Born in Coffeyville, KS, September 24, 1942. Moved with parents to Chicago area in 1949. A resident there for about fifty years, now residing in Independence, KS since April, 2000.

Past occupations include a variety of telecom-related ventures and adventures, including telephone switchboard operator in various large institutional settings and various clerical positions. A part time writer and author, selling freelance material to The Christian Science Monitor -- I like to say what they pay keeps me in beer and cigarette money -- and other publications.

After a 1971 collision between two Illinois Central Railroad suburban commuter trains in which 27 people were killed, another 200+ were injured, and I walked off the train and stood there scratching my head looking at it, I decided God must have some sort of plan for my life, although I am damned to this day if I know what it is for sure.

Beginning in 1972 I became an 'information provider'; making information available to me as widely disseminated as possible to the people who would benefit from it. I began with a telephone recorded message giving calendars of events, and progressed to editing a small community newspaper. For five or six years in the middle 1970's, I operated a nightly discussion forum via Citizens Band Radio. As CB radio got to the point by the late 1970's that its usefulness as a public forum was about over, I looked for other ways to share information with the masses. For fifteen years, 1982 through 1997 I was also a program producer and 'reader' for the visually handicapped radio reading service CRIS operated by the Chicago Public Library.

In 1979 I started an Apple ][+ BBS (Bulletin Board System) on a home computer. In 1981 I was system operator for the first BBS in the world operated by a public library -- the Chicago Public Library. I was involved to a limited extent in 'Usenet' in those days also, and a couple of the early mailing lists as a participant. By 1985, I was frustrated by the limitations of 'single server' type communications -- a BBS in those days could handle only one phone call at a time usually with an average of 30-40 calls per day being considered quite successful -- so I closed down the Lakeshore Modem Magazine BBS and went almost exclusively with 'Usenet' and a couple of mailing lists including TELECOM Digest.

Now in recent years, my life has consisted mostly of the Digest, and helping newcomers to the net community become established with their web pages, mailing lists, etc. Outside employment took me to Junction City, KS in February, 1999. I become known as the 'resident expert' on things concerning the Internet and the World Wide Web. Little did my clients -- mostly soldiers at Fort Riley, which is part of Junction City -- know about how little I knew compared to the 1960's and 1970's, when I used to know everything.

Then came November 26, 1999, a day which will live in infamy for me. I had a brain aneurysm which rendered me in a coma for two months, emergency rehabilitation for another month, and a nursing home for a year and a half after that. Now I am partially paralyzed as a result of the neurological damage from the aneurysm. I resumed the Telecom Digest at the end of 2001, when I took over my mother's old house here in Independence, where I live with my two cats, Callie and Missy, and daily Meals on Wheels and a housekeeper from Windsor Place and SEK Senior Services. Want to know more ... just ask.

November 2004

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TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly but not exclusively to telecommunications topics. It is circulated anywhere there is email, in addition to various telecom forums on a variety of networks such as Compuserve and America On Line, Yahoo Groups, and other forums. It is also gatewayed to Usenet where it appears as the moderated newsgroup "comp.dcom.telecom". TELECOM Digest is a not-for-profit, mostly non-commercial educational service offered to the Internet by Patrick Townson. All the contents of the Digest are compilation-copyrighted. You may reprint articles in some other media on an occasional basis, but please attribute my work and that of the original author.