I was born in Mineola, a Long Island suburb of New York City, on November 24, 1953, the first of four children to middle class parents. Two of America’s most notorious serial killers, Charles Starkweather and Ted Bundy, share my birthday. Not a good omen. I grew up in Williston Park, right next door, and from kindergarten to eighth grade was educated, as they say, in the Mineola school district. I had a happy, normal childhood when America, as insane as it was back then, was a thousand times saner than it is today. My parents were good people, and so are my siblings. What happened to me?
From the earliest age, I was curious about everything, especially what the world was like far from home. I remember discovering, in our attic, right after I had learned to read, some musty volumes published in the early twentieth century called “The Book of Knowledge.” I loved those books. Recognizing my inquisitive nature, my parents gave me the full set of the children’s “Golden Book Encyclopedia” for Christmas when I was six. For years I devoured them. When I was a little older, I often played the board game “Pirate and Traveler” with my friends. I was enchanted with the names of distant port cities on the board like Cape Town, Valparaiso, Brisbane and Godthaab (the capital of Greenland, now called Nuuk), never imagining that in the future I would visit all but the last. I also remember that I watched much less television than my parents, siblings and friends. I did have a few favorite shows in the sixties, but I was never glued to the screen, and rarely went to the movies. I watched less and less as time went on. In 2000 I took my television set out to the curb with the rest of the trash.
I breezed through elementary school. From first through sixth grade, we were all pretty much the same group of about fifty kids, with two different classrooms and teachers, but we all knew each other and socially it was a happy, healthy experience, like one big family, long before America became a multicultural dumpster. But year after year, the curriculum bored me. I became disruptive at times, shouting stupid answers to stupid questions, which angered my teachers. In fourth grade I was pulled out of class several times and made to endure closed door sessions with the school psychologist, a bald robot who had a creepy fascination for me, though he never did anything weird. Looking back sixty years later, I still don’t know what it was all about. Today they’d want to pump me full of Ritalin.
In seventh and eighth grade, all students in the five elementary schools in the district were funneled into Mineola Junior High School. That was 1965-67, the last of the young and innocent years of my life, just before violent protests against the Vietnam War and destructive race riots wracked the nation, and I first sensed the old norms crumbling, and the counterculture of drugs, sexual license, degeneracy and subversion seeping in. From the standpoint of observing human behavior, particularly the need to conform, junior high was fascinating. But there were too many dirtbags and too much mediocrity there. I wanted something better, not four more years of this at Mineola High. Directly across the street from the junior high building was Chaminade, an all-boys Catholic high school which had, and still has, a reputation as one of the top academic institutions in the New York metro area. You had to take a tough entrance exam. I passed – one of the elite. But I quickly discovered that I was no longer the bright boy in class, but more like the middle of the pack, and I went downhill from there. And it was a whole different scene. Discipline, rules, jacket and tie every day, no long hair. Scholastically it was strenuous too, and if you couldn’t hack it you were out the door. But it was nice to be among guys who, on the whole, were two cuts above in intelligence and character, though there was a wide range of personalities. And we had a lot of fun, really. But looking back, I didn’t learn much.
All but one of our graduates went straight to college. I chose Lemoyne, a co-ed Catholic school in upstate Syracuse, for no particular reason, and majored in biology, also for no particular reason. I had no idea what I wanted to do in life. I hated Lemoyne and Syracuse, quickly decided that college wasn’t for me, and spent the rest of the semester majoring in ping-pong. I went home at Christmas break and never went back.
Through the 1970s I lived aimlessly, working at various menial jobs, going through a spiritual crisis and studying different religions, fishing a lot, taking several long hitchhiking trips around the U.S. and Canada, becoming an amateur league baseball umpire, returning to college again, this time Adelphi University, then dropping out again then returning again and finally graduating. Eventually I found satisfying employment as an oil truck driver which, being seasonal cold weather work, gave me more than half the year off, and through most of the 1980s I traveled the world on a shoestring budget in the summer months. I also became a voracious reader of books on all kinds of controversial topics. Nearly everything worth knowing I learned from my travels and independent reading.
In 1991 I married the wrong woman and paid for it with years of bitter divorce litigation, but not before twin children, a boy and a girl, were born to us three months premature, the culmination of a problem associated with the many vaccines I got before traveling to Third World countries in the 1980s. I’ve written about this in detail in the opening pages of my book Will Vaccines be the End of Us? We reached a settlement in 2002 and since then my life, though much changed, has been fairly normal. I also resumed my overseas travels, less frequently and of shorter duration than the trips I took in the eighties, though of course foreign travel has gone down the tubes with the Covid-19 hoax. After learning the dark, hidden truths about vaccines around 1990, I began researching the subject in my spare time, and started writing my book – a work in progress for more than ten years – in 2008.
I displayed musical talent at a young age, and as a boy dreamed of writing great symphonies. My parents thought I was a child prodigy. They were wrong. When I got older I realized I was just average on the instruments I played, and lacked the creative power it takes to compose classical music, as well as the kind of popular songs of the late sixties that still reach into my heart. I marvel at the gift some people have to write such sweet melodies. But even now I dream of doing something great, like dropping an atomic “truth” bomb on the whole vaccine superstructure. I’ll see what I can do.