was no longer the assumed next step.
Graduation arrived in June of 1981. One month later, I was married and entering the workforce.
The learning phase was over.
Now it was time to earn.