I was born in Montreal and raised by adoptive parents, first in the Bronx then in Queens both times living in an apartment.  Went to primary school in Queens then college for a B.S. degree at CUNY (Queens College).  One learns to be street smart in that environment. Got married too young, lived in an apartment house, and had two kids (now 5 grandchildren), and several years after that I bought a home on Long Island . My first real job was for the City Board of Education.  Left that after a year and landed a job at IBM as a programmer. From there moved up the ranks quickly and found myself as the technical half of a sales team selling million dollar+ IBM mainframes. I received about 10 awards in 14 years. For many reasons, mostly that IBM caused by changing their working environment negatively (at that time, they of course rebounded years later), I left them and became the Director of Management Information Systems for a 500 million company on Long Island. I was responsible for 4 divisions in data processing located in NY and NJ.  Over this time frame, I got my pilot license, bought an airplane, and found myself visiting various clients with the president and vp.  (Easy for them, I was the pilot and it was my plane!). When the relationship became stale (there were too many illegal activities and I wanted no part of them), I resigned and started up an IBM mainframe consulting business.  I had a good reputation on Long Island, having serviced many companies through employment for IBM, but to get an income now, not later, I negotiated a buyout of a one man consulting business, and found myself commuting 5 hours a day from L.I. to Manhattan where all of the accounts in this company were located. From day one I was profitable, but tired.  Good thing I was still young. I kept the business (I was the only person marketing) for 17 years, and grew it to a 7 figure company, which was as large as I wanted.  I wanted some time to my personal life.  During that time, I built a second home in Schroon Lake, and purchased La Casa Restaurant, which now the building our main office resides in.  My employees always joked that the reason I bought the restaurant is that I knew I would always get a good meal (not always true), but it sure was different coming from a fortune 100 company to being self-employed.  

After a divorce and having been single for several years, I met Darleen Cote, our broker. She lived in N.H. Fortunately the plane took the commute from L.I. to N.H. down to an hour.  Having made the decision to re-locate, I got involved in selling mainframe solutions built by a Silicon Valley company.  Once we made our first set of sales, I was able to vacate Long Island and move first to N.H., then in less than a year or so, to Schroon Lake.  During that period the employees who worked for me on L.I. were taken care of and every one easily found new employment. 

This new business venture was tied into the Internet and I would be able to work out of my bedroom which I sometimes did.  Darleen called it quits in N.H. and moved with me into Schroon where were soon married by our Schroon Lake Justice.  I did my marketing from Schroon and had a partner on L.I.  When we made a sale, I would drop ship high end Dell Servers to him, he would take a week to configure, then I would fly down to Islip, pick him up, load the luggage compartment with the system, then fly to the customer  (some locations were Texas, Oklahoma, Alabama).  It was an interesting life that we kept going for many years. Due to change in the market place of IBM computers, we decided to pull out the kitchen from La Casa and rebuild office space which we turned into Adirondack Country Homes Realty.  I do remember one interesting conversation I had at that time (1987 time frame or so) with the code officer.  I went into his office and asked what I needed to do to change from a restaurant to a real estate office.  With his dry humor, he made it look like he was thinking for 15 seconds, then replied "change the sign".  So we did.  

Let me start by saying that when I got married to my first wife, we had our honeymoon in Pray's Beach Motel and Trailer Park on the shore of Lake Champlain. I like the environment, the beauty, the low density of people. (Remember I started off life living the the Bronx which is going through re-vitalization but is still very congested).