“A child is born “, was how the telegram from my father announced my arrival to a disinterested world. Apparently, I was born in Cambridge UK, with no identity, sex, mother, or family to speak of. Nobody’s child. A minor omission in my father’s rush to announce my birth, somehow set me on my lifelong wandering, a gypsy’s path. No…
Years passed and inevitably, I developed a Dublin accent. Ireland had become my home. The U.K. was just a memory now. While studying and working as an articled clerk in an accountant’s office in Dublin, (at the tender age of twenty years), I purchased my first motorcycle – a Honda 90CC. I called it a motorcycle; others more critical called…
Photo: Original Grass Band members (mid-’60’s), LtoR; Alan Cullen (guitar & saxophone), Pete Cummins (guitar & flute), Tony Gannon (bass) & Sid Gray (drums). During the late 1960’s and 70’s, quite apart from Secondary school and later college, I spent many hours playing a plethora of cheap electric guitars with friends. I used to hang about music stores in Dublin,…
After several noisy days in New York city, I exited that city without regrets and took a Trailways bus south to New Jersey. Atlantic City’s tough reputation and gambling casinos were not for me. My destination was Wildwood – a coastal city with extensive beaches, a boardwalk, music, night clubs and tanned Jersey girls. Purely by chance, I secured a…
In spring 1976, I relocated south to Cork City. My mode of transport – a bright yellow, Ford Capri. Located on the picturesque south-eastern coast of Ireland – one hundred and sixty miles from Dublin, Cork is the second city in the Republic of Ireland. But don’t say that to the locals. Whereas Dublin undoubtedly has an Anglo-Irish atmosphere, the…
In October 1987, known in financial circles as the year of the big crash (long before the 2020 one), I travelled to New Delhi, India. From there, our small group from Ireland (Olivia Furlong, Derrick Gerrity, Maureen (my Irish wife), and I were driven to the hill stations in northern India. (It appears that the only girlfriends I could muster…
Photo: The disappearing snows of Mt. Kilimanjaro, as taken from our Ethiopian Airways flight from Arusha Tanzania. In September 1989, John Rahn and I decided to take another expedition, this time to Africa and climb Mount Kilimanjaro, Tanzania. Standing at 19,340 feet tall, it is that continent’s tallest mountain and during that season, trekkers throughout the world were celebrating the…
In 1992, alongside an Argentinian friend and cameraman Gonzalo Caparros, we unwittingly accelerated ourselves into Ecuador and Peru’s cholera epidemic. That year, the America’s were commemorating the 500th anniversary of the ‘discovery’ of that part of the world by Christopher Columbus. However, to give them credit, the indigenous people of that continent had been aware of its existence for countless…
My first visit to Kennedy Space Center was in July 1981. Maueen and I were set to be married that summer in Cocoa Beach, Florida. Several friends and family members from Ireland and Florida were vacationing there, then joining us for our wedding. It was a happy time. However, being the adventurous type and rather than hanging about the pool…
When I started working day one at the Kennedy Space Center, my supervisor in Delaware North did not know where to place me – or what precisely she should do with me. Perhaps I was an enigma, more likely an oddball. So true to form, Delaware North did what my wife Maureen had said earlier – they started me off…