I was born in 1939 in a small town in northeastern Pennsylvania called Edwardsville. I spent 17 years in Buffalo, NY – first as a graduate student at the State University of New York at Buffalo, then as an Assistant Professor at Niagara University, and finally as an acoustics engineer at Calspan Corporation. I met and married my wife while at SUNYB; we have been married for over 35 years and have one son. We moved to Springfield, VA, a suburb of Washington, DC, in 1977 and I worked for the next 22 years as an acoustics engineer at Wyle Laboratories in Arlington, VA. I retired in 1999 and we moved to San Jose, CA to be near our son. Presently we are residing in an “active adult” community in San Jose called The Villages.

I began taking pictures in 1960 with an SLR. In 1962, I acquired a monochrome enlarger and began processing some of my own work in the bathroom and then later in the basement. When we moved to Springfield, I built a darkroom in my basement and acquired a color enlarger. However, as is often the case, when I had enough income to afford this system, I didn’t have enough free time to learn how to use it well. When we moved to the west coast in April of 2000, my son gave me my first digital camera – a Sony Mavica, which stored images on a diskette. I haven’t used a film camera since. In February of 2001, I purchased my Uzi and, as most of the members of this group, have fallen in love with it.

I’m not as active in this group as I would like since I am President of The Villages Camera Club and Secretary of the Central Coast Counties Camera Club Council and also heavily involved in several non-photographic groups. I thought retirement meant having more free time than when one was working, but it doesn’t seem to have worked out that way. However, trying to shepherd photo clubs that are built around film photography into the digital world is both interesting and a challenge. I still stand by the statement I made when I first joined the camera club in 2000 – “In ten years you will have to special-order film”.