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I was born April 1978 into a
loving lower middle class family. My parents married
young and had my older brother before they were
finished with college. My father quickly finished,
but my mother had to quit in order to take care of my
brother. Two years later I was born. Growing up we
didn’t have a lot of extra money, but we did have an
abundance of love that comes with a close-knit
family. When I was 6 mom had another boy and I was no
longer the baby, but the middle child. Some say that
the middle child gets left out, but that wasn’t the
case in our home. We grew up in the North with cold,
white winters, but moved south before my junior year
of high school. During high school I ran cross
country, played basketball, and football. I was a
member of many clubs and extra-curricular activities,
but I was most active in Future Business Leaders of
America. My senior year I was our local Vice
President and the State Reporter, which enabled me to
travel all over the United States while attending
conferences.
I moved
to Florida for my first two years of college,
attending a small private school. With the strict
rules, it wasn’t much different than high school, but
it did wonders for my grade point average. After two
years there, I moved back home and got an apartment
with my older brother. It was nice to live with him
again and we were even studying the same thing, civil
engineering. When we were growing up our father was
very mechanically inclined and got both of us
interested in building, while teaching us that hard
work was necessary to achieve your goals. My brother
graduated and moved away for work, but not before
introducing me to one of his good friends, my future
wife. They met and became good friends at the same
junior college I attended. It didn’t take long to
realize that she was the one and we married before I
finished school. My last year in school, I was the
team leader for my school’s concrete canoe team. I
know what you’re asking yourself, so yes, it floats
(that’s always the 1st question). It was a
national engineering competition in which you had to
build a canoe out of concrete and race it against
other schools. It was stressful balancing the canoe,
school, work, and a new wife, but my drive, support at
home and faith in God got me through it and made me
stronger.
Upon
graduating, we moved again and I am now working for a
general contractor building apartment complexes and
condos. I feel blessed to be able to do “what I
wanted to be when I grow up.” My older brother lives
about 10 minutes from us and my younger brother is
just starting medical school. All of us are married
now, but we still remain close and get together as
often as we can.
-Chad- |
