A brief history of my family

I was born in Alpena, Michigan, a small town far from any place you know.  Here's my mom and dad at their wedding.  My dad spent a lot of time traveling, in Europe mostly, which he liked because he was a European.  My sister was pretty nice to me, as you can see here.  Somehow, I made it to kindergarten and wore a bow tie on photo day.  Imagine, this is when the world was young and innocent, before John Glenn soared into the atmosphere and before John Kennedy took three bullets in the head and the country changed forever.  This house is the first one I can remember, but we soon left it in order to move to Barcelona, Spain, so that my father wouldn't have to travel so far. 

That was 1962.  Fast forward through seven years in Spain.  That’s another story.  Back in the US, 1969 on...

I graduated from high school back in Michigan, though by this time we had moved to Ann Arbor.  But the 1970s were raging, the counter-culture called to me, and so I left college (ostensibly forever) and moved to California.  There (or here, I should say), I worked all kinds of jobs, from a stint as a forest firefighter on the El Dorado National Forest to various ranch hand jobs, a cook, and lot of work in construction.  I lived for a while in this small cabin in the woods near Grizzly Flat, CA.  Finally, I wound up in Ojai, CA as the caretaker of the springs at Wheeler Hot Springs, where this photo was taken.

My back started to give out and I was tired of being poor.  I left Ojai and went to UC Santa Barbara to get my BA and wound up at UCLA getting my master's degree.  That's where I met Janet, my wife, to whom I got engaged, and soon after, married.  Here is my favorite picture of her, near my hometown in Michigan, on Lake Huron.  Soon after came our son John-Michael, at whose birth you see us here.  A few years later Angela was born and our family was complete.  Even Angela's older brother thought so.