I was born December 3, 1963 the youngest of four into a household shaped by engineers, war, discipline, and a rapidly changing America.
My Dad had served as a navigator on a B-17 during World War II. His plane was shot down over Czechoslovakia in December 1944. He survived. Six of the crew did not. He spent the remainder of the war as a POW in Stalag Luft I until liberation in 1945. When he came home, he went to Drexel University, earned his engineering degree, and met my Mom.
Mom became the first woman to graduate from Drexel with a degree in engineering in 1948. That fact was written about in the Philadelphia Bulletin at the time. In our house, engineering wasn’t an abstract profession it was culture.
Arguments weren’t about chores. They were about physics.
Precision mattered. Language mattered. Systems mattered. Problems were meant to be solved, not avoided.
Before personal computers were common, there was a computer in our home. Mom was working on automated machinery and early computing systems long before “home computing” was a concept. Conversations about base numbering systems and logic structures were normal dinner-table topics.
If I wanted to use a calculator, I learned a slide rule first.
If I wanted something built, I was handed tools.
That was the atmosphere.
But my upbringing wasn’t contained to one house.
Just before I was born, my parents bought a home at 14 Williams Lane in Hatboro, Pennsylvania. My Aunt Dot and my grandmother moved into 84 Williams Lane, directly up the street.
From first through fifth grade, I walked to Aunt Dot’s house every morning. She fed me breakfast, had clean clothes ready, and sent me off to school. I spent most weekends there during that same period. She provided structure, routine, and steadiness during years that were not always calm.
I do not look back on those years with regret.
I consider myself blessed.
Good, bad, and indifferent every part of it shaped me.
On one side of the street there was intensity, ambition, and the aftershocks of war and industry.
On the other side there was order, faith, accounting ledgers, oil paintings, and breakfast before school.
I crossed that street every morning.
Somewhere between those two houses, a problem-solving mindset formed practical, independent, and results-oriented.
That foundation would later carry me through electronics, fabrication, automotive work, early e-commerce, web development, business collapse, reinvention, and preservation.
But it started on Williams Lane.