As a young boy growing up during the 1950’s & 60’s, I had two major passions… art and music.

My remote family home was located thirty miles west of Phoenix, Arizona, in a farming area known as the Buckeye Valley. There were plenty of cotton and alfalfa fields surrounded by countless miles of desert and cactus covered mountains, but no art museums or music theatres.

So I learned to entertain myself by drawing my own artwork. Mostly pictures of cars, airplanes, army tanks, spaceships and robots. I spent so much time drawing and coloring pictures that my parents were certain I would grow up to be a professional artist. That would have been fine with me since my favorite subject during all four years of high school was art class.

As for music, I tuned my transistor radio to stations that played rock-n-roll by the Beatles, Beach Boys, Roy Orbison, The Four Seasons, and country music stations that played Johnny Cash, Buck Owens, Merle Haggard and so on.

My father took notice of my fascination with radio and told me about an announcement he had heard on his favorite station. It was an invitation to high school students to participate in a two week radio broadcasting course at Phoenix College. I jumped at the chance to attend and those efforts resulted in a very successful thirty year career in radio broadcasting as an on-air personality (otherwise known as a DJ), music director, and manager of various departments at many of the best known stations in Arizona. For about ten of those years I ended up working for Buck Owens who owned KNIX Radio in Phoenix.

Throughout my broadcast career I dabbled in the arts, drawing and painting as a hobby. Then about ten years ago, I found myself seeking a new challenge and decided on combining my love for art with my interest in collecting unique items I would find in antique shops, thrift stores and yard sales. Items that some might think of as junk, I value as treasured found objects to be used in creating assemblage art, robot sculptures. I call them “Refried Robots” and their sole mission is to bring a smile to the faces of those who share a fascination for seeing old unused items turned into something new and entertaining for art lovers of all ages.