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Starting a blog is very difficult for an Electrical Engineer, Navy Fighter Pilot and career Commercial Airline Pilot with Delta. It is not my nature to talk about “things” unless it is how they operate.

I look forward to this new adventure in my real estate career and hope to leave the “way it was built” out of my blogs and concentrate on how things look from my perspective. However, I am totally type A and don’t have the colorful artistic background that so many of my contemporaries possess. My son,Matt is a beautiful writer and explains nature beautifully…so I may have him write a few blogs for me as we travel this road together.

I live in Grayton Beach … I love what those before us have preserved. It is up to those left behind (us) to continue this legacy of conservation so there will be something left for our children and our children’s children to explore and remember their “good old days”!

I am still amazed that the Iowa Bankers Association in 1919 had the foresight to build the Iowa Grayton Beach Club at the end of WW I. Being from Iowa, I feel a connection, a kindred spirit to those that wanted out of the cold, impending winters after the harvest in October. To move to Florida after the harvest and back to Iowa after the first frost free date (May 11 th ) was a dream to some … but very real to the trustees of the Iowa Grayton Beach Club. Please read this history if you have time. It will take you back 100 years ago. Just driving to Pensacola to board the barge would have been historic. My grandmother told me stories of her riding a covered wagon from West Plains, Missouri to Palm Beach,Florida when she was a child (born in 1891). I can only imagine what it would have been like to ride a primitive Model T, a Tin Lizzie, all the way to Pensacola on dirt roads and tires that only lasted a few hundred miles! Top speed was 40 mph and make sure there was a gas station within range of your fuel reserves!

I will try to concentrate, on the great life before us and the opportunity this life presents to us. Climb aboard if you will…we are going to continue this great ride through the Emerald Coast of Florida! My father had a saying that he adopted from the Little Brown Church in the Vale, located in Nashua, Iowa, where my parents were married in 1949: “Let me sit by the side of the road and be a friend to man”!

That saying was his moniker for life…and on his obituary when he died Jan 30, 2012 … it was plastered on the front page and everywhere we could put it! I would like to dedicate my real estate career in his honor … that if we just sit down, communicate and become friends … it is enough. We don’t need to fly through this life at Mach 2, although there was a time and place for that. Grayton Beach has a few slogans, but one of them much like my dad’s is: “Slow down, your are here”!