Candidate for
Governing Board Member; Laguna Beach Unified School District

I was born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Today I live in Laguna Terrace Park with my wife and one adult child who is developmentally disabled. Our daughter lives in Oakland and supervises the computer lab at the University of California, Berkeley. Our other son live in the Seattle area and is a Program Manager at Microsoft.

In Milwaukee I had the good fortune of attending the same elementary school for eight years and the same high school for four years. It was there I began a lifelong history of community service. In elementary school I became a school crossing guard, hall monitor and audio visual monitor. In high school I was in a variety of activities as diverse as volunteer stage hand, equipment manager for the basketball team, sports editor of the newspaper, and president of our city championship Chess Club. I also was actively involved in the scouting program, eventually attaining the rank of Eagle Scout and was inducted into the Order of the Arrow. I lettered in tennis and was the number two ranked player in my school in my senior year.

I won a scholarship to the University of Wisconsin, where I began my undergraduate work. In my second year, as president of the Chess Club, I secured a grant from the University to send our team to the national championships, where they placed fourth.

During the Vietnam War I interrupted my studies for a three-year tour in the US Army. I was a logistics specialist at Kagnew Station, Ethiopia and Fort Lewis Washington. In Ethiopia I managed an individual equipment operation, and in Washington I did accounting management for vehicles processing through the Fort Lewis Logistics Center.

Then I went back to the University of Wisconsin where I elected to pursue a teaching degree. I specialized in secondary education with a teaching major in English and a minor in German. I graduated Phi Kappa Phi in 1972.

Upon graduation I was commissioned a second lieutenant in the US Air Force. In my first assignment at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base (AFB), Ohio, I began as an administrative officer in aircraft operations and ended as the Headquarters, Squadron Section Commander.

At Hill AFB, Utah, I was a plans officer and the executive officer for the base commander. In the first job, I oversaw more than a 100 support agreements and was the project officer to coordinate support for a tactical fighter wing that relocated from Thailand to Utah. Working for the base commander I reviewed all his correspondence, including engineering projects requiring his approval.

Throughout my Air Force career I was involved in community service, e.g., unit project officer for Combined Federal Campaigns (United Way). While stationed at Incirlik CDI, Turkey, I coached youth football. In my second year my team went undefeated. I was named the all star coach and took a team to Spain for a tournament which we won.

At RAF Mildenhall, England, I was Chief of Administration, responsible for the post office, printing plant, information systems, publishing and documentation storage. I also managed the budget for the base commander, a budget that included about 28 cost centers. At Mildenhall I was a lector in the base chapel and the offensive coordinator for the base football team.

At Fort Belvoir, Virginia, I directed worldwide personnel and plans operations for the Air Force Special Activities Center.

I retired from the Air Force at Hickam AFB, Hawaii and started my teaching career as a substitute. I also taught high school English in summer school. Just to give you a little insight into how I view education, I'd like to tell you about one of the term papers I assigned to that American literature class. Students had to think about what it means to be an American. Then, they had to pick five values commonly held by Americans, three examples of each value in the works they read in the course and how the characters in the stories reflected those values.

After a couple of years we moved to Washington state, where I again was a substitute teacher. I did have a long term assignment for half a semester when a regular teacher became pregnant. I mention this because there is another anecdote here that will let you know me better.

The job was a junior high school mathematics teacher. The algebra class was scheduled to have an exam shortly after I took over the class. More than half the class failed, and I even had to send home warning notices to parents of two officers of the graduating class. Rather than just ploughing ahead, I went back and presented the entire first half of the course to insure the class was ready to go forward. By the time the semester was over those students knew algebra, and many had even improved their grades from before.

After my wife of 25 years died of cancer in Washington, I moved to California. In the last seven years i have taught in every junior and senior high school in Laguna Beach, Newport Beach and Irvine. A number of those schools are among the finest public schools in California. I have seen excellence in education first hand.

In the last few years I have not done much community service in the traditional sense. Rather, I have morphed into something of a cyber person. I have been a volunteer expert at allexperts.com. Most likely I surf more than a lot of our children as I have done the interesting sites feature for a philosophical ezine. I also moderate a wisdom list at egroups.com. My cyber community, or rather my online address book, consists of 2000+ people in over 30 countries. I read 300+ emails a day and send out three or four of those containing wisdom to a small portion of my address book.

Now i'd like to spend more time in my real community and in education, the field in which I'm best equipped to serve. I'm looking forward to serving Laguna Beach as a school board director and promise to do my best to help the administration provide quality education to our children.