One quiet September afternoon, my teenage cat Mags followed me down 55th Street to the beach, waited while I surfed, and joined me for a dollar hot dog on the walk home. At the time, it was simply another day. Looking back, it represents how uncomplicated life once felt.
I moved to Ocean City when I was twelve and left forty years later. Somewhere between 1984 and 2024 were house parties, friends, family, the Boardwalk, the Chatterbox, disappearing old houses and an island that slowly became a different kind of hometown.
It was almost Thanksgiving, and Brian was playing right guard for the Ocean City Hawks pee-wee football team. He was in sixth grade, about 12 years old, when we noticed he had developed a limp and was complaining about pain. At first, my wife and I figured it was probably football. Kids get banged up,…
Starting Over After Losing My Job Starting over after losing my job wasn’t something I expected to become familiar with. When I left Resorts after seven years, I thought I was moving into something bigger. Instead, the next stretch of my life included two lost jobs, a ruptured appendix, surgery, an infection, an FAA contract,…
My career in cybersecurity at Resorts Casino began in December 2015 when I arrived as a contractor. At the time, I was working through DSI and helping migrate Resorts from its on-premises Exchange environment to Office 365. I wasn’t hired as the Senior Security Analyst. I wasn’t even technically hired by Resorts yet.
Ocean City NJ in the 1990s was still a place where a bunch of young people working summer jobs could actually afford to rent houses. I’m talking about the early 1990s, before I knew my wife, when I was still dating my high school sweetheart, Krista. I was working at Voltaco’s, surfing when I could,…
In April 1989, four teenagers piled into a yellow VW bus and drove from Ocean City, New Jersey, to Pittsburgh for my first Grateful Dead concert. What followed was 48 hours of music, LSD, cold weather, Shakedown Street, a memorable blanket, and a trip I can still return to through a smell or a foggy morning.
William Hirst Shippingport history isn’t something I ever expected to find myself researching. For most of my life, William Hirst was simply my grandfather. I knew about his career in nuclear power and had heard the names Shippingport, Three Mile Island, Oyster Creek, and Admiral Hyman Rickover, but as a kid, those stories didn’t carry…
I was about fourteen and still in eighth grade in Ocean City, NJ, the first time I took acid. What started with a small gold-star tab became a summer of LSD, strange nights, and experiences I still remember decades later.
A name on a birth certificate should be one of the simplest facts about a person’s life. Mine became the starting point for uncovering aliases, family history, old letters, and a story about my parents that I didn’t discover until years later.
