About
About Me - Author's Motivation
I grew up in Solvay, New York, a factory village built on soda ash and immigrant stubbornness, and I never quite left it even after I did.
That's the thing about a place like Solvay. It links you. The smokestacks, the numbered streets, the people who stayed and the ones who scattered -- they all keep showing up in ways you don't expect. In other people's stories. In your own. In the space between what happened and what it meant.
The Linkatarian.com is my attempt to follow those links wherever they lead.
I call it a Singularium -- a repository of individual connections. Each story here is a single link in a longer chain. Ernest Solvay's Belgian philosophy inside a New York factory town. A grandmother's hands and a railroad death and a grandson born decades later asking why. A paperboy's route down a street that no longer looks the same, remembered by a man old enough to know what was lost.
None of it is random. That's the point.
History isn't a collection of isolated events, and a life isn't a series of coincidences.
When you trace the lines carefully enough -- between people, between places, between generations -- you find something underneath.
A pattern. A message. Call it meaning, if you want.
I've worked the floor of a soda ash factory for thirteen years and held public office, served in uniform and spent the better part of a career helping people figure out what they were meant to do next.
The factory came first -- the Solvay plant, shift work, the kind of labor that teaches you things a classroom never could.
Real estate followed, and that taught me something different. Every person who ever sat across a table from me wanting a home was really after the same thing -- a place to recharge, to make memories, to be still long enough to hear themselves think. A shelter in the literal sense, but also in the deeper one.
Then came the master's degree and a seat at Florida International University in Miami, where I sat with students and helped them look inward before they looked outward -- toward the natural inclinations and internal drives already pointing them toward a major, a career, a way of applying themselves to the world.
That same thread followed me into the IRS in Laguna Niguel, then across the country through the Federal Highway Administration, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, the National Guard Bureau, and finally the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
The agencies changed. The mission didn't.
Everywhere I landed I was doing the same work -- measuring needs, tracking results, building learning programs, and trying to help people recognize and develop the instinctual ways they were already wired to contribute.
What I found inside those agencies was the full range of what human beings are capable of -- the people who lifted the mission and the ones who quietly buried it.
Personal agendas, misread policy, management layers that drained more energy than they produced, and occasionally something darker underneath.
But in agency after agency, the overwhelming majority of people were there for the same reasons the rest of us get up in the morning.
They wanted to do something worthwhile. They wanted to grow. They wanted what we all want -- a life that means something beyond the paycheck.
That's the current that runs through everything on this site.
What I'm after here is the local made universal. The specific made legible. The thing that happened in one particular place to one particular family, and why it turns out to matter beyond the county line.
Come in and follow the links. See where they take you.