Would you like to know how many people have visited this page? Or how reputable the author is? Simply
sign up for a Advocate premium membership and you'll automatically see this data on every article. Plus a lot more, too.
I have 45 fans: Become a Fan. You'll get emails whenever I post articles on OpEd News
I am a lifelong resident of the Chicago suburbs, with a several year hiatus to serve in the Navy when my Vietnam era draft notice turned up. I had been told that guys with last names like mine were among the preferred cannon fodder in the Army, so the additional time required for service in the Navy seemed well worthwhile.
After military service, I worked variously in petroleum refining, for myself as an architectural illustrator just in time for electronic media to displace the ink and watercolor images that were my specialty, and doing electronic technical drawing.
To more important issues, I married lucky, which is to say once and forever, and after thirty years still marvel that she keeps me around. We have two children, a daughter with a daughter of her own, and a son who is just coming into his majority.
My wife did tire of my shouting at the television set and suggested that if I feel so strongly about politics, I should be involved. That is when I started a prolific run of commentary on this site interspersed with a few articles, and joined my local Democratic Party organization. To my wife's chagrin, I still shout at the television set.
I believe that the liberal values I hold are the result of a proper upbringing, and those values are simply what my mother, like most mothers, taught to their children. Among those values was a love of country and an admonishment to stand up for those who couldn't stand up for themselves. I still hold the part of my military oath to "defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic", to be sacred.
I keep the Jr. in my name to spare my father, whom I am fortunate enough to still have in this world, from being misidentified as responsible for my rants.