Mike Myers:  

I assume those of you who are reading this are my former classmates. Those of you from Canyon knew me as a very wild child probably destined for trouble. Those of you from Newbury Park knew me as “Tex”, a little bit of a wild child, though not quite as bad. Hardly anyone knew me from Amarillo High because I only went a half day and worked the other half. By my senior I was a pretty devout Evangelical Christian and by the time I graduated I had joined the Army. This is the abbreviated rest of the story. The Army did not work out for me. The job I selected required a pretty high-level security clearance because it involved launching nuclear missiles at the Russians from Germany. I wasn’t aware of this at the time, but there was an incident in late 1983 in which the Russians thought that we had launched these missiles at them during one of our drills, their global missile commander was order to immediately retaliate, i.e. end the of the world as we knew it, but the general refused to believe it. As we all now know, the US did not launch any missiles and so their general was correct not to retaliate. However, given the close call and the close proximity of these missiles causing the Russian to be on a hair-trigger, President Reagan ordered the Army to remove those missiles from West Germany and there goes my job. The Army just told to me that they canceled my security clearance because of my juvenile record and wanted me to take a job I did not want. So I chose a Trainee Discharge instead, which basically means I was never there – no military record, but I did feel extremely guilty for leaving my fellow troops. Afterwards I had some basic go-nowhere type jobs. For a semester in 1984 I attended Amarillo College (in Electronics), joined Sigma Alpha Delta and joined the Student Government Council, which was too much to handle on top of having a job. In late 1985 I was given the opportunity to buy a company called Golden Eagle Gourmet Foods. From a customer’s perspective this was a very real business but legally speaking it wasn’t at all. It had 2 trucks/territories spanning the entire Texas panhandle down to Abilene, so I had to salespeople, a secretary and myself. I went back to Amarillo College to learn Business and Accounting, and did my own bookkeeping and purchasing. The gourmet food market ended up taking a nosedive during the 1986 oil and S&L crisis which devastated Texas. Shortly after that failure I met Kim Noyse (CHS class of 1985), got married and we moved to Los Angeles where my career as a Cost Accountant in Manufacturing got started. It continued in that path until 2012. Along the way I picked up various IT skills and for many years I wore two hats, one in Finance and one in IT. Relationship wise, Kim and I lasted about 11 years with no kids. We were still having too much fun with life a...Expand for more