Have been teaching and/or performing many instruments and genre for fifty-two years. That's a bunch when you start at four or five years old. Following a successful classical music career, I moved back home and found myself starving. Teaching helped fill the time void, but Country Music put me back on my financial feet.

At some point, I guess wanting to rebel from a musical family, I wanted to be a Mechanic. Worked with an Alfa Romeo team mechanic for a while and opened my own sports car shop...."Maestro's". Mechanic's knowledge came in handy later delivering boats. Nothing like breaking down on the ocean at 3:00 AM with clogged fuel lines or hydraulic fluid leak.

Somewhere in there, I took a fancy to motorcycles, with the help of a good friend, I learned to ride and not kill myself. Put 80, 000 miles on a Honda 350 Scrambler and 20,000 miles on a Gold Wing. This brings me to a point, in the early '80s, where my motorcycle riding friend brought his Goldwing and new homemade sidecar by for a test drive. It was raining, but we went anyway. As we were heading for a major intersection, we realized that the unit was not going to stop. It was raining and it just wasn't possible to grip the front brake hard enough to displace the water and cause enough friction to bring the extra weight of the side car, to a halt. We went through the red light, unscathed.

As sometimes happens, necessity, adreinaline, and/or fear of death are/is the mother of invention, so I suggested that my friend drill some holes in the rotors to give the water someplace to drain to, plus the edges of the holes would scrape the pads dry. Being a machinist, my friend did this and the bike stopped on cue. Being a good friend, my friend said he would give me 50% of the profits from the patent and any money that was made from this idea. Unfortunately, my friend said that sometime afterward, before he could get anything off the ground with the idea, a BMW motorcycle shipment to his motorcycle shop included disc brake rotors with holes in them. So much for retiring to Hawaii. If anybody knows how BMW developed the idea of putting holes in their brake rotors or where they got the idea from, I'd be interested in knowing. This brings me back to selling my CDs.

Advancements in computers helped me to be able to record many songs that were continually requested over the years. In 2002, I recorded my first CD, Echoes Of A Honky Tonk Vol. I. Sales, one at a time quickly paid for all the costs of production and Licensing, so I recorded Vol. 2, a "Tribute To Willie Nelson" a year later. That album had similar success, and so on, until I had four CD Albums recorded Licensed and paid for.

There isn't much market for playing country swing in the NW, where I live, so I've been judging Karaoke contests (will save Karaoke in Hawaii for another entry). First prize has been really huge with 1st place prizes ranging from $500-1000 dollars. The finals have been really great. Getting to listen to so many wonderfully talented people has been a real pleasure.

That's about it for today, My Eyes feel like two friend eggs.
Cheers,
Wichita