Tom's Biography

Tom was married in the late sixties. After a short career in the Navy, Tom was honorably discharged after it was discovered that he had type 1 diabetes (type 1 diabetes doesn't usually occur in early adulthood but it can happen). Tom has taken daily insulin shots for several decades. Tom returned to college and earned a Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan and then a Master's Degree in Computer Engineering from Wayne State University. After working for several small computer companies both in Michigan and California, Tom and family returned to Michigan in 1984 to work for General Motors. During his 24 years with GM Tom worked on automotive applications for computers in the areas of machine vision, artificial intelligence, expert systems, computer aided manufacturing and collaborative engineering. Tom retired at the end of 2008. Since then he has seen an implosion in the company he worked for half his career, a degradation in his personal finances and some health problems.

Tom has always loved the west since his first visit in the mid-sixties with his family. At that time, much of the southern route across the country was still route 66. That was his first American Road Trip. Since then he, and his family, have driven across this great country of ours several times.

Tom's family is spread across the entire US from Maine to Southern California. Despite recent life changes, and more significantly, because of them, Tom will take advantage of the freedom of retirement to visit his family. Tom just completed a two week trip to visit his family in the East. Now he and his brother-in-law Dave, will embark on a cross country road trip to visit family in the West. They will driving a Pontiac G6 from Michigan to California and back. The G6 was engineered by people that Tom worked with both in Germany and the US. Both the Pontiac G6 and the Chevy Malibu are manufactured at Orion Assembly, only a few miles away from where Tom lives by people that Tom knows in his community.

This blog is going to be about their road trip together. It will also be about what it means to be retired and their worries about retiring from Chrysler (in bankruptcy) and General Motors (bankruptcy possible if not likely). Most importantly it will be about their thoughts and feelings as they get to visit old friends, make new ones, and see places both familiar and foreign as they drive 5000 miles on...

The Last American Road Trip!