Patrick McLaughlin:  

After graduating I spent 4 years in the USN as a shipboard electrician. Lived in Scotland for a year and a half. After the Navy I spent a few years custom building Induction Heating/forging equipment in Madison Hgts. For a few years I was with the Air National Guard at Selfridge as an electronics tech. It took a good amount of time to get the six months of electronics schooling. This was three months after I got married. Got married between terms at Lawrence Tech in Southfield (now Lawrence Univeristy where I was learning electronics in night school). I left the wife in Detroit while I concentrated on learning. Basic electronics was six weeks and the equivalent of a year in college. The rest of the time was learning and tearing into different systems. Each 'block' was anywhere from 5 to 10 days from start to finish. A few short months after completion, Michigan's economy tanked and I went federal active duty and was posted to the Mojave Desert for 3.5 years. Here I spent most of my time tearing into various communications and navigation g...Expand for more