The world had launched the most horrific war in all of recorded history. Hundreds of German U-boats were busy at their ruthless torpedoing of merchant ship convoys on the eastern seaboard. News reported thirteen merchant marine sailors drowned on January 27, 1942, on the day I was born in the water sign of Aquarius.

[i] Autobiographical Endnotes: German U-boats attack the eastern seaboard of North America. Just after 0000 hours, German submarine U-754 sank Icarian off Newfoundland, killing nine of the twenty-nine aboard. Off the east coast of the United States, German submarine U-130 sank a US tanker Francis E. Powell, thirty-five miles southeast of Ocean City, New Jersey at 0943 hours, killing four of thirty-two aboard, then damaged the oil tanker, Halo, off N. Carolina.

      Whenever asked, I like to say, “Thoroughbred lineage, all the way back to the Roman Empire.” But my ancestors in the nineteenth century were only sturdy peasant stock … raised by poor illiterate farmers who tilled the rich Italian soil in vineyards, or fishermen who every day trawled Mediterranean shorelines, to earn a meager living.

Born in Boston, raised by a middle-class family in Melrose, MA., and educated as a degreed electrical engineer, I attended Yale graduate school pursuing a master’s degree in Engineering Science in 1963, during John F. Kennedy’s assassination.

That trauma dramatically altered the course of my life in a search for God and the miraculous … what you will read in vivid excerpts from Book 1.

Book 2 will tell the rest of my story, rising from ‘rags to riches,’ but only after I had found limitless spiritual treasure deep within me. Matt 6:33