TRIAD Author' Biography

TRIAD Author' Biography

I was an only child born of white parents in 1934 during the depths of the Depression in Winfield, Kansas, and raised mostly in segregated Wellington, Kansas in the days prior to Brown versus Topeka. My father was a member of the KKK but was very much respected (I doubt feared) by the black community. He was very fair towards Negroes but felt that they had their place and he detested both Kikes (Jews) and Communists. In later years, my father, and very much my mother, mellowed in their attitudes towards blacks and Jews. From my early youth I was a strong advocate of racial equality and while in my teens I married a Jewess. I became very active in the Civil Rights Movement and taught in black colleges. I now have over 20 descendants including four Chinese grandchildren and numerous great-grandchildren. I have traveled in Europe, South America, Japan and China. All of the above is irrelevant to this book but does go to indicate the cultural diversity to which the author has been exposed. More significant still is probably the span of technological change that my wife and I have witnessed. We now live in the village of Horning‘s Mills in Ontario, Canada, where she was born, and her mother before her two centuries ago. The farm on which my wife was raised had no electricity, no paved roads, and no vehicles. We often remark that we may see life come full circle. But, back to my youth. I often remark that I had two mothers because my grandmother lived with us and had much to do in raising me while my mother worked. Not that I was spoiled, at least in my opinion, but my father often remarked that he was concerned that my mother and grandmother might break their necks as they raced to fulfill any wish that I might murmur. My wife, children and others, to this day treat me in this kindly fashion. In point of fact I have been blessed with exceptional teachers, of whom I was often their favorite. One brought to a reception, papers of mine that they had retained through the years. Indeed, I think back over my early years to the many townspeople who extended to me extremely exceptional attention, allowing me sit in their places of occupation such as the city lab, and various places of craft and profession, and mentored me as no other young person of which I am aware. As popular as I was with the adults, I was equally unpopular with the youth, being considered what today would be called a nerd, which is probably the appellation that many would apply even now. I felt myself particularly unpopular with the girls but now in retrospect I realize that wasn‘t so. I had a driver‘s license at fourteen and at fifteen my own car, obtained through holding down simultaneously several jobs. I read voraciously and had special library privileges such as to the locked shelves. The books that I read were the latest nonfiction best sellers many in the vein of psychology because I greatly doubted my sanity – actually a very healthy attitude for a teenager. Those were very different times from the present day. We of course had no television or computers, although I was a movie hound. Speaking of which, I owned a terribly useless dog that did not care a whit for me but upon which I poured immense love and concern. Today my wife and I have marvellous dogs that we, as volunteers, raise for service dogs for children with autism. Perspective changes through time. I was equally enamoured of my first wife as I was of my first dog. I suppose she wisely left me, but I was so crushed at the time I did nearly go insane. During my first marriage I was in the United States Air Force, where I mostly attended schools. The Air Force has a strange policy. They train too many people for each specialty. Upon graduation they look and see who was the best, and since I was often the honor student, they then send you to a completely different school because they know you can study. I went into the Air Force with three years of high school and came out with three years of college but very little rank, although the last week I was in I was offered an appointment to officers school if I would have accepted it. In all, my transcripts finally covered eleven different colleges and universities, a number of which I flunked out of because I could never maintain the level of discipline required for graduate studies. I was always far too interested in too many subjects. One school at which I later taught had a reading lab, and the instructor there got me up to a speed where I could read five books a day, and did on many days. Now, I do well to read that many per month. Well, maybe a few more – but now I spend hours each day on the Internet, and with tools such as Google the access to information has ex-panded exponentially since my youth. When my present wife married me she insisted that I write down all the jobs that I had had. There were over one-hundred and fifty then and more than that afterwards. I was never 'successful‘ at any of them but they are astounding in their diversity and the insight that they gave me regarding society and technology. I won‘t bother you with the details but many were quite technical in nature so that I was 'grand fathered‘ as an electrical engineer, had training standing in operating rooms, flew Link-trainers, and a grand variety of things of such diversity that you wouldn‘t believe me if I told you. On top of that, I found that I had a knack to discuss with people about their professions in such a manner that they would explain to me things that they would not normally discuss with outsiders. I discovered that no matter what profession, art, skill you may be talking about – it is usually not done anything in the way that one would imagine from the outside. The purpose in setting all this down was, in the words of my reviewers, to make myself seem more credible to the reader, but as I write all this I suspect it will have the opposite effect and not only that, at my age to treat of all my life experiences would itself make a tale longer than this book. Therefore I must limit myself to a few succulent facts about my history. I trained as a Christian Science practitioner, and rented an office to begin practice, but that was one of the many things at which I failed. I also trained as a psychiatric social worker and worked as a paid or volunteer worker in a number of mental institutions. One of the specialties that I held in the USAF was in control tower operation and there I was stationed on one of the five bases where 'experimental‘ and 'secret‘ aircraft were permitted to land in their training runs. Unrelated to that fact, I think, but related to the bases I had numerous encounters with UFOs and sent planes in pursuit of them. Those stories would certainly be a different book but I have related them on the Internet. It was my present wife who got me into the area of computing science, and through the generosity of many employers and companies I was sent to many dozens of schools from which I received many dozens of certificates in that field. I eventually designed a microprocessor chip for which I received both U.S. and Canadian patents which I sold and received royalties. Another very long story – but I eventually bought back the patents because I wanted to have them produced in China for the Chinese. All of these again are irrelevancies because my reviewers want me to tell how I came to have the funds to build Ark Two. That story too would be too long to tell, but briefly I sold one of my research companies for fifty million dollars. The day that I went to pick up the check I had a hundred dollar bill in my billfold, so I took it out and put it in the orange folder inside my coat pocket in which I put the certified check so that I could say that at one time I had over fifty-million dollars in my pocket. That was when fifty million dollars was a lot of money. I eventually bought the company back, but I used the money to buy forty percent of the company that built the robotic arm that recovered the space shuttle Challenger. At that time I owned numerous interlocking corporations but it eventually all came to naught. There came a point where I owed 95 million dollars in taxes and the government foreclosed and took my office building. For eleven weeks after, all I had was eleven cents in my pocket. I kept looking at it wondering what I could do with eleven cents, and then one day my wife said that she was gathering money for groceries and asked if I had any money. She took the eleven cents. For the next seven weeks I had nothing in my pocket. Such has been the ups and down of my life. I started a magazine with seventy-five readers and when we closed it the last two print runs were over a hundred thousand each. We also printed a number of books. I don‘t know if hearing all this will make you feel any more confident, but this is my story and I am sticking to it. You can also look up about me on Wikipedia, which I found accurate in all its details except that it had me in the army instead of the Air Force. I am told some may not feel that a reliable source since it can be modified. For a more objective view about me you might read Dancing at Armageddon, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2002, which describes interviews with me on pages 219-234 under the pseudonym of 'Thomas Sands‘. It was written by Richard G. Mitchell, Jr., one of two PhD sociologists who came for several months from the University of Southern California to do a post-doctoral study. I asked why they spent so much time studying Ark Two, and he replied that while they had visited dozens of survival groups and had in their database hundreds, they considered me to be the Dean of North American Survivalists. People ask me why the author referred to me using the pseudonym of 'Thomas Sands‘ and I speculate that while I feel that he treated me fairly and favourably that the publishers did not want to be sued in case some of the other people in the book did not feel they had been treated as kindly. With all that I have said, I feel that there is one more thing that I must mention and that is about my education in economics. I had of course studied economics in a number of universities and had NUL Fellowships with both Chevron in California and IBM at their headquarters in Armonk, NY. In my affiliation with black colleges I was eventually led to an affiliate of one of them, Texas Christian University, which at that time was one of the five schools dedicated to institutional economics. I do feel that the paths through which all of us are led are Divinely guided, and I feel myself particularly blessed because this gave me an insight that I would not otherwise have had. Once again my dear devoted father came to fore and although he was older then, than I am now, he continued to work so that I could get my degree from that institution. He lived to 89 and my mother to 102. I should do so well.