I now have an 18-year-old daughter who is remarkably gifted but who, thank God, has had the good sense to use her gifts far more productively than I did during the same stage in life. She is a straight A student in an extremely challenging International Baccalaureate program and is the President of her senior class (Editor's Note: Brittany is now an Ivy League freshman at the University of Pennsylvania). She plays musical instruments, is fluent in French, writes poetry and is so motivated to succeed that she will undoubtedly surpass anything I have ever accomplished (and will probably do it before her 21^st birthday)! I take some pride in this because I figure her motivation may have come from watching me keep my full potential at arm’s length for so long. Surely I did her a favor by providing the kind of role model she should avoid! 

Since I was busy majoring in girls, sports and soul music, I entered my senior year still not having a clue what I wanted to be or where I wanted to go when I graduated. I was playing baseball that last season and the local radio station broadcast many of our games (in a town of 15,000 compelling programming was obviously hard to come by)! When I had a good game, the play-by-play man, Bob Buchanan, would interview me after the game. I got to know him as a result and he asked me where I was going to college. I told him I didn’t know where or for that matter even if! He suggested I look at his alma mater, Eastern Kentucky University, where he knew the baseball coach and would put in a word for me. However most of us Buckeyes believed that people living south of the Ohio River were all “hillbillies” so there was no way I was going to consider that! Very twisted logic when you consider that our little rural town was not so cosmopolitan that anyone would confuse it with say Paris or New York (or even Omaha for that matter). 

Buchanan (obviously knowing a man of the world when he saw one) accepted my reasoning, though the fact that I wasn’t that good a player to begin with probably had more to do with his willingness to drop the idea. However, determined to help me sidestep a career on the back of a garbage truck, he later told me I had a good voice and wondered if I would be interested in pursuing a career in broadcasting. A light bulb immediately went off in my head and I thought, “That sounds right up my alley. Minimal work with a massive paycheck!” Little did I know that small market broadcasters were paid about the same as those guys you see picking up tin cans along roadsides. 

Buchanan referred me to a new broadcasting school in Columbus (in those days very few colleges had degree programs in broadcasting). I enrolled there the next fall and managed to skate through (after all this isn’t brain surgery we’re talking about) and finished in the top 3 in my class. As soon as I got out, Bob’s station in my hometown, WDLR (a tiny 500-watt AM outlet whose signal faded away as soon as you left the parking lot), offered me a job. So I went to work as the station’s News Director, afternoon DJ and  play-by-play man for local high school and college sports. Wearing all of those hats meant they had to pay me some big money - $100 a week! When I arrived, Buchanan took the opportunity to move over to the Sales Department where you could actually make a living!  

Unfortunately I was on the job less than a year before the draft board came calling. The Viet Nam war was going full bore and the military needed more young men ready for jungle warfare. My fighting skills had been limited to outwrestling old girlfriends when I wanted my class ring back, but that was apparently good enough for the draft board! 

I soon found myself in Augusta, Georgia going through basic training at Fort Gordon. After a battery of intelligence testing there, the Army said they were willing to send me to Officers Candidate School. However since a lot of the guys getting shot up in Nam were young lieutenants fresh out of OCS, I declined and said I would prefer to serve out my two years as an enlisted man. Fortunately they didn’t hold it against me and after basic I was assigned to a plum position in the Fort’s press office. We spent our days recording radio shows and writing articles for the post newspaper (which incidentally won awards as the best military paper in the U.S. during those years). We had a very talented group of reporters including a young Syracuse University graduate named Steve Kroft. Today Americans know him as one of the key anchors on the long-running CBS news program 60 Minutes. 

I was one of the lucky few that were never sent to Southeast Asia and as my service term was coming to a close the Army offered to let soldiers out 90 days early if they went back to school. Spending those 3 months on campus sounded a lot better to me than being on an Army base, so I enrolled at Ohio State and put my military fatigues in permanent storage (though I am proud to say the Viet Cong never made a single successful raid on Georgia during my watch)!  

I majored in journalism at OSU and it was smooth sailing because I had already been working professionally in the field both as a civilian and in the service. What wasn’t so easy was readjusting to those Ohio winters!  After spending two years in the sunny South, I decided that as soon as I got out of school I had to get back across the Mason Dixon line before I froze to death. I even overshot Georgia by several hundred miles and landed in the Sarasota-Bradenton area on Florida’s beautiful west coast. I took a job there as a radio DJ with a company that also owned a new TV station. Again the money was horrible. I had been offered twice as much to take a radio job in Pennsylvania but the climate trumped the money and I saw this as a chance to make the jump from radio to TV.    

All of the sudden there was no money in the budget to do the things we had always done. The workplace environment at this once dominating station went sour and it was clearly time to move on. Fortunately, I had paid attention to the trouble brewing and had opened a local record store and music mail order business a year before leaving the TV station. It quickly took off, making it much easier to start a new career and get reacquainted with music which had been a longtime love.

By the year 2000, thousands of independent music stores had closed their doors around the nation. I joined the crowd that year myself, shutting down a retail operation that had been a cash machine for 12 years. I limped along for a couple more years selling only on the web, but the party was over and it was time for this entrepreneur to start looking for a new line of work.

My plunge into a third career in the domain business is detailed in a magazine article from 2003. By the grace of God I have always had the good fortune to work at something I love to do and domains have been no different. As much as I enjoyed broadcasting and music, there are times I feel that domains are what I was really born to do. I love language, computers, the internet (and making money) and this industry combines them all!   

The business even gave me the opportunity to keep my journalistic skills sharp by establishing a trade magazine for the industry, Domain Name Journal at DNJournal.com. Better yet, the people I cover today aren’t nearly as obnoxious as some of those athletes were (though I am not going to mention Johnny Bench by name). The site exists because soon after entering the industry I realized it did not have a trade magazine of its own. In radio/TV we had Broadcasting magazine, in music we had Billboard, in domains we had - nothing. So I decided to set about fixing that situation, also anticipating that it would help jump start my own late entry into the field by bringing me into contact with a lot of the key players in the business.  

Thanks to the support of a lot of great people who have been generous with their time and advice, it has worked out far better than I could have hoped when I started the publication on Jan. 1, 2003. DNJournal.com is now the source mainstream media turns to when domain news is breaking. The site has been featured in Newsweek, USA Today, the New York Times, MSNBC, the Boston Herald, Arizona Republic and many other publications. The information we have been able to provide in the magazine appears there only because of the remarkable cooperation we have received from the leading companies and knowledgeable individuals in this industry. They recognized what we were trying to do and rallied around the flag to help us pull it off. I truly appreciate each and every one that helped make it work. 

My company, Internet Edge, Inc. is also involved in developing websites on other topics, as well as domain investment, monetization and sales. I Thank God for the opportunity because I can't imagine a more exciting workplace than the web!