Darrell McGuire:  

I was mostly known by my middle name Gene in high school. Definitely not Eugene! After graduation from high school, I attended classes at Arizona State in Tempe for a year (mostly because Mary Lou Jordan whom I secretly loved, adored and admired went there), then joined the Navy. I served five years as an aviation fire control technician in a fighter squadron aboard the USS Hancock and USS Coral Sea. I did some special work for the Navy, then left and worked as a Customer Engineer for IBM for a year or so, then as a senior radar technician for McDonnell Aircraft, where I got in lots of trouble with unions (but management loved me). Got outa there and went to Cape Canaveral to work on board a down-range instrumentation ship the USNS Gen. Hoyt S. Vandenberg - as instrumentation radar and microwave systems engineer for some 5 years on Atlantic and Pacific missile test ranges collecting signature data from our and USSR ICBMs and dodging Soviet destroyers and aircraft intent on stopping us from doing that. I returned to Arizona State University at Tempe in early 1970. Married Sylvia in 1973, while working for Motorola GED in Scottsdale. We moved to San Diego in 1974, where I was initiated into marketing as an applications engineer for Conic. I lasted a little over a year while figuring out that I knew virtually nothing about sales and marketing. Experimented for 3 years as a real estate salesman. That's where I learned what sales and marketing was all about. Then, with my new-found marketing knowledge and expertise, I joined Decom Systems Inc in 1979, where I stayed for 12 years as senior applications engineer and regional sales manager for telemetry products. Called away from there by one of my former associates, I set up the Sales and Marketing dept. for Berg Systems International, as national director of sales and applications engineering; continued on after company buyout with SBS Berg Telemetry Systems. 8 years later, I stomped out of the corporate environment to go home and retire and write my novel. But then ... After working for another 16 years as an independent manufacturer's sales representative selling high tech electronics products (telemetry components and systems, precision time and frequency systems, cesium and rubidium frequency standards, etc.) to commercial, military and aerospace accounts, I finally retired from the commercial world to continue (well start, really)...Expand for more