Quick Summary of My Life

IT'S NOT WHO YOU ARE...... IT'S WHAT YOU DRIVE!
[ Nobody really cares who you are anyway ]

On the plane ride over to the United States from my birthplace, Israel, I met a gentleman who said he could tell me all about America. But being an impatient 8 year old, I told him I didn't have much time, could he do it in about a minute or so. He said he could.
He told me that..... "Americans buy things they don't need, with money they don't have, to impress people they don't like......". I thought that was pretty cool. Forty years later, I still do. This is, by far, the greatest country that has ever been on the face of the earth. I feel extremely fortunate to live in California as well. I use the whole state as I live in Silicon Valley, and work 400 miles away in Southern Cali. I commute every day via Southwest Airlines. I get up at 5:00 am, read the paper, have breakfast, leave the house at 6:10 am, arrive at a parking spot at San Jose airport at 6:27 [ it's 20 miles from my house... do the math ], then I go to the Clear Counter, get through security by 6:33 and at my gate by 6:38 for my 6:45 flight so we can push back "5 early", a Southwest Airlines term for leaving 5 minutes earlier than scheduled if everyone is on board. I'm at work by 8:00 am as our plant is 2 miles from the airport.
I'm a hard core car guy through and through. My mom says I liked cars from birth...... making car sounds and pointing and looking at them. Nothing has changed, although now I keep the car sounds to a low volume and I don't point as much in public.
I hated school, and left High School early, 1 week before my 17th birthday, so technically I was 16 but had spent 3 years and 3 summers of work credits to get out of there. I then went through a series of jobs and kept getting fired from each one of them. I went gold mining in the Sierra's and learned to live on Top Ramen, freshly caught trout and river water for weeks at a time. There's a great diet in there somewhere as I ended up weighing a lot less than when I started. So I tried Junior College, but that seemed like High School, so I enrolled and got accepted at UC Davis [ there's a whole 'nother story on how I got in there ]. I spent 2 quarters in Davis, switched to UC Berkeley, lasted about 9 weeks and then set off on a temporary career of securing and losing jobs. I went back to the mountains to look for gold....... again. One day, literally hours before we were going to starve to death, a guy walked into our camp and offered to buy our home made dredge right then and there, on the spot, for cash money! We took the money and went into town and had a steak dinner. I still remember how good that steak tasted.
So my buddy and I started a Gold Dredge building business. Gold at the time had just topped $700 per ounce, the economy was in the dumps, and we were building dredges 20 hours a day. We couldn't keep up. Sometimes customers came in looking for their dredge, and when they found out that it wasn't finished yet, we would show them the tools and tell them how to finish building it. Hysterical, really when you think of the liability alone. OSHA? Are you kidding me? Anyway, that lasted about a year, after which everyone and their brother got into the dredge building business, and gold dropped, and people realized that, in fact, there was no gold in them thar hills 'cause the 49'rs got it all, so we sold off everything and cashed in. We had $52,000 in cash. I got $26,000 of it. This is 1980 or 1981. That was a lot of money for a 20 year old. It's the equivalent of maybe $50,000 today. If I recall correctly it lasted me 6 months or less. Then it was all gone. But it felt good. I mean it felt really good. One of the things I ended up with was a 1967 Camaro convertible that I dragged home. It was a 6 cylinder automatic and I built it into a V8 4 Speed car. I remember buying 6 large vinyl spray cans with black paint and spray painting the interior black from whatever it was, light blue? On hot days you couldn't drive the car wearing light colored clothes..... My brother and I strapped 2 giant home speakers into where the back seats should have been......... and, I still have the original stereo deck that I bought for the car, a Concord HPL 350. It's on a shelf in my garage right now. How many people can say that they still have their original car stereo? What a neat car that was!
So then it was back to finding work. I finally landed a job where I didn't get fired right away and so I started looking for something to do to make "real" money. That something was a product we called Nyla Braid, a sleeving that went over automotive hoses for decorative purposes. Of course, to start the company I had to sell my Camaro. Bummer. But guess what? The stuff sold. It sold really well [ I told you this is a great country! ]. We sold $1MM our first year, and ended up with $28,000 in cash, so I did what any sensible business person would do. I borrowed $2,000 and bought a Ferrari for $30K. I still have that very car today also, even though I sold it once and it went through 5 other owners before I got it back. It's almost as cool as a 1967 Camaro convertible with a tacky interior.
That was 25 years ago. Now I'm very happily married [ and no, she didn't make me say that and if you knew her at all you would agree with me that I got the better end of that deal by a long shot ]. We have 2 boys and a son [ that 3rd one was supposed to be the girl ]. All three are into stick and ball sports, not really into cars. They are awesome kids and I feel extremely blessed to have such a wonderful family; happy, healthy and humorous.

Thanks,
Amir Rosenbaum #86