Similar to many, after graduating from Livingston High School, I went directly to college (Fairleigh Dickinson University) and eventually to Seton Hall University to achieve a Masters in Taxation. I met my future wife, Louann, in my junior year of college, and we were married in 1983. We had three sons who have grown to be amazing men and fathers. We now have five grandchildren (three boys and two girls) with another little girl due in July of this year. And we are sure that my youngest son will not wait too long to try for his second child. While it is surely a whirlwind, it is also absolutely amazing. My oldest also had three sons and I am hoping I can coach them all as I did my boys when they were young. I ended up coaching football for a total of 21 years both at the 8^th grade level for Berkeley Heights and then assisting at the High School level and was fortunate to coach all three of my sons at all levels and even got to be on the sidelines with my oldest two playing Varsity football together. As you can imagine, that was an absolute thrill!

I recently was “retired” at my place of employment as their VP of Tax at Prudential’s PGIM Real Estate specializing in Real Estate Investment Trust taxation and planning. It kind of felt like I was being put out to pasture when the Company discussed retirement with me and that our 1977 graduation from Livingston High School continually moves further into the rear-view mirror. While I was not expecting my retirement to arrive as early as it did, my wife and I are already enjoying this next chapter.

But let me go back to the more interesting times after graduating from LHS. In college, I decided to quit trying to play football and instead started bodybuilding in a small gym in Bloomfield, New Jersey and fell in love with the sport. I competed in six separate bodybuilding shows ranging from Teenage Mr. New Jersey up until I was 23, taking third place in Mr. East Coast and qualifying for the US Nationals. I loved it so much that I drove across the country to experience Santa Monica, California and to train in both Gold’s Gym and World Gym. While I was in Louisville, Kentucky I got the chance to work out for a few days with Porter Cortrell, who was Mr. Universe. I ended up cutting my California move short to come home to my girlfriend at the time who is now my wife for over 42 years.

As I mentioned above, Louann and I met back in college while in the same class and found out that our parents grew up together on the same street in Newark, New Jersey and were friends as kids. We have a remarkably close and rather big Italian family with “many cousins”. As a result, this all comes with growing up with many family traditions. One interesting tradition is that my parents started going to Wild Wood Crest, New Jersey each summer when I was just five years old and within a couple of years, this grew into having about 70 to 100 cousins, Uncles, Aunts and their families joining the same week at the same hotel. The amazing fact of this is that it continues still to this day with all the newest generation picking up the torch to keep this tradition a yearly reality. While you may think it could be crazy trying to coordinate activities on such a vacation, but we actually all do our own things without any pressures, but we make sure we have “family” get togethers during the week and of course it’s a sight to see when all of us end up at the beach sitting together in one large group. We even have a tradition on the Wednesday early evening every year here coordinating a treasure hunt for all the kids to participate in with pirate maps and all. The result is them digging for a buried treasure chest containing all gifts labeled for each child. We even have one of my cousins dressing up as a Pirate to read each clue that leads them all over the beach to the eventual treasure find. One of the pictures I included is from a local newspaper in Wildwood that called our hotel owner as they heard about our vacation tradition and the number of people that come each year and they ended up putting a story and picture in the paper highlighting our family and our love for Wildwood Crest.

My wife and I are very newly retired and we are still feeling it out and hoping we can start to travel a bit more as we love trips to Italy the most. We have been to numerous places in Italy over the last 10 years but now hope to plan our next trip in the Italy regions of Puglia and Sardinia. We also recently took our entire family to Disney as we strive to spend as much time as we can with our kids and our grandchildren since we no longer need to be on that work grind each and every day.

I want to thank Michael Hauser for all he does for our LHS class and everyone that takes the time to read my Classmate Spotlight story. I truly hope to see you at our 50^th High School Reunion!