About

A brief bio might help put some things in perspective.

The ME part …

I was born in Evansville Indiana in December 1941 and adopted by my mom and dad. They didn’t get along and not long after my first birthday my mom took me with her to Florida where we lived during WWII.

A court order during divorce proceedings meant that I spent summers in Evansville with my dad and his new family, and the 9 months my school year with my mom and her new family (“until 21, self-supporting or married”).

In today’s world you could say that I was a product of white privilege with a capital P. I make no apologies and acknowledge the advantages.

Thanks to a job at a local supermarket in Santa Monica, CA, I became “self-supporting” when I was 16 and by 17 was finally able to spend all year in Southern California surfing beaches up and down the coast.

After a year at Santa Monica City College and two semesters at Evansville College I decided to give up on tertiary education to continue my Endless Summers on the coast. Several jobs and adventures later I got a job with a surfing magazine and started writing.

From then on my life became neverending cycle of new jobs, adventures and one last attempt at college.

I’ve lived and worked on Maui and O’ahu, Hawai’i, in Costa Rica and in Aotearoa New Zealand where I’ve lived since 1974.

Before I semi-retired in 2001 aged 60 I worked for a radio station and then as the creative director of a couple of advertising agencies in Auckland. Just before my 50th birthday I resigned and started my own, independent creative consultancy and wondered why I hadn’t made the move years earlier.

After I semi-retired I finally got the opportunity to do what I was always hoping to do and that is write human interest articles and features for lifestyle magazines. It was a wonderful period.

For the past few years I’ve been at a bit of a loss and not able to figure out why. I needed to write again, but couldn’t quite find the direction. So close, but not close enough. I was spending far too much time trying to find it on Facebook and wasting my energies and time over issues that don’t matter to me any more.

One day I was reading a blog I found interesting and wondered if that wasn’t a direction I could explore. I didn’t want to climb the steep, slippery learning curve of creating another website. Besides, the software I’d used for my surfwriter.net site was outdated by decades. WordPress to the rescue.

So … here we are. YOU and ME and my keyboard. Giddyup!

About © Robert R. Feigel 2022 – All Rights Reserved