Hard to believe it’s been 50 years. The gray hair, trifocals, and increasingly creaky joints suggest the math unfortunately checks out.
I didn’t make it for our senior year at TZ (did anyone even notice?). I left a year early to start college at SUNY Stony Brook, then headed to the Bronx for medical school at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. After graduating in 1984, I left New York for good and started moving west—first stopping in Dallas for a surgical internship at Parkland Hospital.
I enjoyed taking care of patients, but eventually realized that medicine wasn’t my long-term calling. With the stunning realization that my only real skill was…medicine, I decided to pivot and moved to Austin to attend law school at the University of Texas. From there I continued west to Santa Monica, joined a healthcare law firm in Los Angeles, and spent several years doing corporate and transactional work for healthcare clients. After that, I went in-house with one of those clients and went on to work with several healthcare companies in various business and operational roles.
About 25 years ago, I started a company that provides biospecimens to biotech, pharma, and diagnostics companies for early-stage research. I still own and operate it, with plans to sell and semi-retire in the near future.
I now live in Orange County, California with my wife, two dogs, and a cat. My wife is an estate planning attorney—I met her during her first year of law school when she spent the summer at the firm where I was working. Our older son went to college in Puget Sound, Washington, where he played baseball. Each spring, my wife and I packed up the dogs and cat and rented a house nearby so we could watch him play. He’s now in his first year of chiropractic school near St. Louis. Our younger son will graduate this spring from UNC Charlotte. For two fall seasons, we drove cross-country with the dogs and cat and rented a house in Charlotte for a month.
My wife and I have now been to all 50 states. The dogs and cat have made it to 32—clearly slacking.
I’m really looking forward to catching up with fellow TZ classmates and seeing the house in Blauvelt where I grew up.