The first thing that I can remember doing after waking up hung over and starving and leaving the Hollister Ranch after our graduation party was finding myself, wholly disoriented, at UC Irvine. The cheerleading squad had sidetracked me during orientation, and I, not really wanting to be there anyway, managed to flunk out my first quarter. The associate dean of Humanities pulled some strings and got me reinstated. I stumbled into the Classics Department where I found my niche eventually. My first three years I mostly played soccer, drank beer, and got accustomed to a coed environment.

My fondest memories are of playing left inside or right wing on the UCI soccer club during the days and on a local team of ex patriots in the evenings. I played a lot of soccer, and I, as a late bloomer, got pretty good at it. During that time I also went to Europe with Mal, Ruric, and David Selman.

I can hardly remember studying for my first 3 years. I dropped out 3 times including the time we shut down UC Irvine in protest of the Cambodia invasion. Carl Munger finally suggested that I stop questioning what I was doing and “put the blinders on” for a while. I did and spent the next two years getting nearly straight A’s while carrying double the usual class load. I had so much fun. As an Ancient Greek major, I had my own chemistry lab in the Physics building for two years. I did tropical disease research and published a paper in clinical chemistry. I was the advertising manage for the school newspaper for a while. I studied Greek, Latin, physics, math, ballet, fencing, modern dance, taught myself chemistry and biology, and I finally got to read the Antigone entirely in the original Greek. About that time my daughter was born. She’s now a bilingual school teacher.

One day as I crossed the central park at UCI I saw that the grass was growing and had to know why, so I walked into the chairman’s office in the Department of Molecular Biology and talked my way into their PhD program. That lasted 2 years before I quit, but not before I made a major breakthrough in the laboratory having to do with the molecular controls within chloroplasts in plants. I couldn’t see myself spending my life in a laboratory. I took a six week break and rode a train and buses to the end of the road in Guatemala via Mexico and Yucatan, slept in a hammock in the jungle and by the ocean, and stayed for 7 to 10 days with several families that I met on the way. When I got home I became an ocean swimmer and spent the next 10 years running on the beach and swimming nearly every day.

My political career started during my second year of graduate school. Another guy and I pretty much organized the Associated Graduate Students at UCI. I ended up either appointing the graduate rep or serving myself on every Academic Senate and Chancellor’s advisory committee for the next 3 years. The first year I was the vice-chairman, and the second year I was the Chairman and spent 4 days each month being flown around the state attending Regent’s and Student Body Presidents’ Council meetings. For one year I actively served on the committee that hired, fired, and promoted the UCI professors.

I decided to become a diplomat, so, just before I took my M.S. degree in molecular biology, I talked my way into the History PhD program. It always was my worst subject, so I figured that was the best way to handle that. I was wrong. After 2 years I bailed with an M.A. degree. During my last 6 months there I enrolled full time at the local junior college and took all six of the real estate courses I needed to become a real estate broker. I passed the exams for the sales license and the broker’s license, and, having no experience in real estate, began my career as a real estate broker. Before I really got into it, I took another long trip to Europe, spending most of my time in Paris, Greece, and Spain. I learned all about tax-deferred exchanges and fancy real estate dealings, but residential transactions were the most fun for me. I put together two dozen no money down deals for some clients and myself; actually got paid to acquire 10 houses.

I worked with a bunch of Viet Nam vets selling VA houses and sold a lot of houses. It wasn’t what I had planned on doing when I grew up. That was a pretty wild time. I drove fast, played hard, traveled around, and worked hard. At the end of 2 years, in 1980, some idiot ran a red light and I hit him broadside at about 50 mph. My Audi 5000S was totaled, but I didn’t have a scratch. Problem was that I got knocked silly and lost my ability to think for at least a year. Just about that time I met my first wife, and I married her when I was totally disabled mentally. I had negotiated to buy my first Porsche just before the accident, so I ended up driving that for the next year while I was half crazy. I only got 3 or 4 speeding tickets, and each one was for at least 50 mph less than what I was doing! That’s also when I started rehabbing houses.

In 1982 my old professor from molecular biology rescued me from my hopeless depths by offering to bring me back into his lab. He got us a married student apartment and me a TA position and within a short while I was able to function again. I spent 16 hours a day in the lab, mostly to get away from my wife who drove me crazy. Somehow my son was born then. I became an expert in DNA sequencing and published a few papers in an international journal in plant molecular biology. I was advanced to candidacy for my PhD but didn’t finish the degree, because I no longer had any reason to go to the lab after my first wife finally moved out.

I’d gotten involved in a Korean martial art, Hwa Rang Do, during my last year of graduate school, and I spent the next year working with them and training continuously. Our group held a training camp for 3 days up at Pistol Springs.

That’s when I decided to become a lawyer, so I talked my way into law school on a full scholarship. I worked my way through law school by selling houses and brokering real estate mortgages. I bought a house in Irvine in 1987 and ended up being the president of the homeowners association for 10 years. I started suing bad cops in 1992 with a major lawsuit against a dozen dirty Irvine cops. 3 lawsuits later and I finally got the mayor to join up with me and got rid of the dirty police chief. That was the high point of my legal career, cleaning out the local police department. It got pretty scary for a while when they began retaliating.

I met Joycie three years ago and married her 7 months later. She’s a gorgeous tomboy from Wisconsin. We moved out of Irvine and into the rural region west of Riverside CA onto 1.6 acres with a fixer-upper house, where we now have 9 horses, 4 dogs, 6 cats, a pygmy goat, and lots of chickens. I just finished cultivating 1,000 square feet of our vegetable garden with a spade fork. Most of the soil here is decomposed granite, but the soil in our garden is really dark and rich. I’ve been composting a lot of horse manure and working it into the soil. I’ve planted dozens of trees that I mostly grew from seed and covered 200 yards of chain link fence with honeysuckle, bougainvillea, and grapevines. This last year we had literally hundreds of bunches of grapes and some fruit from our trees.

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