Mr. Jones
Ok, this page has been blank too long. The time has come to fill in some of the space. After much consideration, I decided to allow this section to become more than just superficial, but less than bitingly personal. After reading it, you will know much more about where I am "coming from." To this point, my life has taken many unexpected turns. I have had tremendous highs as well as tortuous lows.
I grew up at a young age. My father passed away when I was just eleven and made it known through his will that I was to take over the family tugboat business. I went through school with that eventuality in mind. I learned what I could about the oceans and developed an enduring thirst for knowledge, especially science.
I attended Wilson High School in Long Beach, California. I was not an especially motivated student but I did win our school's physics competition and placed well in state-wide competition (No. 43 in California). Athletically, I competed on the wrestling team at 136 pounds. I graduated a semester early, in January of 1974, to attend the Colorado Outward Bound School's ski mountaineering program. There, I climbed a 14,000+ ft peak in Colorado in February. Parts of me are still thawing out...
After high school, I enrolled at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. UofM is the home of the "Big House" and 104,000+ screaming fans every football Saturday. I studied Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering and graduated in 1979 after the normal four year tour. NA&ME is a very broad engineering discipline because of the nature of ships. Each one becomes like a city on its own. They must be well behaved hydrodynamically, aerodynamically, and structurally. Ships are also filled with an array of machinery that allows them to move, generate power, support their crews, and handle or protect their cargo. I really just wanted to understand and build tugboats.
After graduating from UofM, I married a young woman named Jenny who remains my soul-mate and wife (we are actually divorced for financial reasons but we remain bound together at the heart). I then enrolled in grad school and spent a semester in UofM's graduate school of business studying economics, finance, accounting, and statistics. Jenny was finishing her last year in Physical Therapy (a very tough year) so I learned how to cook and do those other things necessary to support a marriage. After she graduated, I was recalled to tugboats and the real world.
I worked in and eventually became president of the tugboat company. At one point it had 60 employees and innumerable headaches. The photo at right shows a couple of the boats moving the largest airplane in the world - Howard Hughes' Spruce Goose. (I helped build the boat in the lower left corner.) But the company had a little monopoly on a small part of the market so it did well for quite some time. Unfortunately, the monopoly was lost shortly after I began to work there and the stress level began to rise. Monopolies, while pleasant for a while, don't encourage the development of competitive behaviors. I learned that too late and closed the company down in 1988. At this point in time, I was probably a millionaire -- that would change.
In 1990, Jenny and I had two wonderful children and we moved to Sacramento so I could enter law school at UC Davis. The study of law is a very demanding pursuit and I spent many nights from dusk to dawn poring over the books, reading and analyzing cases. I graduated in 1993 and passed the bar exams in California and Washington. I also managed to earn a black belt in Kempo/Tae Kwon Do in my spare time. Unfortunately, the legal profession was awash with surplus lawyers so I had to begin as a solo-practicioner for a a couple years. In the course of one law case, I was invited to join a group of real estate developers so I worked with them for a while and obtained a license to be a real estate broker in California.
The real estate development group built a few houses, but California was in a housing slump and I moved on.
In 1998 I joined three other men and formed a dredging and marine
construction company. For our first trick, we salvaged the vessel "Lady
Christine" off of California's San Miguel Island (shown at above left after one
week of work and at right after 53 days of work. You can barely see me
standing at the stern of the vessel)-- after three other larger companies had
failed. I developed the salvage plan and earned more than a few grey hairs
in the process. We then bought an electrically powered hydraulic dredge called the
"La Encina" and sought dredging work. We acquired the contract to dredge
the harbor in Santa Barbara, CA along with another dredge - the "Wyatt Earp."
(shown below right)
That
ultimately proved to be our, and my undoing.
Three years later I secured a contract to dredge out an area at the Navy Base
in San Diego. The material was to be pumped over five miles away through a
20" diameter steel pipeline. I designed a pipe welding system onto a
self-propelled barge to lay the pipeline. (shown below left) I had
over five thousand horsepower on the pumping system. Unfortunately,
although I worked an average of 20 hours per day, seven days a week, for several
months, it proved to be insufficient and the system couldn't move material fast
enough. The company closed up and I had to file bankruptcy personally.
I next went to work, as an employee, for a construction company in Southern California. This company did two things - hillside stabilization and marine construction. I managed a dredging project for them at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California in 2001 - just after 9/11. They next brought me on full time to design and build a specialized rock drilling system (see photo below-left - the drill itself is not installed. the photo on the right shows the drill in use on a platform that I designed for it) to be used in Pismo Beach, CA. After building it, I managed a welding/fabrication shop where a series of very unique steel structures were built to hold back a slumping hillside. (The photo second row-left shows me at the beginning of the project, hanging on the cliff, marking the interface between the rock layers and the dirt above that. The photo to its the right shows the steel "lizards" that I built and the reinforcing that went in as the project was about halfway done.) When the laser surveys of the cliff proved to be inaccurate, I was charged with building the structures to conform to the cliff face with literally no margin for error.
After the Pismo Beach project, I designed a number of other specialized drills and adaptors. Some held the drills onto crane booms, one was designed to be man-portable and yet be able to drill a 110 ft deep 6 inch diameter hole (in Malibu, CA) One of the drilling systems was capable of reaching 220 feet up a hillside and drill into solid rock. Other bits and pieces I designed were to hold wire mesh material suspended from helicopters to be released on the pull of a cord.
In 2006, I left their employ and moved to Idaho. In the summer of 2007, I thought about teaching -- science.
When I was in high school, I completely expected to devote my life to the tugboat business. My journey since then would have been completely unimaginable to me in high school. What I bring to the classroom, I believe, runs somewhat beyond textbook learning.
I enjoy the following activities:
Racquetball (and most other racquet/paddle sports)
Scuba diving (since 1971)