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After my parents married and had me, we lived in several places on the east coast and the deep south.
My father was a marine so his stationing seemed to change fairly often.  

They met in New York city where my mother (21) was working as a sales clerk in a department store and my father was a Marine (31).  

They lived, or visited, Philadelphia, where my grandfather, Thomas McGee, lived.  I have some pictures taken there when I was about 2, I think. In one picture, I am with my grandfather and in the other I am with my father.  I actually have faint memories of the building.

My father and I

My Grandfather and I

Later, we lived in North Carolina quite near the sea.  And then, later still, we lived in Montgomery, Alabama.  I was about 5 by then, Kindergarten age.  

By this time it is 1952 and I can remember various things.  I recall the ’52 election which Eisenhower won.  I remember asking my mother what they were talking about so much on the radio.

We lived in a duplex in Alabama and I recall that we liked the folks next door.  But, my parents were arguing though I don’t know about what.  And, just after Christmas in 1952, my mother packed some things and we left.  We got on a train that took us out to Los Angeles.  

I can remember bits and pieces of that train trip.  In particular, I can recall a whistle stop we made in Texas where we walked to a cafe (which I can still see in my mind’s eye) and I had my first pistachio ice cream and the man asking me if I’d ever had green ice cream before.

We arrived in SoCal and stayed with my mother’s half brother, Herbert Hofacker (aka Butch) (more about why he was a ‘half brother’ in story #2) and his wife (Coral) and two daughters; Holly and Terri.  They lived in the newly constructed city of Lakewood just beside Long Beach.

I grew up in Lakewood and Long Beach and things were chaotic for me until I was about 9 and in 4th grade.  

My mother, as a single woman with a child, found it hard going and so she boarded me out with various folks until she got herself better organized.  Some of these boardings, like with my Uncle’s family, were good and others were not. In one, I was sexually abused.  But, luckily for me, she had the good sense to pull me out of there as soon as I told her.  But by 4th grade, she settled down and then we lived together and I remained at the same school with my peers after that.

By then we lived in North Long Beach.  Those are the neighborhoods that I consider my ‘home turf’.  To this day, I belong to a ‘Born & Raised in Long Beach’ group on Facebook and I can visualize most of the streets there.

I was an intensely curious kid and I read a pile of books about all sorts of things then.

In 1960, my mother began to date Barney Kent whom she then married in 1961.  I liked him immensely and he really supported my interest in Science and Chemistry and got me setup with an amazing laboratory.  He was an executive for an oil field company named O’Mera & Rogers.  They turned out to be quite important to me years later.  

But, things were not good with Barney and my mom.  I never knew why.  But, by the time they split up, she’d become an alcoholic.  I was in 10th grade and 15 by then.

Things got rocky and she met a fellow who was a small-time Mafioso, named Hutch, from the east coast who had to move west to wait until some problem back east blew over.  And he was an alcoholic as well.  And they began to feed off their alcoholism together.

By the time 11th grade had begun, they’d decided to move to downtown Long Beach to be nearer the bar where Hutch was bar tending.  This idea I hated.  

I’d been with the same kids since 4th grade and this would require me to transfer to Poly; a tough and mostly black high school.  AND I’d met my first girlfriend, Sharon Freeman, at the beginning of 11th grade.  I considered all this to be a catastrophe of the first order.

I have a streak in me that only surfaces rarely.  But when I think something is wrong or terrible, I just won’t abide it.  And it arose now.  I call this my hard-edge.

By the time Hutch, my mother and I moved downtown, I’d realized that the only way I was going to be able to continue to attend my own high school and to still seeing my girlfriend, Sharon, was if I had money for the gas I would need to get myself back and forth the 7 miles or so between downtown and North Long Beach.

My mother had a small 25 caliber Beretta pistol.  I’m not sure why; but she’d had it forever.  I sat and thought for a long time about things and I finally decided that I’d commit armed robberies to get the money I needed.

And I did.  

Maybe six or seven.  They were well planned and took place miles from where I lived.  This got me the money I needed and I continued to commute to my high school, Jordan, out in north Long Beach.

About the same time, I fell into a bad crowd.  ‘Car clubs’, they called them then.  I told these guys what I’d been doing and soon some of them wanted ‘in’.  I think they saw me as the ‘brains of the gang’ sort of thing.

I took two of them out once or twice and then I decided I had enough money and I was going to lay off.

But the two of them wanted to go again even though I didn’t.  And they begged me to loan them the pistol.  And I gave in and loaned it to them.

That night they were caught.  

That was a nightmare come true.  I sat for a day or two waiting for the police to come knocking; as they traced my mother’s register pistol.  Finally, I broke down and told Hutch and my mother what was going on.

And the result was that Hutch, who had pull somehow, went downtown to the police and made the problem go away.  I never found out how.

So, things were OK again.  I still had the money I needed.  But then the next bomb fell.  

Sharon’t father was an aerospace engineer and he’d accepted a new job in Marietta, Georgia, and they were leaving in a week.  I was in love, as only a kid of 16 can be, and this was terrible.  After everything I’d done to stay in the same high school – and now she was leaving.

Once again, that hard-edge in me came out and I made some ‘new’ decisions. 

I decided that I was going to quit high school and get a factory job.  And then I would save my money all through the 2nd half of 11th grade (which I would miss) and through the following summer.  Then I would move to Marietta, Georgia, rent a garage and live in it and finish High School.  And then I would marry Sharon.

All that seems amazing naive now.  But, was what I decided.  And I was serious.

So I quit high school in 1964 just as the 2nd half of 11th grade began and I found a job in an industrial area called the Dominguez Hills where they didn’t ask a lot of questions.  Except for management, everyone there was either a Black from Compton or Watts or an illegal immigrant up from Mexico.  The factory made foam rubber.

I think the management there realized that my time might be short out on the factory floor, given I was a young white kid and with that mix of people.  So, they put me onto the small crew (of five) that ran the huge machine that made the form rubber.  It all involved lot’s of bad chemicals and serious noise.  But when you are 16 and think you are invincible – who cares?

I stuck it out and saved like 80% of my salary every paycheck.  I was still living with Hutch and my Mom but they were generally so drunk, they didn’t much care what I did.

The time passed and I was getting ready to quit towards the end of summer and make my move to Georgia, 

But then I got a ‘Dear John’ letter from Sharon.  She’d met someone and thought I shouldn’t come now.

I was stunned – what was I going to do now?

I had a good high school friend, Ron Johnson, who had followed all of my adventures.  He asked me if I would choose to go back to high school?  But I told him that I just couldn’t imagine doing that living in a house with a pair of alcoholics.  

He shared all of this with his mother, Maxine.  And she talked to me and said that they had a screened in shed in the back yard that had power.  And that I could live back there and finish high school, if I wanted to.  She offered to feed me a morning and an evening meal but that for lunch I was on my own.  And if I got into any sort of trouble back there – I was out.

It isn’t really claiming too much to say that Maxine literally saved my life with that offer.  

Before I quit, I had been in the accelerated classes for smart kids.  The school counselors now determined that if I came back and took the maximum class credits possible in my senior year, the I could ‘just’ manage to graduate with my class in 1965.

I took some of the money I’d saved and bought myself a nice 1955 two-door hardtop chevy (affordable but popular then).  

Before this, my life had been like a plane diving towards the ground with a likely crash ahead.  But Maxine’s intervention changed all of that.  And the plane of my life pulled up – and I had a future again.

My senior year was good and I graduated with my class.

After graduation, I had a year of going to the beach and shooting rivets building DC-8’s at McDonald-Douglas.  And then the Viet-Nam war came calling and threatened to draft me into the Army.

To avoid that, I, and three of my high school buddies; Ron Johnson, Elmer Davis and Bruce Ladd, all joined the Air Force in October of 1966.  And thus another adventure in my life began.

When I joined, I was quite patriotic.  If asked, I would have said, “Hell yes – lets go kick there asses.”

But two years into my four year enlistment, after a lot of reading the news, I’d changed my mind completely.  And I simply could not see why we were in Viet-Nam.

My speciality in the Air Force was as an “Auto-Tracking Radar Operator and Repairman”.  We were the folks who sat in radars on the ground in Viet-Nam and guided entire flights of B-52’s on their bombing missions to obliterate entire villages.  

In the radar’s bombing control room, I was literally the person who said to the bombers, “Five, Four, Three, Two, One – Drop!” 

Given the leverage inherent in the situation, I knew that if I was sent to View-Nam to do this work, I would certainly be responsible for the deaths of many, many people.

Most of my service time had been spent state-side conducting practice bombing runs with B-52 crews where I was stationed on a small radar site on Matagorda Island just off the Texas Coast.  

But finally, with about 10 months of my four year enlistment left to go, my luck ran out.  They wanted to send to me View-Nam for a six month tour .  

I was an excellent radar technician (top of my class)  and they’d sent me to extra training to learn about the newest version of their Auto-Track Radars.  And now I was scheduled to ship over with the very first of these new machines to go to Viet-Nam.

Again, the hard edge came out.   

I didn’t believe in their war and I had no intention of killing people for reasons that were, at best, opaque to me.  And I told them so.

I was, apparently, the first person in the Strategic Air Command to do this. And they decided that, if I stuck to what I was saying, then they were going to hang me from a very high tree as an example.  it would be a Court Martial, a Dishonorable Discharge and some hard labor Federal Prison time.  

I had acquired a young wife (20) by now.  I had married Rosemarie Diane Foss on 28Dec68 and I had young son, Daniel, born on 19Sep69.  Their desire to send me to View-Nam began in early 1970.

Thus began a long and tense game.  The new radar, I was to go over, with kept getting close to shipping.  But then, over and over, another technical glitch with it would postpone its shipping again.

The military’s rule was that they cannot hand you your orders until it is time to ship out.  And thus you cannot be accused of refusing your orders until they hand your orders to you.  

For months this went on.  Many of the folks at my base asked me why I thought I knew better than the President and the Government about the U.S’s foreign Policy.  But some were sympathetic.   No one actually took my side publicly, but several spoke to me privately. 

I thought that if the radar had not shipped by the time I only had six months left in the service, then they would remove me from the orders (which were for a six month deployment).  But I was wrong.  They really wanted to make an example of me.  So, they didn’t remove me from the orders until I had only four months left in the service.

I’ve always said that, without a doubt, I am one of the luckiest people I have ever met. 

So, in the end, I did not go to Viet-Nam and I got out of the military with an honorable discharge.

When I returned to Long Beach with my wife and child, I was surprised to find out that I had 5 years or seniority with McDonald-Douglas.  This because I’d quit them to join the military.  So, I stepped right back into a good paying job immediately.

My wife, Rose, Dan and I settled into Long Beach.  My mother had dumped Hutch by now and had mostly gotten a grip on her alcoholism.  Ron and Elmer also had returned from the service and our old friendships resumed.

After a year of shooting rivets on DC-10s, I began to remind myself that I had the G.I. Bill.  And that if I didn’t quit working and take advantage of it to go to university, then in 35 years, they’d give me a gold watch at Douglas and than that would be that.  Life over.

So one day, I quit and took my tools home.  I remember that day like it is engraved in my memory.  

And another entire new life began then for me.

I’d graduated from High School with a C- average.  I had never in my life ever studied.  In class, I either got it the first time I heard it – or I didn’t.  

But beginning University at The California State University at Long Beach was a new station in many ways.  I was motivated and on fire to learn then.  Prior to that, I’d been just coasting and reacting.

I buckled down and got serious.

Five years later, I graduated with honors getting a B.S. in Microbiology.

About half way through University, I visited O’Mera & Rogers looking for my former step-father, Bernard Kent.  But on the day I visited, I missed him.  

But another executive was there and we talked.  And when he found out I was studying Microbiology, he told me that his son. Albert Nichols M.D., was running a laboratory over in San Pedro and I should go and talk with him since I was looking for summer work.

I did. And I got a job washing laboratory glassware for the summer.  And this led onto many other things. And by the time I graduated University, I had a job waiting for me at the Nichols Institute for Endocrinology.

I did research chemistry there for nearly two years.  However, in the mean time, my attention had refocused itself elsewhere.   This was 1977 and computers were getting to be a big thing.  And ever since the first moment I’d encountered one, I’d been deeply hooked.  All through my senior year at University, I’d spent weekends and evening at the computer center teaching myself to program.

After two years at the Institute, I managed to talk the management into letting me making a lateral transfer and taking over control of their computer system which was used for data reduction.  Their previous computer person had just left.  After all my self studies, I was well equipped for the change.

That began my main career and most of my working life I’ve been a programmer.  I worked for Microsoft twice, Motorola twice and for quite a number of smaller firms.  I’m a restless person who likes new challenges, so I’ve never stayed in any specific job for more than four years.

By the early 80’s, my first marriage to Rose had ended. We’d had two sons by then,  Dan from 1969 and Chris from 1980.  

I was quite restless in my personal life as well.  And for several years I was involved with a number of open-relationships with multiple women.  A lot of poetry got written in those years.

In 1987, I began to get interested in one sort of political involvement.  

So, I signed up to go to the then Soviet Union on a Citizen Diplomacy mission with a group of Americans.  We toured Leningrad, Moscow and a number of other cities in Russia’s southern islamic areas for three weeks.  That trip and its insights were an eye-opener for me.. And, when I returned, I began to give speeches about my experiences to interested groups.  The trip’s purpose had been to promote direct citizen to citizen contact between the Russian and the American people.  

Not long afterwards, I organized and led a group in Irvine, California, to host a group of five Soviet citizens who came to the U.S., to see what our lives were like.  They were doing the reverse of what we’d done when we went over there.

This work led to another trip in 1988 which took me to Nicaragua on another three week trip  under the auspices of The Maryknoll Sisters to have a first hand look at the Sandinistas and Contras conflict.  Our group traveled in the back of pickup trucks and travelled through a lot of the back country.  We talked with people on both sides of the conflict and  I heard some really terrible stories from people there.

When I returned, I was deeply convinced that the U.S. and the Contras had the wrong, and the very unethical, end-of-the-stick.   And once again, I gave speeches to various groups about what I had seen.

About this time, in late 1988, I met Sharon Ann Ronsse; who was to be my second wife.  We lived together for a year seeing how things were and then we married on Dec 31st, 1989.

This began a marriage that lasted for nearly 20 years.  And for the last majority of that time, it was a marriage that I thought would be for life.  Sharon never had or wanted kids.  But, by then, that was fine with me.

Sharon and I decided to convert our Southern California corporate jobs into remote consulting positions. And that we’d then sell up our properties and move north to Washington State and make a new start.  One side effect was that my political involvements dropped away.

And thus, in early 1990, we found ourselves living in a nice house in a semi-rural area about 40 miles east of Downtown Seattle on 2.5 forested acres.  

I did remote consulting from Washington for nearly two years, as did Sharon.  But the specific part of the computer industry I’d been involved in was shrinking.  So, I quit and taught myself Windows programming and C & C++.  And as a result, I ended up working during the next ten years for Microsoft, Motorola and various other places that had offices in the area.  

Sharon also got over her previous career which had been selling hotel software to international five-star hotels and traveling a lot.  She switched her focus to our land and became very focused on horticulture.

By 1998, she was working at a wholesale nursery just outside of Monroe, Washington.   And towards the end of 1999, she came home one day and told me that the fellow who owned the 19 acre nursery she was working on had offered to sell it to us.  What did I think about buying it and having a business of our own?

That was an amazing idea for a computer programmer.  

But I like challenges.  And I am handy with tools and technology.  So, in the end, I said, “Yes”.

As 2000 began, we found ourselves owning a wholesale sale nursery with 52 green houses and tons of outside trees growing around them.

In a short time, I learned accounting, electrical, plumbing, greenhouse building, pipe laying, irrigation systems, tractor driving and a ton of other skills in short order.  Sharon handled ordering the stock and most of the selling.  We had three illegal Mexican workers that worked for us.  All wonderful people from farming areas in southern Mexico.

By 2002, it was obvious our business was going to do well.  We’d bought the house, on one acre, just beside the nursery so we had a one minute walk to work.  Later, we also acquired another 5 acres on the other side if the original 19, so now we had 25 acres. 

I like adventures.  So, in 2003/2004, I spent two months of the winter (when the nursery is closed) and I sailed, as a paying passenger, on a freighter from San Francisco to New Zealand and back.  

The ship, once it arrived in New Zealand, had two more ports to visit in Australia before it then returned to New Zealand and then sailed back to San Francisco.  

With the captain’s permission I left the ship in NZ and arranged to re-board it when it returned from Australia. This gave me two weeks free in which to tour New Zealand.

And I did.  I rented a camper van, learned to drive on the ‘other’ side of the road and I took off and circumnavigated the North Island going counter-clockwise.  I stayed mostly in beach camps as I went.  I spent Christmas in Wellington at the James Cook Hotel and New Years in Gisborne at a beach camp.

I wasn’t sure what to expect of New Zealand but I was curious.  And in fact, it knocked me out.  I loved it.

I wrote a journal of the entire trip which is here:  https://samadhisoft.com/travel-logs/voyage-to-new-zealand/

Upon return to the U.S., I didn’t think it was possible to immigrate to New Zealand because I was already  57 and I thought that would be too old (55 was the posted maximum for consideration).  

But then a year or so later, I realized that it was possible if we went about it a different way.  And I began talking to Sharon to interest her in the idea. After some resistance, she agreed that we should try it.  And we did.

And, in 2006, we were granted a two-year residence visa in New Zealand.  

This was possible because she was 9 years younger than me and she had a Masters Degree in International Business.  So, in this arrangement, I tagged along as the spouse of the main applicant.

The nursery was still going well for us and we decided that we wanted toehold off on selling it and moving until we’d converted our two-year visas into permanent good-for-life visas.  

Luckily, New Zealand had a rule that (1) if we bought a residence and kept it for our exclusive use and if (2) we each came to NZ and stayed in it for a minimum of two months each year, then we’d qualify for permanent visas in two years time.  

So, we opted to do it that way. It was beautiful.  This meant that we could continue to run our business and stack away money even as we gained our permanent visas.   

In August of 2006, we flew down together and bought an apartment in Christchurch and thus began the process of earning our permeant visas.

Over the next two years, we each went down twice separately while still maintaining everything in the U.S.   And at the end of Sharon’s 2nd visit in 2008, she went into the immigration offices and traded our two-year visas in for permanent ones.   Mission completed!

Sweet.  

But storm clouds were brewing.  

We’d been sure, with the success of our business, that when we were ready to sell it that we’d be able to get at least 2 million USD for it.  It was a thriving business.

But as 2008 moved towards 2009, the Global Financial Crisis hit and everything changed.   Our business went from being strong to limping along.  And the prospect of selling it looked weak in such an economy.

It was at this point that Sharon and I diverged on what to do about all of this.  

She wanted to hold onto our new permanent visas and to continue running the nursery until the U.S. economy recovered.  

I was 9 years older and I was in favor of selling now it for what we could get and moving.  

My argument was that we were entrepreneurial and creative and that once we arrived, we’d figure out how to create something new.

We could not agree on what to do and months passed in arguing.

Finally, in late 2009, I decided to ship some stuff to NZ and go down and hope that she would follow.  

I did not want to lose her but I also did not want to wait years for an economy that might or might not recover.

And so, I went.  And, still not able to agree, we ended up divorcing in 2012.  That was sad.

In the divorce, she got most of our net worth.  25 acres (19 of them free and clear), three houses, two tractors, all the stock and the business.

I got the NZ apartment (also free and clear by then) and about $10,000 dollars.

In 2009, I’d just turned 62 so I was now able to collect my U.S. Social Security. So, with an apartment paid off to live in and a steady income, I was solvent and could work or not – as I liked.

In the U.S., she had to work the business alone.  And things never did recover for her as she’s hoped.  And she lost quite a bit when she finally sold-up 7 or 8 year later after a long struggle.

So, New Zealand in 2009 was a new start for me.  And not one I was entirely happy about having thought we were moving there together.

Once settled in Christchurch, New Zealand, I established a set of friend who were, like me, recent American immigrants to NZ.  And I also got a job as a C++ programmer in early 2010 for a Christchurch company named SLI.  

As these early days in NZ passed and things remained tense between myself and Sharon back in the U.S., it got clear to me that things were not going to workout.  

Thus, I began meeting people through an on-line dating service.  After I met a number of people (about one a week for lunch to check each other out),  I met Colette.  

We liked each other and slowly began to date more seriously.

Then on September 4th, 2010, at 4:35 am, a 7.0 earthquake hit near Christchurch.  Amazingly, other than having nearly all of my furniture toppled over, my apartment was OK.  

I lived in a complex of 5 buildings and my apartment was 6 stories up one of the buildings.  There was substantial damage, however, around the city.

Then, on February 22, 2011, at 12:51 pm, another earthquake, a 6.3, hit directly under the city.  And this time my apartment, and all the buildings in my complex, were damaged beyond repair. Luckily, I was not home that day.

All the things that happened on that day to me and the other folks in Christchurch would easily make a small book.

It turned out that Colette’s house was not damaged and I was homeless.  

So, she generously offered that I could bring some of my things over and store them in her garage for a couple of weeks until I figured out what was next.

But, as the weeks of my being there passed, living together seemed to work well.  And so, by mutual agreement, I never left.  And it is now 14 years later – and I am still here 🙂

In 2012, my younger son, Chris, from my first marriage to Rose, went through a big breakup with his girlfriend back in the U.S. and I invited him to come down to NZ to clear his head for a bit.  He liked it and he stayed and he is still here..

In 2012, I flew to the U.S. and Sharon and I finalized our divorce.  

Also, in 2012, I quit my job with SLI.  They’d had a couple of interesting projects for me.  But then, when more mundane tasks followed, I realized I did n’t need the money, if the work wasn’t absorbing, so I decided to move on.

The years since then have been smooth.  Colette and I both like traveling and that has become a center point for us and our relationship.  Thus far, we’ve gone and stayed and explored in all the following cities over our years together.  

2013 – 4 months – Wellington, NZ
2013 – 3 months – Paris, France
2015 – 3 months – Montreal, Canada
2015 – 2 months – Vancouver, Canada
2015 – 1 month – Driving the West Coast of the USA
2017 – 1 month – Rome, Italy
2017 – 2 months – Nice, France
2017 – 1 week  – Valencia, Spain
2017 – 1 week  – Seville, Spain
2017 – 1 week  – Granada, Spain
2018 – 2 weeks  – Hong Kong
2019 – 1 month – Lisbon, Portugal
2019 – 1 month – Porto, Portugal
2019 – 1 month   – Copenhagen, Denmark
2019 – 1 month  – Oslo, Norway
2019 – 1 week  – Paris, France
2023 – 2 months – Stockholm, Sweden
2024 – 2 months – Toronto, Canada
2024 – 2 weeks – Driving Buffalo, NY to Irvine, CA
2025 – 5 weeks – Helsinki, Finland
2025 – 1 week – Aarhus, Denmark

Colette Ann Meehan was born on October 14th, 1954.  She was raised in Oamaru, NZ.  Oamaru is 245 km, or 152 miles, south of Christchurch down the South Island’s eastern coast.  

She is the eldest of four sisters.  Her parents were both Irish.  Indeed, her mother immigrated to NZ from Ireland.  

Colette was married earlier and has two sons, Jared and Jono, who are both, themselves, married and each have two children.  So, I have fallen in with a lovely family here.  They are all intelligent, successful and well educated people.  

Colette has a degree in English Literature and has worked for the NZ government in various capacities for most of her life.  After her divorce, she managed, by focus and grit, to pay off the mortgage on her house, raise both her sons well and to send them to the best schools in the city.  Focused, efficient and loving are the attributes I would use to describe her.