Elyria
I grew up in Elyria, Ohio, a Rust Belt town the New York Times later profiled as a portrait of the squeezed American middle in This Land: Elyria, Ohio. My dad was an electrical engineer who built complex automation systems out of circuits, capacitors, and relays. It was the kind of hands-on, make-the-machine-work engineering that I’d end up chasing in software a generation later. We weren’t well off.
The human calculator
Money was tight enough that my mom used me as a human calculator. We’d go to the grocery store with a fixed monthly food budget, and my job was to keep a running total in my head, specials and coupons included, as we shopped. If my tally came in within a dollar of the register, I got a treat: a candy bar, a Matchbox car, or a Star Wars figure. It was the first time arithmetic had real stakes, and I loved it.
Star Wars, at five
My first movie, at about five, was Star Wars, and it taught me more about morality and politics than almost anything else I’d encounter for years. The Star Wars figures I earned at the checkout counter were not a coincidence.
The first machines
The Christmas after I turned six, my parents passed on the Atari every other kid wanted and brought home a Magnavox Odyssey². For my seventh birthday they added its Intro-to-Computers cartridge and book. My dad saw the value in the keyboard, not the games. The point was the learning. That’s where I learned to program in assembly, at seven. When I was twelve, a Commodore 64 arrived for Christmas, and I taught myself BASIC and kept going. From there it was PEEK-ing and POKE-ing straight into memory. The Cleveland Public Library lent games out, so I hauled them home. I’d play each one all the way through and leave with the manual, the maps, and whatever else I’d drawn up along the way.
Three-plus decades on, I still have the Magnavox Odyssey², the Commodore 64, a stack of those cartridges, and my childhood LEGO.
LEGO, and the skill underneath everything
I had the very first LEGO space set, and LEGO ran right through my childhood. It was quietly training what turned out to be the single most important skill I have. I learned to picture the finished thing and build toward it. I’d see the Klingon Bird of Prey in a Star Trek film and picture it whole, down to the moving wings. Then I’d translate that into a LEGO version in my head and build it brick by brick, layer by layer, until the picture in my head was sitting on the table.
That’s not a toy skill. Knowing what you have to work with, knowing what the end product has to be, and then building it logically, without retread, is the core of how I design complex systems and software. It’s why I could look at Corrigo’s business plan and existing architecture and hand them a replacement with confidence. And it’s the same move run in reverse that lets me break into a system from limited detail. I picture how the whole thing is most likely organized, then go at the seams.
More than a work skill, it’s how I deal with the world at all. I model it. That same faculty shows up as plain mechanical intelligence. I can fix almost anything, from a dishwasher or a washer-dryer to a car, because I can picture how the mechanism has to fit together and reason my way to the fault without a manual. Software, hardware, organizations, and systems of any kind all come down to one move. Build the model in your head, then find where reality and the model disagree.
Catholic school, and the move West
I went to Catholic school straight through to the middle of junior year, when we relocated to Castro Valley, California. My dad had been tasked with supporting the robotics inside the NUMMI plant, the Toyota operation in Fremont that is now the Tesla factory. The California Catholic education was a notch higher, and I did very well there.
The dream: F-16s
My childhood had a single organizing ambition. I’d watched the Air Force Thunderbirds, the Air Force’s F-16 demonstration squadron, at an air show, and from then on the plan was fixed: Air Force Academy, then F-16 pilot, then commercial airline pilot. I built toward it with everything I had: I read constantly, worked on computers, fought to overcome asthma, made Eagle Scout, took ground school at 14, and started flying lessons at 15 or 16.
I was too small for a sports scholarship, and everyone around me recognized the intellect, so the road to college ran through academic scholarships. I made the case. As a junior, I took 2nd place overall and 1st in chemistry at the Lawrence Livermore Lab-sponsored “Chemathon,” hosted at my high school with ~1,500 students from across the area. Sitting the physics labs and tests I already knew padded my score. I earned a congressional nomination to both the Air Force and Naval academies from Rep. Fortney “Pete” Stark. To his credit, his office ran it on merit, not politics. They handed the academies a candidate list with what amounted to résumés and let the academies choose. I was also accepted to UCLA engineering and MIT, though not Caltech, with ASU as my safety. ASU had an aerospace-engineering program and an Air Force ROTC program large enough to carry full-ride scholarships.
Twice knocked off the path
I turned down the Navy and chose the Air Force Academy, and went through the whole intake: the physical, the running, all of it. By then I was set on the path, flight to Colorado Springs booked.
Then timing intervened. In mid-June, with my flight already booked, I got a letter rescinding the offer. It was too late to pivot to any of the other schools except ASU, so I headed to ASU with what little I’d saved and went after the Air Force ROTC scholarship instead.
That was going reasonably well until a drunk knocked me off a bench in the student section at an event. I fell several rows and landed knee-first on concrete, fracturing my kneecap. It was past the full-withdrawal deadline, and that ended the ROTC path too. The pilot dream, taken away a second time, this time by a stranger and a few feet of concrete.
The grind, and the parking lot
I worked to cover the next semesters and took out loans, but it was obvious I couldn’t keep it up. So I did what there was to do: manual labor around Arizona, mostly tearing down pallet racks in warehouses. I sold plasma and lived on grocery-store sales.
Then one day I went to see the Air National Guard recruiter, who was out to lunch, and a Marine recruiter chased me down in the parking lot and asked me to talk. I had a feel for it already. Over a spring break I’d taken a bus to MCAS Yuma to stay with my sister and her Marine husband, and gotten a close and colorful look at military life. I’d also read stacks of WWII history and fiction. So I decided to enlist in the Marine Corps as a reservist, reporting to boot camp the second week of November.
…but that’s just the background. The Corps itself, and everything after, is where the career starts.
Why it matters: the throughline
Everything downstream is already here in miniature: an engineer’s instinct inherited at the kitchen table, numbers as survival at the grocery checkout, a moral compass set by a movie, the build-the-whole-thing-in-your-head systems vision trained by LEGO and the machine-level curiosity of an Odyssey² and a Commodore 64, relentless self-driven preparation, and a hard early lesson that timing and luck can take the plan away, so you build a new one and keep moving. The F-16 never happened; the practitioner it was forging did.
Key people
- Paul’s father, an electrical engineer in automation, working with circuits, capacitors, and relays. He later supported robotics at the NUMMI plant in Fremont, now Tesla.
- Paul’s mother ran the household on a tight budget and made Paul the family’s “human calculator.”
- Paul’s sister and her husband, a Marine at MCAS Yuma, gave Paul his first close look at Marine Corps life.
- Rep. Fortney “Pete” Stark gave Paul a congressional nomination to the Air Force and Naval academies, through a merit-based process.