In February, I went home on vacation.  Everyone at home told me I had gained weight.  I returned to BK to find out I had come down on orders.  We went to Denmark and were married.  My friend Dan Flateau had ETS’d up there, married a Danish girl, so we had some friends at the wedding, and got to tour the country.

We later found out that the Army married couples program would not be in effect for us until our next PCS.  So we were separated anyway.

Lightfighters and Manchus

I left Bad Kreuznach to go to Ft. Ord in May of 1992. I landed in LA during the riots, nice.

I was assigned to the 127th Signal Battalion, 7th Infanrty Division and I got lucky; CSM Rudy Wilson liked me, and tried to get me a job as the LTC’s driver.  I turned that down, he seemed to respect my decision, and [he brought this up later at the E5 promotion board].  I ended up at A Co, 127th, the best place to be at the time.

My team chief, SSG Cathy Jackson, went to BNCOC, so I was in charge of our rigs on a trip to Ft. Polk.  Oh, Yeah 127th had just gotten out of MSE training, so they had no idea how to do anything with their equipment.  Yeesh!

It also turned out they never gave out any awards of any kind.  If you had come from overseas, you looked like a General in Class A's.  Only 4 people went to the E5 promotion board out of the BN, which I maxed, and that got me into PLDC.

I apparently got a good peer review there and one from my instructors.  The day before the graduation, they had recounted scores and I moved up to the Commandants List.  My unit didn't know until I stood up with the rest of the Honors group.  It was very cool, because it was a surprise to my command- I wasn’t listed on the already printed program.

The entire time there we tried to get 141 Sig to release Rosemary as 127th in Ord had a slot open she could take.  141 decided to be difficult, said she could go several months past her ETS, if she reenlisted.  Rosemary also went to the board and PLDC.  She actually got her E5 before I did.  I made E5 in '03, got promoted wearing Hi-Tec boots with zippers in 'em-ha!

Ord consolidated the 127th into1 company, the 176th Signal Company, and mixed in some people from 29th Signal Battalion at Ft. Lewis.  So it's 1992, Seattle is the hottest place in rock history and the Army gave us a choice of going there or helping shut down Ord, then go to either Hood or Korea.  Needless to say it wasn’t a hard decision to make.

Ft. Ord was shutting down, we were moving to Ft. Lewis, WA.  I Made E5.  We cleaned our rigs and strapped 'em down onto trains  I rode in a 3 car caravan ditty move to WA, got to see Mt. Shasta.  Once you get to Tacoma, Mt. Rainer is visible from everywhere.  Rosemary ETS’d, but had gone through Ft. Dix for this.  She went home then met me at Tacoma.  Of course we were forced to live off post.

I had one private, Marcus Williams,  who was from Tacoma, with orders to go to Ft. Hood.  His buddy was from Texas and had orders to go to Lewis.  We convinced the CO to switch them and shortly after arriving in WA, my soldier was killed in a traffic accident.  We had driven right by the wreckage, not knowing it was him.  We promoted him to SPC and gave him a medal like it mattered.  He did get this cool buckle that only the 9^th Infantry Manchu’s wear if you go on their death march.  Our unit was invited to go with them and Marcus completed the march.  We made an award holder and put the buckle in it and gave it to his family.

Ft. Lewis was so different.  Some others from Germany had been arriving at Ord or were at Lewis.  I was assigned another private who just couldn’t stay out of trouble.  The chain of command promoted that guy without even consulting me-to not lose a slot.  My idiot E7 then tried to make me buy new Army boots when I was so short I was counting double-digits.  I got a cheap pair from Wal-Mart with a cow head plainly visible on the ankle and then ETS'd.

Rosemary joined the most hooah National Guard unit ever.  They planned military activities every time something cool was going on in town.  Ironically, this same unit would later distinguish itself by being one of the worst, not ready for combat units anywhere, when we began invading Afghanistan and Iraq.

Rosemary got into a temp position as a Field Tech for a 2 way radio company and traveled all over WA state.

I finished my tour and once again became a dependant, which really confused my old chain of command when they saw me at the PX.

KGRG

When I signed up, I had wanted to work at Armed Forces Network or AFN.  The idea was to get a job in the radio or TV industry that would allow me to get into it professionally as a civilian, while serving a relatively easy tour of duty.  Well, that didn't work out now did it?

Turns out colleges call this Broadcast Journalism.  In the last days of my tour at Ft. Lewis, I heard two songs on KGRG that reminded me that I wanted to get into "the business":  Breathe, by Oomph, and KMFDM Sucks, by KMFDM.

KGRG is the FM radio station at Green River Community College, in Auburn, WA.  At 89.9FM, the signal could only reach so far, but fate intervened and KBTC 91.7 FM in Tacoma shut down operations.  They had leased the side band signal to pager companies or some such and in order to keep those contracts, leased their main signal to KGRG-at the height of the "Seattle Sound" explosion of the early '90's.  Suddenly this little college station was in a position to reach a huge listening area with "100 screaming watts of mono power!"  Yep, the station wasn't even in stereo.

I signed up for the Associates Degree program at GRCC in the summer on '95, but couldn't get into the radio course yet.  When Kurt Cobain of Nirvana died, I loaned the station my copies of Bleach and Hormoaning, which I'd picked up overseas, and weren't known to the station yet.  That was how I first met the staff at the station.

Eventually, I was to take on a 3-7 PM gig Sunday afternoons, known as Dan-O.  I had a lot of fun and tried to get more management interest in the gothic and industrial [Darkwave] sound [mainly so I could play it during my shift].  I did manage to do one show that was all local acts in the darkwave genre, which led to meeting Paul Alienikoff of C-89, On the Edge, [he later opened an after hours club called Metal Works] and The Vogue's own Peter of Industrial Park fame.

I got myself into a lot of free shows all over town and did some interviews here and there, including: Sky Cries Mary,  KimWarnick of The Fastbacks, and Faith and Disease.  All the members of Qüeensrÿche, signed my 1991 Monsters of Rock concert ticket at the CD release party for Promise Land, which was held at the Seattle Museum of Flight, on October 10, 1994.  I also did some work managing underwriting sales. Whenever the station hosted a concert at the school, the staff had to play security.  In the picture, I'm on the right side, in front of the stage.  Read the Full news story.

Rosemary was offered a permanent position in MN and she decided to take it.  I stayed in WA to finish up the school semester and sold TV's in this weird store called Incredible Universe.  They had an actual performing stage with a TV control board and cameras.  I switched over to that and played VJ for a few months.  At school, I did some interviews, specialty shows and PSA’s.  I was invited to join Phi Beta Kappa because I had good grades, but I never finished the radio program because I moved.

Incredible Universe

The Incredible Universe was a weird retail concept that Tandy bought from Disney.  The store is a show, you are a cast member in the show and the merchandise is referred to as props.  You didn't carry stuff around, we would use the GriDPAD 1900 to  scan your account card, then the bar code on the item's signage and off you went.  We transmitted transactions wirelessly to the main server from the sales floor.  Your items were sent to the check out via a slide.  Amazing?  Not anymore, but remember, this was 1995!

The place had a mini concert stage complete with cameras and a large screen composed of multiple 40" screens. All the in-house entertainment was controlled by a VJ, they tried to call it KFUN, like it was a real radio station.  I escaped selling TV's and got the VJ gig due to my experience at KGRG.  3 live cameras, 2 laser disc players, full of promo material, 2 CD player's and 2 tape decks, as well as a Windows 3.1 PC with a software controller that acted as the sound switcher between devices.  In the image, I'm on the left side of the console.  Read the 2 Full news stories, link1 and link 2.

Courier to Computers

I joined Rosemary in Mankato, MN in May of 95 and got Certified as a Cable TV Installer.  We moved to Owatonna a month later.   I ran the TV control board for a live show for about a week, which was great, because the install work was outside, in all-weather conditions.  One Minnesota winter later, [That year was the worst winter in many years, so I FROZE. ], and I was looking for indoor work.  I quit and then had to fight for my unemployment benefits.  I was out of work for a very long time, and things were looking grim.

I was contacted by a technical recruiter and was suddenly traveling coast-to-coast installing Frame Relay 56 K modems [this was new back then] for a company providing travel services to major corporations [Worldspan].  The project was being handled by a computer consulting company.  Once that dried up, the project manager put me on 2 other projects, RAM upgrades for Allstate and a large-scale replacement of bad motherboards for Allstate.

I saw some people from 143^rd in San Diego and got the idea to make the historical website.  I moved into doing telephone support for American Express Financial Advisors, in Minneapolis, contracting through IBM Global Services.  They ran OS Warp 3 and were starting a Windows 95 conversion.  We had our first son during this time.

Y2K is a self-limiting project, so we moved back here to Ohio.  Mayo tried to get me to stay, but it is very expensive in RCH, and I was pretty sick of snow. [As it’s not that different here, I guess it didn't make a difference].

I contracted downtown Cleveland doing tech support for BP and Mitsui, a Japanese international trading company,  through the spring of 2000.

Both projects I had been on were contracted by one company, who laid us all off, brought us back then laid us off again.  I took another traveling contract, our second son was born at home, and then I was laid off again later that year.

My sister-in-law, who is an art teacher brought me a posting for where she was interning, and  I got hired in October 2000 and am still there.  We are an IT support company taking care of 3 counties worth of school districts.

While pregnant with our daughter, Rosemary was hit by a drunk driver, who was going the wrong way in her lane.  The drunk’s F150 supercab crushed our car.

Our daughter was a water birth [in a portable pool], born at home.

March, 2003 We invaded Iraq.

U.S. soldiers captured Hussein in a raid on December 13, 2003

I hit a doe which crushed another car.