I began my working career immediately after high school at Foster Wheeler Corp. in Livingston, NJ, as a draftsman and, later, as a model maker with the same company. In 1982 I went to work for AT&T Bell Laboratories in Whippany, NJ, working on the design of telecommunications equipment. My wife, Karen Signell Andrews, and I relocated from northwest New Jersey to the northeast suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia in January, 1998. Today, I continue to work as a Senior Mechanical Designer at OFS in Norcross, Georgia, the former Fiberoptic Apparatus unit of AT&T, and then, Lucent Technologies, where I design of fiberoptic telecommunications hardware.

  I first became aware of the story of the Titanic at the age of four. I became captivated by a picture of the ship published in Reader's Digest as part of a condensed version of Walter Lord's "A Night to Remember". Between repeatedly asking my mother to re-read that condensed version and then seeing the J. Arthur Rank movie of the same name, I became thoroughly and hopelessly hooked. I have to say though, that given it was a photo of the ship, and not her story, that first captivated me, I'm sure that I would have the same interest in the Olympic-class ships today, even had all three lead routine and uneventful lives.