Well, this is where you'll find out a little about me, about my life, the places I've lived, my interests and my passions.

I was born on April 12, 1954 in the town of Norwood Massachusetts just outside Boston. I was actually born on the day that Bill Haley and the Comets recorded We're Gonna Rock Around The Clock for Decca records. A year later, thanks in part to the fact that the song was used in the movie Blackboard Jungle, it became a huge hit. I always tell people that I am a true rock and roll baby, and this is why I have such an intense interest in fifties rhythm and blues, doo-wop and rock and roll music.

I'm sure there will be a lot of songs from that era and a lot of discussion about this era of music on this "AUDIOLDIES" website.

I attended the Perkins School for the blind in Watertown Massachusetts, first as a day student, but eventually I stayed at the school through the week and came home only on weekends. In February of 1960, my sister Christina was born, and in 1961 because our original house in Norwood had only two bedrooms, we moved to the next town of East Walpole.

In 1965, we moved to the Burlington Vermont area, and settled in the town of Shelburne just eight miles south of Burlington. The town is famous for the Shelburne Museum which specializes in 18th and 19th century furniture, dolls, carved indians and other interesting New England artifacts.

In September of 1970 at the beginning of my junior year of high school, I switched to the Oak Hill School for the Blind in Hartford Connecticut. I really enjoyed the experience of attending that school, because the attitude of the staff was much more friendly and relaxed than at Perkins, and I made many wonderful friends there.

For six weeks in the summer of 1972, I was given the opportunity to take a single course at Syracuse University in upstate New York which the state of Vermont paid for. This program was set up to help prepare us blind kids for college life. After all, most college campuses were considerably larger than the schools for the blind that we had just graduated from, and there were all kinds of things that we had to get used to, everything from caffeterias to not having our textbooks available in a format we could read and having to find readers to read them to us. Really, this was quite an adjustment for all of us, going from a small school for the blind to a huge university. If we passed the course, we would get credit for it, if we didn't, well, we would have an idea of just how hard we were going to have to work at the colleges that we were heading for in the fall. Naturally it was hoped that we blind kids would start mixing with the sighted college students, but often the blind kids just stuck together because they felt more comfortable with each other, rather than trying to make sighted friends. The course I took was called Announcing and Writing for Radio and TV and I did quite well in the course. It was quite a lot of fun to be at Syracuse University, and for the first time in my life, I got drunk. Naturally within days of getting to Syracuse University, I just had to check out the campus radio station WAER which broadcast at 88.3 MHz on the FM dial. In fact, my instructor who taught the announcing and writing course whose name was Barney Wineberg, had a show on WAER on Tuesday afternoons, and I made sure to tune him in, and record an aircheck of him which he probably wasn't too thrilled about.

Later that summer, we moved again, this time to Columbus Ohio. Naturally I hadn't expected to move away from New England, so I had already planned to attend Nathaniel Hawthorne College, a small liberal arts college in Antrim New Hampshire which unfortunately doesn't exist any more. But although the state of Vermont was willing to pay for my college education, the state of Ohio was not. So after one year of college, my higher education came to a grinding hault. Naturally, like so many other blind and visually impaired people that enjoy listening to the radio, I fancied a career as a deejay, so when the state of Ohio said I would have to attend a vocational school rather than college, I attended the International Broadcasting School in Dayton Ohio for four months between February and May of 1974. I received an award at graduation, as the best all-round broadcaster whatever that means. Unfortunately, that still didn't help me find a job in radio, which of course is an extremely competitive field for anyone, never mind a blind person.

A year later, a small community FM station opened up in Columbus called WFAC which stood for free access communication. I did an oldies show for two years which I called Sam Ward's Memory Lane, and I played everything from standard rock oldies to early rhythm and blues to rockabilly. For the most part, the station gave out two hour slots to people that wanted to do shows on the air, but I wanted a four hour slot on Saturday nights, and reluctantly they gave it to me. Since nobody was in the station's office on Saturday nights, and since there was an extention phone for that line in the studio, I began giving out both telephone numbers as request lines, and they both started ringing off the hook, much to the amazement of the station's Program Director. It soon became obvious that I had the most popular show on the station and the show was eventually extended to five hours, from 7 PM to midnight. Of course I was not paid to do my show at this station, but the on air experience was invaluable.

In January of 1978, I finally managed to go back to college, and I attended Ohio University in the small southeastern Ohio town of Athens. I majored in radio Broadcasting at O.U. with a miner in music, and in recording engineering. I had a lot of fun at O.U. and again I made a lot of great friends there. I'll never forget those wonderful college days. I graduated in 1981.

At about that time, I managed to get a job at the Central Ohio Radio Reading Service, COORS as they called it. It is now known as VOICEcorps reading service as of July 2004. It was a special radio station meant for the more than 1,800 blind and visually impaired people of central Ohio. We had many volunteers come in and read material for the station sometimes live, sometimes on tape. At the time, Columbus still had two newspapers, and both of them were read on the air along with hundreds of magazine articles as well. We also had telephone call in talk shows. I was one of the announcer-engineers, but my job there was always part time for the seven years that I worked there.

In 1982, I began corresponding with people from all over the world, from countries that I had an interest in via cassette tape. One of the people that responded to a letter that I put in a young people's magazine called Radar in Warsaw Poland, was a young lady named Izabela. At first she could not send me cassette tapes because the Pollish government wouldn't allow her to. However, she could receive tapes from me, some of which were probably listen to by Pollish customs officials. Finally in May of 1983, I did receive my first tape from her, and when I heard her lovely voice with her Pollish accent, I fell head over heels in love with her. I know it sounds strange to fall in love with just a voice, but that's what happened, and I vowed then and there, that somehow, someday I was going to meet this woman. Izabela lived in the city of Poznan Poland which is located in western Poland about an hour from what used to be the East German border, and in the eighties anyway, Poznan was Poland's fourth largest city. In June of 1984, a year whose significance was not lost on me by the way, I made the long trip to Poland to meet Izabela and her family. I had an absolutely spectacular time over there as the pictures I brought back show. I am beaming and just grinning from ear to ear in every single one. I spent nearly five weeks over there, and I must say that even now as I look back at that trip which took place over twenty years ago, clearly this was one of the happiest and most exciting and educational experiences of my entire life. So many things were so different over there, and I feel that everyone should take a trip abroad to a foreign country and experience a different culture, different foods and different customes. It makes a person realize so many things about our own society, and one can't help but come away with the broader understanding of how the other side lives, and an understanding of how impatient, greedy and self centered we as North Americans really are as compared with the rest of the world. Frankly it was one of the most enlightening experiences of my life, and rather than being on a package tour, I was living in a Pollish families home for those five weeks, so I really got to experience the Pollish culture first hand, which I never would have been able to do had I been on a package tour.

Then in 1987, I married a blind woman named Mary from the Toronto area and that's why I moved up here to Canada. We lived in the city of scarborough which is just east of Toronto. I have now been living in Canada since May of 1987.

For most of my life I had used a cane to get around independantly, but I had heard about how well some guide dogs did at leading their blind masters around. I have always loved dogs very much and have always really gotten along well with these wonderful creatures called man's best friend. So on April 12, 1990 my 36th birthday in fact, I went to Canine Vision Canada, a guide dog school in Oakville, Ontario that is affiliated with the Lion's Foundation of Canada and was matched up with Blazer, a black labrador retriever. (Click on his name to see his picture.) Blazer and I hit it off immediately and it didn't take us long at all to begin bonding. Blazer turned out to be an exceptional dog, very intuitive about figuring out where I wanted to go without me even having to verbally tell him. Blazer was very quick, intelligent, and like me, he loved women and was much more successful at picking them up than I'll ever be. Blazer worked until he was just about twelve years old, and then he had to retire because his walking just got too slow to be safe due to his arthritis. I have hundreds of amazing Blazer stories, but that is perhaps for a future website or a book. Suffice it to say that Blazer was a very smart dog, a conscientious worker and a truly wonderful companion, the best and most loyal friend that I could have ever asked for.

Blazer enjoyed three loving and relaxing years of retirement. But on June 9, 2003, he had to be put down because his back legs were getting pretty weak and he was having difficulty in getting up. He certainly didn't owe me anything because he lived to be 14 and a half years old and many people have told me that that's extremely old for a pure bred lab. He obviously loved me very much to have stuck around that long, and I know that I gave him a very good life filled with happiness and love. Blazer, I will always remember you with fondness and treasure the things you taught me over the years about just how intelligent and intuitive a dog can be.

After my wife and I separated in 1993, I moved to the city of Malton and I lived with a fellow named Charlie Ritenburg for four wonderful years. The location was great, there were so many eateries around, Westwood Mall was just a blokc away, and the bus stop was very close as well. It was only a 20 minute bus ride to the Toronto subway line and another 20 minutes to the heart of downtown Toronto.

In August of 1997, I moved to the small city of Georgetown Ontario which is located in the Halton Hills district, about 40 miles northwest of Toronto. The Halton Hills Public library in Georgetown has some wonderful pictures of Georgetown's past. I spent eight long years living there, but I was never really happy in Georgetown because the town was extremely cliquish and unfriendly.

After being threatened by one of my room mates and finding it necessary to leave home very quickly, I spent the month of October of 2005 in the Lighthouse Shelter in downtown Oakville which is run by the Salvation Army. Then in early November of 2005, I moved into a retirement home in the village of Streettsville Ontario. Streetsville is a fascinating place, in that it is actually a small town, complete with small town atmosphere and attitude that is completely surrounded by the city of Mississauga.

Here is a Photograph of me, just to satisfy your curiosity.

If you'd like to know about some of my hobbies and interests, click HERE.