I didn't have any childhood ambitions. There was nothing I really wanted to be "when I grew up." I just wanted to grow up.
I was a sickly boy, ill for a lot of my pre-teens with a variety of afflictions, none crippling, but all of whic interferred with my physical development in some unforseeable way in adulthood. I had the usual complement of measles, mumps, and chickenpox which everyone had, but I had persistent, repetitive strep throat infections, complicated by polio and rheumatic fever. I had surgery to remove tonsils and adenoids before I was 10
Neither I nor my family, friends, or doctors in those dark, distant days made the connection between all those illnesses and the open sewer that was Lake Erie, and/or the Rocky River in Cleveland in the 50s, wherein we disported happily, swimming and splashing--and swallowing. Polio is, of course, transmitted through fecal matter which I must have ingested through that filthy water.
When I reached 18, I was pretty happy that I had lived long enough to leave home, growing in confidence that I was "playing with house money."
I've always been an 'employment' opportunist, doing whatever came along, and as such I shall undoubtedly perish, but which has led to many ventures and careers I couldn't EVER have foreseen. I followed no career paths. Just about everything I did prior to earning the PhD (in Education) in 1989 was decidedly "ad hoc."
That included gigs working as a stage hand at the Opera as a teen, work in broadcasting and newspapers, humping beer at Raider games in Oakland, a hitch in the military (USAF), selling cars, a two-year stint in public relations, some 10 years in construction as a carpenter, and I finished my working life as a professor and instructor, and then 'retired' to work as a landlord and of necessity a handyman.
NONE of it was the result or consequence of either ambition or plan, but it seems to have worked out okay.
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