| Me. |
| OK. This is where I tell you just who the heck I think I am. First off, where I come from: I am from a rural area, near a small town in south Georgia... well, small by many people's standards... it was actually one of the larger towns in the area. I won't bore you with many of the details- suffice it to say, the area is best known for its small aircraft manufacturer (remember the small plane Dom DeLouise was hanging out of the bottom of, as it flew under the road underpass, in the movie "Cannonball Run"? They made that plane!), and as being the home of Stonewall Jackson, the country singer (the longest-standing performer on the Grand Ole Opry, and whose family lived as next door neighbors, and fellow sharecroppers, to my dad's family when they both were boys), and of Ray Knight, former New York Yankee baseball player (my dad worked with his cousin, nonetheless!). I was born in a small hospital (which naturally later became the county services building, after the new hospital was built, as is the propensity for many small town government facilities), with possibly the most incompetant doctor in history attending (the almost caving the back of my skull in with forceps during delivery I can forgive, the almost letting my mother DIE afterwards part, I find harder to forget). Oh well, this was back in 1967... the dark ages, by the standards of many people reading this, I'm sure. (Those of you that can do math, can figure out my approximate degree of oldness now. Hey, I look older than I feel, so THERE.) My parents are probably the two most decent people I've ever met. No, I'm not kidding. My father was a career auto mechanic (the best around, by the judgement of MANY people- a natural fix-it man, if there ever was one, and the literal personification of Mr. Goodwrench, being that many thought he looked MORE like Mr. Goodwrench should, than the guy they used to have on the posters! :-) ) and realistically, a near-genius, who despite never getting past 8th grade in high school (he went to work to support his family's farm, as his brothers were shipped off in the Korean War) did remarkable things like pick up computers and advanced automotive electronics with ease, in his late 40s in age! My mother was a high-school math teacher (a degreed physicist, but chose to teach math, seeing the dearth of good math teachers that existed, and STILL exists, in south GA, especially for those who are deemed to have less-than-average acuity for math and are frequently destined to ignorance, unnecessarily as a result) and a VERY avid thinker. What makes them remarkable, in my eyes, is their sincere tolerance for, and consciencious attempts to understand, other people, no matter what their background or status. For dedicated Baptists, they surely defy the stereotype many have of Southern Baptists, of them being closed-minded, subtly bigoted, holier-than-thou buffoons. None of that in my immediate family. If I can be proud of anything, it is that they truely DO treat everyone, just as they want to be treated. (Why is that something so rare??) If all Baptists were as well-mannered as them, maybe I might have been much more inclined to stay with the practice of the faith, than I am now... Growing up, I had two major interests: Automobiles (or more generally, building and fixing mechanical things, of which autos were the most common subjects), and music (both playing instruments, and building/tinkering with audio systems of myriad types). In school, I was mostly the loner type- I had friends, but I tended to spend great amounts of time by myself, either reading, building stuff, listening to music, or just thinking about stuff. When the nearest neighbor your own age, lives more than 3 miles away, these things happen. By high-school, I had branched out somewhat- I had great fun attending Governor's Honors Program in Valdosta in 1983 (between sophomore and junior years of high school)... and as a result, indirectly of that, meeting my best friend of all time, Donna H. (who attended the same program, the next summer, and who I met through my high school physics teacher. Thanks, Mr. Hall, for that... as well as lots of other things). I did a stint in high school band, in junior high and early high school (our band was GOOD... we pretty much won almost every single band contest we attended!), playing trumpet. (though on retrospect, I kinda wish I had bypassed that, and stuck with the piano, my first love as an instrument, and which I had started playing at age 5. Man, I need to get another piano someday...) I was also in lots of academic clubs- in fact, as a very fortuitous (for a teenager, at least!) side effect of all the clubs and the projects and such, I actually had the "dubious" honor of being out-of-class MORE days than I was in class my senior year, and STILL getting a perfect attendance award! How sweet can you get?? During this time, I began an occupation that I stuck with for many years- car stereo installation. Back in 1984, it was like the Wild Wild West... there were people starting to spend MASSIVE sums of money, but very little was actually known about the SCIENCE of actually MAKING good sound systems in an environment as un-friendly as a car interior! We spent HOURS experiementing and learing what worked (and MANY things that DIDN'T work, in the Thomas Edison tradition), in what can mostly be labelled a labor of love (we certainly didn't get paid enough, to make it worth wallowing around in car trunks all day!) for the most part. Incidentally, at the shop I started at, we built the system that won the VERY FIRST car stereo contest in Georgia- Ken's Stereo Junction in Macon GA, 1984. Man, I still remember that system... and I bet, though we didn't know our gluteus maximi from voids in the earth in many ways, that that system would STILL sound good today... As I was just going off to college in mid 1985 (Georgia Institute of Technology), I built my very first "serious" pair of home speakers. Well, "rebuilt" may be the better term. Actually "hacked up" and "bastardized" might be the words some people might use. I found a set of derelict 1965-vintage JBL Lancer 33 cabinets (I now cringe at the fact that I hacked up a vintage JBL product! Mea culpa, mea culpa! :-) ), at a very low-rent audio closeout/used stereo equipment store in Atlanta (anyone else remember those places that were perpetually screaming in radio ads "We lost our LEASE!"?? One of THOSE places.), and shoe-horned a bunch of Becker drivers (made for the ubiquitous, at the time, "Becker Box" truck boom-box speakers) into them. Truthfully, these things probably never sounded THAT good... especially with my rather rudimentary knowledge of audio circuit design at that time... but they were good enough, that with my trusty Radio Shack/Hitachi 50w/ch. receiver, to ensure that I was one of the "mac daddies" of the dormitory stereo scene, for sure. -- More to come, as I get the time to write it... -G. |