Ron Conley:  

Born in Temple, Texas. A native Texas kid who was transplanted around the U.S. at various locations from birth through college years, courtesy of two career parents. A father working for (then) Santa Fe Railway (now BNSF Railway) and a mother working as a career executive with AT&T (one of the first women to hold an executive position in AT&T's construction department in Illinois, in 1969). We started out in Texas, then we relocated to Kansas, and while there lived briefly went on to Colorado and California before landing back in Kansas. Then during junior high school we were relocated again to Illinois and there I remained until college started, and I could FINALLY go home to Texas (where I always wanted to be). During those early years I'd lived for short or long periods in Temple Texas, Galveston Texas, Texas City Texas, Topeka Kansas, Eldora Colorado, Los Angeles California, finally ending up in Woodridge Illinois. In Texas, over the years after high school, I lived in Abilene, Austin, San Antonio, Lubbock, Amarillo, North Richland Hills, Arlington (home of the Dallas Cowboys football team and the Texas Rangers baseball team), and finally came to rest (hopefully for good) in Mansfield Texas. I've worked in Abilene, Lubbock, Amarillo, Austin, San Antonio, Fort Worth, Dallas, Hurst, Corpus Christi, Tyler, El Paso, and lastly Mansfield. My father came off of a small family farm in West Texas, near Abilene, and my mom was out of the timber country in south Texas, near Houston. My family has been native Texans going back many generations, though tracing their roots back to the deep south before that, and then Virginia, going back (mostly) to Ireland and England. After finishing up at Abilene Christian University in Abilene Texas in 1972 I moved back home briefly to (by then) Tecumseh Kansas and studied at a trade school after college for computer science and computer programming. In college I'd studied as a Music major and Dramatic Arts minor, but by the end of college I realized I wouldn't be able to make a living in either. After college, for over three years, I briefly worked in the medical field, starting out in hospital administration with Abilene Memorial Hospital in Abilene Texas, but then moving on to work as an orderly and then a med-tech in such departments as surgery, ER, rehab, ICU, CCU, intermediate care, and almost every hospital department in between too with Amarillo Baptist Hospital, before finally landing in Lubbock at the Health Science Center hospital working as the department head for the transportation department there. But before long I (again) had moment of insight and realized I didn't have the heart for the medical field, since the deaths of patients I often worked with for months at a time simply affected me too greatly. So I moved back home to live with my parents in (then) Tecumseh Kansas and decided to attend trade school there, where in 1979 I graduated and immediately went to work for Tandy Electronics in Fort Worth Texas, working on the (new then) first Personal Computer ever to be truly mass produced for the general public, the old TRS-80s. In the years following Tandy I worked for other companies (all in the technology field) like GTE (General Telephone & Electronics), AT&T, IBM, BNSF Railway, The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), and Verizon Wireless. Starting out in 1979 as a computer programmer, over the yea...Expand for more