DEAR FRIENDS,
My wife Tammy and I raised four feisty daughters, God’s little joke on a guy who, like most boys, spent his youth trying to be a lady’s man and failing miserably. It’s ironic then that only after I got married did I find myself surrounded by a household of females. I had hoped to improve the odds by getting a male cat. But the cat and I quickly got into a tiff over who was the alpha male in the family. So I got him neutered to end the argument. He never forgave me.
I grew up in the Village of Lancaster in Western New York, a blue collar suburb of Buffalo on the shores of Lake Erie. It was a place of biting winter winds and summers so humid that your shirt stuck to your back with sweat. As much as I loved my hometown, I was anxious to experience what the rest of the world had to offer. I earned degrees at Michigan Technological University and Brigham Young University. At Michigan Tech I was the associate editor of the university newspaper and later wrote stories as a reporter at the Buffalo Courier-Express, a major daily newspaper.
My budding career as a journalist was derailed by a note from my draft board ordering me to go to war in Vietnam. So I enlisted in the U.S. Navy as an officer and saw action aboard the aircraft carrier USS Oriskany. On active duty, I sailed aboard two aircraft carriers and served as the navigator on a guided missile destroyer homeported at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. I loved adventuring into ports of call in Europe, Scandinavia, the Far East and Africa; a life-changing odyssey that instilled in me an absolute awe for the diversity, challenges and beauty of far-flung cultures, languages, people, climates and the plants and animals that surrounded them.
I made my career in the high tech world of Silicon Valley in Northern California where I published a book on program management. My family and I later moved to Utah where I authored a book on politics and religion (that’s asking for trouble) and published several humor articles in the Deseret News. I also served as a member of a city council and planning commission at the municipal level and assisted in the campaigns of numerous political candidates.
I really appreciate your interest and look forward to getting to know you better.
—Larry Alan Brown