Education is everything...

Like Mr. Ed, I do not come from a family with a history of academic achievement. My father is the son of Italian immigrants and was the third of nine siblings to be born in the U.S. My grandmother, in fact, was pregnant when they crossed the Atlantic by boat in 1922 and arrived at Ellis Island in NYC. My father has a seventh grade education as he quit school to join the Army and fight in World War II in order to send money home to help his mother and father raise their large Catholic family. My grandfather was a miner and came to the U.S. to work in coal mines in Western Pennsylvania before moving to the eastern part of the state to work in limestone quarries.

My mother has a high school education. Her father worked a number of jobs in central Pennsylvania--including with Roosevelts' WPA during the depression--before retiring from the railroad. Her mother worked as a seamstress and took in laundry and ironing to help the family get by.

It is against this backdrop of hard work and hard scrabble existence that I was born in 1961 in Hershey, Pennsylvania. I attended Palmyra Area Senior High School in Palmyra, Pennsyvania and graduated in 1979 with academic honors and a few sports achievements to my credit. I discovered both the forest and sports growing up and they--a long with Mr Ed, Lassie, Flipper, and Gentle Ben--kept me company on many, many days.

Between racing tricycles, wagons, and then bicycles down the large hill in front of my parents' house, my brother and I played endless games of baseball in our large backyard as children and lost many, many rubber balls in the woods and thorn bushes below our yard. In middle school (called 'junior high' in those days) I discovered intramural sports and then progressed through junior varsity to varsity sports; playing field hockey, tennis, basketball, and a couple seasons of softball.

College is what I really wanted to spend my time pursuing, however, and that goal proved elusive... My siblings were going along with the hand they were dealt--following the script per se--and had been satisfied to graduate from high school, meet their future husbands, get married and find a job. That track was not going to meet my needs however--which I knew at the time--but how to get there took me a while to figure out.  Back to my Home page.