Life Story
I was lucky to grow up on a small farm in Southeastern Ohio. It was a kind of idyllic childhood surrounded by fields and forests. When I graduated high school, I was looking for adventure, so I booked a one-way ticket to Anchorage, Alaska with vague ideas of making a fortune in the frontier. I discovered that the few thousand bucks I had saved from growing and selling melons wasn’t going to go far in the real world, and I started roughing it and hitch-hiking. A few months later I had made it as far as Mexico City when my money ran out and I headed home.
The seed that the trip had planted grew into years of adventures throughout the world, including working as a mountain guide in Peru and teaching English throughout East Asia and Latin America. In my mid-twenties, I met my wife Lancy and we moved back to Ohio. While looking for jobs I stumbled on an advertisement saying, “Tower Climbers Wanted.” I applied, and a few months later I got a call and a job offer. On the first day we climbed 400 feet in the air to change some bolts on an old tower, and I was hooked.
I spent the next 5 years travelling around the United States while building, repairing, and decommissioning cell towers and cell equipment. Eventually, the constant wear and tear on my body took its toll and I had to find something else to do for a living. Through a roundabout journey this led me to the insurance industry!
