Wo is Me

I began writing as something to do after retiring at 75, following fifteen years of consulting to client companies in the US, Germany and Denmark, but mostly in Japan. Whenever I describe an experience I had or tell a story I heard before a glowing fireplace while growing up in Alabama, folks urge me to write a book. It is not the first time I have been encouraged to write for publication. When a student at William and Mary, my English and German professors urged me to submit for publication papers written in response to some of their assignments. I was more interested in returning to the Arctic where I could apply my skills in radio communications, knowing such a service would be useful and lifesaving to Inuit and Settlers served by 5 Moravian Missions on the Labrador coast. That is what Connie, my wife, and I did, under contract to the British Board of the Moravian Missions. With Connie pregnant for the first time in five years of marriage, and with more accomplished than my contracted goals, we left Labrador after one year, bringing along our adopted Eskimo orphan, Lisabak.Until age 60, I held positions of research engineer to company president and was involved in development of products ranging from television, to a computer for enciphering voice, to one for use in Continental Air Defense, and another for use in the search for petroleum by converting geophysicists' taped recordings into a picture of the earth's strata, to telemetry used in NASA Space exploration, to medical equipment used to aid in diagnosis and treatment of certain conditions in patients. I worked in the US, UK, Iceland, France, Germany, Holland, Algeria and Japan. I know executives who retired early, but that was not my ambition. I left a NYSE-listed company as VP of Finance and Development at the age of sixty and formed OWA, my initials as written in Japan. (In Kanji it means "Imperial Harmony").The first year I signed contracts with fourteen companies that paid quarterl