Tex Abuse

Many of you have been asking: So, Hank, who are you? And what happened in your life to bring you to this point?

OK, nobody actually asked me that. But I’m going to tell you anyway.

I was born in The Bronx late in the first half of the 20th century. My parents were teachers, and my sister (my only sibling) was also a teacher for a while. I, on the other hand, was a student for a long time, but I never worked my way up to the teaching profession.

The fam moved to Yonkers when I was in the first grade, and we lived there throughout my public-school tenure. Probably the most notable thing that happened to me during my School Daze was that the Beatles hit the pop charts when I was in the ninth grade, and suddenly everybody wanted to join a band. Many of my friends lacked any musical background (or any noticeable musical talent) – but I had an advantage, because I played the piano. So I learned how to play the guitar, and then I learned how to play the bass guitar, and then I joined a series of local bands. My last high-school band, The Rayne, actually cut an album! But it was released more than 50 years after we recorded it, so I don’t know if that counts.

One day while I was still in junior-high school, I found myself in a music room (a piano and a couple of chairs) with Steve Tallarico, a fellow student who was the lead singer for The Strangers, the best band in the school. I was playing the piano; Steve was singing, and I was adding what I thought was some tasty harmony. Personally, I thought we sounded great! So when we finished, I had this short conversation with Steve:

ME: So, if I buy an electric piano, can I join the Strangers?

STEVE: No.

Steve later changed his name to Steven Tyler and famously became the lead singer of Aerosmith. If he had said “yes,” you might have been seeing me on stage with Steve for the last 50 years. But then I probably wouldn’t be creating this website. There’s always a trade-off.

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After high school, I attended a series of institutions of higher learning: Cornell University, The University of Colorado, The University of Hartford, and Samford University. And I pursued a variety of majors: Engineering, English Literature, General Studies, Government, Music Theory, Philosophy, and Political Science. (Those lists are in alphabetical order. Ten points if you can match the majors to the schools.)

With all that academic experience, the logical thing to do, of course, was to quit school and become a professional musician. So that’s what I did – first with Holy Moses, then with The Brothers Graff. That last gig took me to Alabama, where I married my favorite cocktail waitress, who gave birth to my favorite son the following year.

But then the band gigs dried up, and I had to go out and find myself a real job. A friend was looking for someone to train as a computer programmer, so I talked him into hiring me. It turned out I loved telling computers what to do, and I was so good at it that I did it for the next 50 years.

I left Alabama to work for Texas Instruments, first in Lubbock and then in Dallas, helping to create a revolutionary new product called the TI Home Computer. But after a few years at TI, I began to suspect that this new field of Personal Computing was never going to amount to anything. (Remember, this was all the way back in 1982.) So I decided that because my dad was a lawyer and my brother-in-law was a lawyer and my nephew was a lawyer and dozens of my cousins were lawyers (and even judges), maybe I should consider becoming a lawyer.

(You may remember that I earlier referred to my father as a teacher, but now I’m claiming that he was a lawyer. How could that be? For most of his life, my dad was a shop teacher and a guidance counselor at a junior-high school in NYC. But after teaching for more than 25 years, he decided that it was time to try something new, so he went to night school and got himself a law degree.)

I got a high score on the LSAT (Law School Admission Test), which earned me offers from a couple of law schools. One of them, SMU in Dallas, asked me to drive over for an interview, something law schools rarely do. Turned out they were impressed by my 791 LSAT score, but they were concerned about my uneven college record; they told me they just wanted to meet me to make sure I wasn’t a weirdo before they accepted me. I guess I must have fooled them, because they sent me a letter of acceptance. But SMU was too pricey for me, so instead I opted for a state school, the University of Texas at Austin.

But just before my classes at UT Law were about to begin, my Spidey Sense started tingling, telling me that maybe this new field of Personal Computing was going to amount to something after all. So I told UT not to expect me, and I planted myself firmly in the computer field, developing software and writing documentation and even authoring a couple of books about computer technology. Then in the mid-1990s, the Internet suddenly became the hottest thing ever, so I founded WebFeats, the first independent web shop in the DFW area (as far as I know). And in between the programming and the web development, I managed to find the time to self-publish a novel (Transition) and a book of short stories (Dream Girl).

Oh, I almost forgot: I got married on my 65th birthday! I’d been in love with the same woman for decades – and we realized that if we didn’t get married right away, we’d basically be throwing Social Security money out the window. (Yes, I know, we’re both incurable romantics.)

My last major client was bought out late in 2019, and the new owners no longer needed my services. So just as COVID was about to elbow its way into our national consciousness, I found myself out of work. That was bad timing in terms of being able to find a job. But it was good timing in that the government was handing out checks so people like me could weather the pandemic. And it was even better timing because, after I’d been paying self-employment taxes for so many years, my Social Security benefits had kicked in just a few months before I lost my job.

So now I had to figure out which of my varied talents might come in handy. Would I find an opportunity to create more software? Or to develop more websites? Or to write another book? Or maybe to join another band? (That last option was, and remains, my clear preference.)

Way back in 1982, both SMU and UT had told me that my LSAT score indicated that I had an undeniable aptitude for the law. When I turned them down and decided to continue to work with computers instead, I assumed that the law would never again have a significant role to play in my daily affairs.

And I had no reason to think otherwise until the spring of 2020, when a new neighbor happened to move in right next door to me…