My career has largely revolved around the railroad industry, as an employee of Berkshire Hathaway’s BNSF Railway and its predecessors, with General Electric’s locomotive business (subsequently Wabtec) as a supplier, and with Zenith Electronics as a customer. A common theme throughout my career has been as a problem solver, including Six Sigma certification, and training in derailment investigation. Both have led to an appreciation for data collection and analysis, resulting in conclusions and solutions largely devoid of editorialization.

My hobbies have included photography and videography, including the genres of landscape and wildlife. Both have depended meaningfully on access to Wyoming’s public lands, making keeping them in public hands one of my top priorities as Secretary of State, via the office bringing with it membership on the State Board of Land Commissioners.

I relocated here in 2019, semi retiring in 2025. I have dabbled in several entrepreneurial business ventures, including starting an advertising agency, career consulting, and serving as a sales representative for a manufacturer of locomotive parts.
My own Wyoming story starts in 1969. My family took a vacation from our home in St. Louis, MO to the Klondike Ranch outside of Buffalo. There, I watched man land on the moon. Our guest cabin had electricity, but no TV, so we were invited up to the Big House to watch on the color console TV.

The cabin was situated right next to a brook that literally babbled. It ran in a depression, in the shade of cottonwoods that lined the banks. While the surrounding grasslands were hot, windy, and dry in the middle of summer, the depression was cool and moist, and when combined with the sound of the breeze rustling the leaves of the cottonwoods, the effect constituted my first encounter with heaven on earth. Little would I know how increasingly profound that experience would become over the course of time, or how few such experiences I would have subsequently.

Several other family vacations would take us to, and through, Wyoming, as would our relocation to Oregon, where my parents retired. Several summer jobs while I was going to Oregon State entailed driving through Wyoming. After my older brother graduated, he relocated to Worland, where he still lives. My life’s travels gave me repeated opportunities to travel through Worland to spend time with my brother en route, and driving across the border into Big Wonderful Wyoming became one of my favorite experiences in life. All of the characteristics that make it Big and Wonderful have always appealed to me.

So to borrow a tongue in cheek expression from Texas, where I lived for about twenty years, ‘I wasn’t born here, but I got here as soon as I could.’ And I have been here since 2019.