Who Am I

When I was born my Mother, Father, Brother and I lived in a small hamlet called High Woods, NY. It was close to the town of Saugerties and if you went in the other direction you’d pass through Woodstock. The year was 1949 and my father was a World War II veteran who had been wounded pretty badly. The road in front of our house was paved but if you drove down it about 100 yards the pavement came to an end. It was a great place to grow up. My brother Charlie and I would search around in the woods behind the house and we’d go to Henry Wilgus’ General Store for food. And we’d go there on Wednesday night’s for square dancing. If I remember correctly, and I think I do, our phone number was 3.. It was a party line and the operator was sitting in the Wilgus’ General Store so she knew everyone and everything that was going on.

When I was 6 my sister Inez was born and we moved to town. My parents bought a stone house that was built in 1727 and they did a lot of work on it to fix it up and make it a wonderful place to finish growing up. The Grade School was across the street and the High School was not far away. We’d walk down Main Street to get to the A&P or the Grand Union supermarkets or Vosdick’s Meat Market or Lachmann’s Bakery or Beetle’s Pharmacy. Life was simple. 

In 1968 at age 18 I joined the United States Navy. I didn’t want to get drafted and go to Viet Nam so it seemed like the best thing to do. I got trained in electronics and was stationed in Memphis, Key West, Cherry Point NC, Virginia Beach, San Diego and I did a 6 month Med Cruise on the USS Forrestal. All in all not bad duty, far better than going to Viet Nam. During that time I was able to get home to go to the Woodstock Festival in 1969. After getting out of the Navy in January of 1972 I went to college and graduated from SUNY New Paltz in 1976. Without going into all the details, I had a good life, a dog named Rufus, hitch hiked to California and back, drove there a couple of times had different jobs. I ended up moving to Boston in 1983 to try my hand at working in the video business. I had done some video work before and owned a VHS deck and camera and loved shooting and editing. My sister lived in Boston and knew a real estate developer who wanted to have videos done to promote his projects so I came and worked for him. I had a van and my camera and a 3/4” portable video recorder and also editing equipment in my own small studio. I was pretty happy doing that.

When that gig came to an end I started to work at a production house in Needham named Multivision. This was the beginning of computer aided editing and Multivision had a beautiful editing suite with interformat editing and a CMX edit controller. We used 3/4” sources and mastered to 1” tapes. That was the height of the video business at the time and we were very busy. The learning curve was steep and I worked many hours and many days in a row. And I loved it. That is until I got burned out.

I was going to head back to Saugerties because it was so nice there in Upstate New York but a job opportunity opened up at WGBH Boston. WGBH is the Public Broadcasting station and they needed an editor. They hired me on the spot and I immediately started working on This Old House, NOVA, Masterpiece Theatre, FRONTLINE and other PBS shows. The learning curve was steep again but it was a good place to be. I stayed there for 24 years. I left there when I was 60 years old because the management had changed and things were not the same.

After about a year of wondering what I was going to do and working with my friend Jeff Hoffman who had started a company called Squashhouse Media I got hired at Harvard University to work in a new department called HarvardX. We created online course material and I supervised 14 editors and had a hand in the field production of the courses. I traveled a little and met Bill Clinton, John McCain, Al Gore and many other renown professors and worked with a great group of people. When the 3 hour commute got to be too much I retired.

That brings me to where I am now. I do my own productions, work with my good friends Vinny Straggas, Mike Chvany and Jeff Hoffman and have been producing a streaming video program with Tom Rush for the last 4 years. I have Lights, Cameras, Audio equipment and my own edit suite in my house. 

Life is good.