This story starts out of a very difficult set of trails. It seems that sometimes it takes something very difficult like a loss or a tragedy to move you into a new and better place. I would not have made this choice on my own. I thought I would be a leather craftsman running my own business from my home with my family near me for the rest of my career. A new chapter in the journey was about to unfold.
While we were doing the leather crafting my wife created some Christmas ornaments from the scraps of leather. These candy canes with leather parts attached turned them into elephants and giraffes. Later we came up with a few more, a mouse on a package, a lion, and a penguin made from nuts and dried flowers. They became a hit and we started selling them all year round with the leather. My wife had found a creative vein in her that she did not know she had.
A family tragedy impacted my ability to travel so this new path on my personal and professional journey brought me closer to her and gave us an even clearer direction! We were attending craft shows with Christmas ornaments all year around. This new direction sustained us along with a few part time jobs in manufacturing.
My manufacturing jobs helped me discover a new aspect of my talents I did not know I had, problem solving. I solved a couple of manufacturing problems that the company could not solve so I was hired full time. This was a big help because it paid for the birth of our 4th child.
Along this journey we were honored with a deal with Southern Living Magazine. While at a craft show in Montgomery we were approached by the magazine to have some of our ornaments featured in their hard bound book that came out annually. We were moving right along and then things needed to change again.My family was growing and the children were starting to school preventing them and my wife from traveling with me. So I started looking for a job that would allow me to stop traveling. Through a temporary job at Lockheed I was asked to join a startup composite tech job with Martin Marietta at Marshall Space Flight Center, MSFC. Funny how things work out.
