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Today's Featured Biography

 
James Conner

How do you compress 40 years of experiences into a relatively short synopsis??

After graduating, I attended Texas A&M for a couple of years and then entered the Navy (1970) where I stayed for 10 years.

Most of my Naval career was spent either undergoing training (schools in California, Florida, Illinois, New York, and Virginia) or on one of three ships based out of Norfolk, VA. Most of my training was on how to operate nuclear power systems onboard ships or on the operation/repair of electronic systems used on ships. I spent one short shore duty tour at NAS New Orleans for a couple of years. Generally speaking, any ship that I was on rarely spent time in homeport. As a result, I was able to visit most of the islands in the Caribbean, several locations in South America, countries on every coast line of Africa, countries in and around the Persian Gulf, islands in the Indian Ocean, Pakistan, and a number of countries bordering on the Mediterranean.

I met my wife, Vicki, in Vallejo, CA while both of us were attending Navy schools at Mare Island. She was attending schools for repair of the Navy's mainframe computers and I was attending a cryptographic school. When I completed that school, it was right back to Norfolk for me as my ship was leaving shortly for an 8 month Indian Ocean cruise. After Vicki graduated from her school, she was transferred to a command in just outside of the Norfolk area. We were married in 1974 right after I returned from the Indian Ocean cruise.

After 10 years, I had to make the decision to stay in the Navy until retirement or get out and do something else. I decided that I was tired of being away from home 8 - 10 months out of the year so I opted to get out. In 1980, I went to work for a defense contractor and have been there ever since. Initially, I was involved in developing system integration designs for electronic and weapon systems onboard surface ships undergoing overhaul. After several months, I started working on similar efforts but associated with designing electonic system installations at Navy schools. After several years of system design, integration and testing, I shifted to project management. While managing design teams, I started focusing on the financial management of the work we were doing and have been working that side of the effort ever since.

Today, in our spare time Vicki and I either enjoy the comfort of our house or travel to visit friends and family. Most of my spare time is involved with digital photography. I love to travel the backroads (I think that I have developed an aversion to paved roads as I will purposely seek out roads that have "travel at own risk" signs) looking for unusual images to photograph.

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