Hal Taylor Bio

I was born in a small town in Kansas in 1947, where I graduated from high school in 1965. After a year at the local junior college I ended up volunteering for the draft in the summer of 1967. I took a bus from Parsons, KS to Ft. Leonard Wood Missouri to begin a very interesting adventure! On the bus was a fellow I knew from school but just enough to know his name. He seemed very nervous and ill at ease about the whole affair. The fact that this was the middle of the Viet Nam war most likely had something to do with it. I made sure we were bunked next to one another so I could keep an eye on him and every morning I would make up my bunk and then make his, after which I would try and keep him close to me the remainder of the day. I kept an eye on him for about four days then we were assigned to different companies. I worried that without someone to keep an eye on him he might become "canon fodder" for the drill sergeant. I didn't see him again until about three weeks later when he was walking across the square. He had a big smile on his face and I thought "Wow, this is a change!" He explained that he had been declared "unfit for duty" and he was headed home! I was glad to see the army had the wisdom to do what was right for this fellow.

After basic training I went to Ft. Monmouth NJ for a year of electronics training which I enjoyed and then it was off to sunny Viet Nam for a year where I was stationed in Can Tho, south of Saigon. I was in a support position and did not see any active combat. We did get shot at from time to time and a every now and then a covey of rockets would explode around us but the folks doing the shooting proved, for the most part, not to be very good marksmen. I was thrilled to be in such a beautiful and to me, exotic place. The people were beautiful and their way of life was quite pleasing to me. It was a real honor to meet my first Buddhist monks while in country. A friend and I used to give them English lessons on the weekends until my brilliant commanding officer decided that we were "fraternizing with the enemy".

Eventually I got out of the army and started college in Pittsburg Kansas, not far from my home town. I started out as a psych major, taking exactly two semesters to come to the conclusion that virtually all of the psych professors were a little too psychotic for me. I hated biology in high school so when my advisor told me that I had to take the course, he suggested a special course "Biology for People Who Hate Biology" "That's for me!" I said and signed up. The professor, R. Harvard Riches turned out to be absolutely brilliant, in my opinion, and I loved every minute of his class. Enrolling for the following Semester I looked for more classes he taught and enrolled in genetics. This class was even better than the first and eventually I, by default, ended up a biology major and graduated with a degree in Biology.

After graduating I took a job repairing electronic equipment used in biological research. I enjoyed the job but eventually got tired of the travel involved so I took a job as an electronic technician at a small company in Newington, VA. After about six months I was promoted to project engineer where I designed microprocessor controlled equipment and taught myself software design. My boss quit to start his own company, hired me as his first engineer, where I continued writing software and designing hardware. Next I was hired by a company in Woodbridge to be their electrical engineering manager. I eventually became plant manager there and discovered what I really enjoyed - manufacturing management! I was in heaven, I had always enjoyed making things and to be paid to figure out how to do this was a completely delightful experience for me. I loved it. Then - they sold the company to a German firm for a huge profit and fired me!

If doing exquisite work for a corporation resulted in my getting fired I decided I was going to make a point of avoiding corporate employment again. I was very good at making things and I knew if I could decide what to make that with every passing year it would be better and worth more money than the year before. Corporate America could not take this from me, I reasoned, so I decided I was either going to make guitars or rocking chairs. After a quick market study I concluded that more people could rock than play a guitar so that is the direction I headed.

The rest, as they say, is history.