I am the oldest of two sons born to an ordained Protestant-minister father and a college-educated mother in the late 1950s in Allentown, Pennsylvania. I was a big-city kid for most of my youth, but frequent visits to the Allentown city parks and weekend excursions to the countryside and Pocono Mountains allowed me to discover that I had a natural passion for the great outdoors. At the age of 12, the first celebrated Earth Day in 1970 and the highly-visible environmental movement at that time impressed upon me that I had a personal obligation to improve the natural environment. From that moment on, I knew I wanted a life working with natural resources, and by ninth grade I had decided to become a forester specifically.

The untimely death of my father when I was 8 years old, being of the working class and being raised in a single-working-mother household before it was a social norm, built my character and forged my independent spirit, entrepreneurial drive and my will to never quit. Like most middle-class families of that day, if I as a kid wanted money, it was my responsibility to do lots of chores for a small cash allowance or find outside work such as a paper route, cutting lawns, shoveling snow, etc.. That youthful initiative and work ethic has carried me into my profession today. I am determined to accomplish the timber sale goals and forest management objectives of my clients.

I am a proud 1981 BSF graduate of West Virginia University with a major in Forest Resource Management and a proud alumni of Penn State’s Mont Alto Campus. I am married and have two grown daughters.