Fort Myers Beach is a long way from the Colorado of Bill’s youth. After being awarded an Electrical Engineering Technology degree, he moved to New Zealand and his first island home. He spent six months backpacking through Australia and southern Asia on his way home to surprise his father for his 50th birthday. Bill worked, saved, bought a bicycle, and pedaled 5,500 miles around Europe from London, Oslo, San Sebastian, to the old city of Jerusalem.
A chance job introduced him to the Pipeline Inspection Equipment industry. Somewhere in those years Bill and his wife Randa managed another trip around the world, he obtained a degree in computer science, and then the company he worked for was dissolved by the parent company. Bill and a co-worker started a company in his garage and their basements. They grew the company, sold it and retired.
This new found freedom allowed Bill and Randa to move to Wyoming to support his mother in her heroic fight with cancer, and eventually to Florida in 2010 after she passed.
Bill has volunteered for Turtle Time, the Mound House, the FMB Chamber of Commerce, the Center for the Rehabilitation Of Wildlife, and has been the Vice Chair of the Public Safety Committee and the Chair of both Community Resource Advisory Board and Marine Resources Task Force. He has learned to love the complexity, resilience, and fragility of this environment through exploration and study. Bill is an enthusiastic singer/songwriter, skier, endurance bicyclist, writer, naturalist and, of course, traveler.
Whatever he does and wherever he goes, he looks forward to coming home to this unique little island, and to serve its people and other wild creatures.