About

Just the Basic Facts

I was born in rural Pennsylvania in 1953. My family migrated to California in 1966. After one year in San Diego, we moved to Ventura County north of Los Angeles where I graduated from Santa Clara High School, Oxnard California in 1971.

I received a Bachelor of Arts in English from St. Mary’s College of California in 1975, where I studied with Robert Hass and Chester Aaron. After a feeble attempt at attaining an MFA from the Poetry Center at San Francisco State, I dropped out of academia, found a job as a florist for nine years, and settled into a married life in the Bay Area in 1980.

When the personal computer revolution erupted in the early eighties I created a career as a network engineer and project manager for thirty years. I retired from all that (involuntarily I might add) in 2015 and relocated in the Pacific Northwest in 2018 where I write, photograph, read, and think fulltime.

Throughout my life I kept writing, even though I was preoccupied with work, marriage, and the raising of two daughters. I recently published the first in a series of memoirs, Winterland Nights – A Memoir of Rock in the Seventies, a remembrance of concerts presented by Bill Graham at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco. That was a transformative time for me, and the book is a coming of age story that takes place during seven years of legendary performances by Pink Floyd, David Bowie, the Grateful Dead, Genesis, The Who, Bruce Springsteen and many others. More information and excerpts from the book are available at winterlandnights.com. The book is available in paperback and Kindle editions at this link.

I am also an avid photographer and my work is featured and available for purchase at imagerag.com. More information about the portfolios and galleries on that site can be perused here on the Photography page.

Current projects include a memoir of my father, also a photographer, and the life and love story of my parents who moved their three sons from the staid rural life of Pennsylvania to the lucent light of California in 1966. Tentatively titled 24 Exposures I’ll be featuring excerpts about that project here at imagerag.blog.