I was born in Oakland, CA on Feb. 21, 1945. My family moved to Corcoran, CA at the end of WW II, and my father became an industrial arts teacher and track coach at Corcoran High School. We moved in 1950 to Fallbrook, CA and I went to elementary through high school there. I graduated from San Jose State and have a MS in Agriculture from Cal Poly. After graduating from college my wife and I bounced around for about six years always working but never satisfied with what we were doing. In a moment of clarity my wife and I decided in 1973 to go to Europe and the Middle East. We spent a year traveling 16,000 miles in a VW Camper that we bought in Hollywood and picked up at the Westphalia factory near Dortmund Germany. I went back to school in 1975 and was privileged to become a professor at Cal Poly in the Agribusiness Department from 1977–2014. At thirty years of age, I decided to go back to school at Cal Poly to learn something that would be fulfilling and useful. As luck would have it there was an opening for a lecturer in the Agribusiness Department just as I finished my MS degree. That one-year Lectureship turned into a 37-year career at Cal Poly. Having the opportunity to teach was not something I had ever thought I would do, but I guess it was meant to be.
I started college as a music major, and lasted 4 days, but I have remained interested in music my whole life. I play piano (poorly), guitar (even more poorly) and sing (only solos in the shower if no one is at home) and if any of you heard me do any of these you will understand why my music education and career was a very brief one. I have played tennis most of my life and now play three times per week, but I do not play matches any longer. I take lessons, practice, and hit with a ball machine and have not played a match in the past 10 years. Beside the year trip to Europe, my wife and family traveled for four months in the South Pacific and lived for four months in Florence Italy and four months in London. In addition, I spent about another year outside the United States traveling for one month at a time to Costa Rica, Ecuador and Peru, and several trips back to Europe that seem to always end in Paris. Without question, my greatest accomplishment is being happily married to Cindy for 55 years. She was an elementary school teacher in the San Luis Coast School District for many years. Our daughter is a lawyer for the National Labor Relations Board in San Franciso and our son is a commercial realtor also in San Francisco. They are both happily married, and our five grandchildren provide us with great joy and keep us young and smiling.