When I was ten years old my church choir director asked for a volunteer to play the guitar to a song for a radio broadcast two weeks later. I volunteered. The only problem was I’d never played the guitar before. This inspired my grandfather to give me one of his old guitars and teach me the song and sure enough I accompanied the choir that day and haven’t put the guitar down since then. I started writing songs immediately and by time I was fourteen I was getting gigs in local bars and my mom and dad had to sit through every single one of them since I was too young to be in a bar alone. For a couple years I even sang bass in the Sweet Adeline chorus my mother directed.

At age seventeen I joined the Navy. Boot camp was ten weeks in Orlando, Fl. By the second week I asked our company commander if I could have my guitar sent from Michigan. From then on it became a tradition to sing a song at 8:55 pm (lights out at 9:00) to the other 87 girls in my company. I was in the navy for four years. I was stationed at the Air Test and Evaluation Squadron in China Lake, Ca. I started out as an A-7 plane captain on the flight line and ended up as the Commanding Officers personal secretary. I met my husband there and we spent the next 21 years together raising our two children, Scott and Molly.

I’ve been lucky enough to travel to many incredible places such as Egypt, China, Russia, all over Europe and the Carribean and Mexico and in most of those places I managed to find a guitar and do some singing. In Ireland I got to play at the Guiness Brewery pub, an experience I’ll never forget.