Please call me Jim. I’m a retired Air Force colonel who had an extremely interesting and rewarding military career. (See the HAVE WE MET tab for more detail). My first operational assignment was to Spain, just outside of Madrid, where I met and married my wife. She was pregnant with our first child when I was reassigned to Vietnam and my youngest daughter was nine months old when I got back from the war and first saw her. We eventually had two more daughters, one born in California and the other in Germany. I am also very proud to have a grandson who is named after me.
Officially, I travelled to Germany, Norway, the UK, Spain and Majorca, Italy and Sicily, Holland, Greece, Turkey, Japan and Okinawa, South Korea, the Philippines, and Vietnam as best I can recall. I also briefly popped in on Thailand, India, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. On personal time I and some, or all, of my family either lived in or visited Spain, the Canary Islands, Germany, Belgium, Luxumbourg, France, Italy, the Philippines, South Korea, Austria, Switzerland and Mexico. While we were stationed in Europe, I owned a Volkswagen pop-top camper and we really enjoyed the camping experience over there. So, you can see that I have a wealth of international experience to draw upon.
Stateside, we were assigned to northern and southern California; military schools in Alabama and Virginia; and bases in New Mexico and Florida. I did some consulting for a couple of years and then was very fortunate to get
hired by AlliedSignal, which bought Honeywell several years later. Both companies were good to me and I did some more travelling with Honeywell, visiting Brazil, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, plus a host of locations in this country. I fulfilled a lifelong dream while in Cairo by visiting the pyramids, the Sphinx and the Cairo Museum. Over fourteen years later I retired from Honeywell and became part owner and member of the board of directors of Sakura, Inc.
These days I am an aspiring author. I really love to write and hope to have a number of literary endeavors come to fruition in the future. I just completed a fiction novel, Counterfeit Conception, with my co-author, another retired Air Force colonel named Carl D. “Denny” Portz, and have also finished a multi-part series of books under the overall title of The Grey Cardinal. I’ve publish them as separate e-books like Counterfeit Conception. Check out the Counterfeit Conception tab to learn more about our joint book. Also, if you’re interested in a combination espionage-murder-KGB-Kremlin thriller go to the Grey Cardinal tab.
Following the Grey Cardinal, I also authored three separate detective novels around an Albuquerque, New Mexico-based detective named Nick (Nicholas) Knaack. I hope you have an opportunity to read and enjoy these books.
I like fishing, especially in the Gulf of Mexico, metal detecting, amateur archeology, and am a WWII buff. Please see the TOPICS OF INTEREST tab for more info on my WWII interests, especially if you’d like to share your, a relative’s or a friend’s experiences. As a historian, I’d like to preserve items from that era and any stories that go with them before they end up in some flea market or just get disposed of. If I get enough interesting input, I may write a book about them.
I have a Bachelor’s degree in American History and a Master’s in College Teaching. I also completed professional military education through the Air War College and have been certified as a Project Management Professional (PMP) through Georgetown University.