I arrived on this particular planet in 1950, or so they tell me. (I don't really remember it all that well.) For some reason, I've always been fascinated by the fact that I was born right in the middle of the century.
My family was working-class Jewish, Mom was a typist, Dad was "in sales". I grew up in Brooklyn and Queens, attended Stuyvesant High School and got a Math degree from Clarkson College (now Clarkson University), a small engineering colege in upstate — way upstate — New York. After spending four years near Washington D.C. (I arrived there with Jimmy Carter), I moved to the Bay Area at the end of 1980 (and I left with him). I lived in Berkeley for 24 years (the longest I ever had the same phone number), and moved to Alameda in 2004. My several careers include radio, Government, computers and telecommunications. I was a Contracting Officer for the Navy (with customers at NAS), worked for a Macintosh peripherals manufacturer located at the ShipWays, and was an IT guy for AT&T for 12 years. I also drove a taxi in New York City for 2½ years, read for blind students at U.C. Berkeley for awhile and spent some months as a driver and dispatcher for a call-girl service in Washington. I helped out as an editor and contributor during the early days of Mondo 2000 magazine (then High Frontiers) and have had essays published in magazines with a combined readership counted in the dozens. I currently live in a 1925 split-level bungalow in Old Town Alameda with my cat, Harvey.