Finding myself in the world of freight was not something I ever pictured growing up. I never even thought there was a business there to get in to. I grew up playing with my trucks and trains, the yellow metal Tonka trucks, a lot of them construction trucks, but one of the one I remember carrying around a lot was the yellow Ryder Tonka truck. Trains always fascinated me, I remember loving to watch them even while others around me were getting annoyed having to wait for them cross.
My interest always lay in other things, the stars where always something to look forward to seeing at night. The constant interest in studying the stars also led to a general interest in sciences. There was always a fascination in sciences in my head, looking at the world around me and wondering about things. I was constantly experimenting with items and just in awe with the nature around.
That curiosity did not limit itself with the natural sciences; there was also an interest in the social sciences. I didn’t realize it when I was younger, but there was also a deep interest in learning about history, mainly cultural and political. There were a lot of academic interests that I had.
Other than those academic interests, I always had these interests in the family activities that my dad always took us on. It seems as though we were always on the road to somewhere. Even if it was just driving around LA, we ventured through all the different parts of town. He loved to take the “shortcuts”, the scenic ways around. It was always better to drive around and see the view as compared to sitting in traffic.
We were always going somewhere, but one constant place we had to always go was the “Happiest Place on Earth”. We were always taking visitors to Disneyland; I just think it was an excuse to for him to go. (I didn’t know it then but I found out later when I bought my first annual pass for myself, he had always had one. They still had his name on record and that was more than a decade after he bought his last one.) I don’t need an excuse like visitors to go to Disneyland, luckily there are just always reasons to go besides out-of-towners.
The love for the scenic areas of this country comes from the trips all over. The times camping in the Sequoias, the numerous drives to visit my aunt and uncle in the Bay Area using the 5, 101 or even PCH, like I said he used all the different ways to get around. The most scenic in my memories though, come from our first road trip across country. The Sedona, the Painted Dessert, Santa Fe all these images of the country and not even to Texas yet. Unfortunately, I have to skip Texas to get to one of my favorite spots, the I-10 with the view of the Gulf of Mexico on one side and the Bayou on the other and the cemeteries around New Orleans or just New Orleans in general.
Capturing images like this at that time were pretty restricted to my head. Eventually, it became a hobby to make them a permanent image. Using my father’s old A-1, I went around taking shots of anything that just caught my eye. I was of course limited by funds during high school, not being able to afford film or any of the chemicals to develop of my own. My pictures were limited to the assignments I had when I took a beginning photo class at the community college. To have digital photography back then.
The sciences and the love to see new places, led me to school in New York. I was going to go into chemical engineering, but I eventually ended up in the social sciences. I don’t think that would have happened anywhere else but New York. Being around the history of the city put that grain in my heart, Tammany Hall, Wall Street, 5 Points, all of these areas these areas that were around during the Revolutionary War, I ended up teaching the social sciences for 12 years. In those years, I also taught science so that never left me either.
But eventually that came to an end, I was surrounded by people who had had experiences of having other jobs and I was constantly listening to these stories, these experiences. I was getting fed up with the way the education world was headed and being part of a losing battle to try to make education better for the students was taking its toll. I decided to take break and an opportunity to take that step into something new came, it was Boa. I won’t be physically driving those trucks or trains, but the excitement of those trucks and trains passing by when I was a kid, or thinking about the places they have passed through, now comes back when thinking that some load on that truck could be a Boa load.
