Eric was born in Huntington NY but has lived all over the US as his family moved around a lot due to his father’s job. After college Eric joined the US Army and ended up living all over the globe to include two tours in South Korea and two combat tours to the Middle East. Retiring in 1995 from the U.S. Army as a Logistics, Acquisition and Systems Automation officer, he worked as a lead information technology engineer for the MITRE Corporation working for the Air Force and then the Army in the area of cyber defense. Eric has a Master’s degree, in Business Administration, Education and Computer Science. He lives on a wooded lot in Maryland with his wife Paula and a myriad of animals. One nice thing about living in northern Maryland is the large selection of wood species as the area along the Chesapeake Bay is the northern edge of many species that grow in the south. And it is the southern boundary of many species that grow in the northern areas of the North America. Eric joined the IWCS in 2007.
Eric has had a true love of wood all his life and has been collecting wood and making saw dust for over 40 years. His wood collection while including standard wood samples is mostly in larger sizes for making saw dust. Eric’s has several wood related goals, one is to collect samples for all the native North American woods, to collect all species with the word ‘ironwood’ in its common name and to collect all the Australian She-oaks. He really enjoys making useful items out of wood, both flat and round wood objects. Eric is slowly building a collection of wood species from across the globe and is turning each species into the form of bottle stoppers and three (3) inch diameter lidded wood boxes.
