Who, What, Where...
The Colonial Panama Phase.
I was born in Ridgecrest, California, the isolated civilian town supporting the China Lake Naval Weapons Center in the Mojave Desert. My father, an electrician and WWII submariner, married my mother Brenda Miller in 1944 in Perth, Western Australia. The nearby port of Fremantle was a large U.S. submarine base during WWII for patrols into the Pacific. Brenda was a nurse he met in an Australian military hospital when he became ill after a war patrol. After the war, they lived in California, including China Lake, until moving to the Panama Canal Zone in the mid-1950s. We lived there for nine years, finally moving to Northern Virginia in 1963.
The Aussie Boarding School Phase.
My father worked as a civilian military employee and traveled often including to Vietnam during the U.S. buildup there. In 1967 he moved the family to an obscure US Navy submarine communications base on the tip of Northwest Cape, Western Australia. The idea was to move the Yocum children closer to my mother's family in Perth. I attended a Christian Brothers boarding school near Perth. While in school there I was lucky to represent the state of Western Australia in the junior rugby championships in Tasmania, where we were thoroughly trounced by the more experienced teams from the Eastern States.
The Hippie Phase.
After returning to the U.S. I finished high school in Arlington, VA and attended George Mason University in Fairfax, VA. I intended to get a degree in English but when a professor would not let me take a higher level creative writing course, I switched majors to philosophy. After college I worked briefly for the US Postal Service and then went back to school at American University in Washington, D.C. for a Master's Degree in journalism. I followed my girlfriend Denise to the Boston area in 1978 and we married in 1980. Like many young journalists, I started out I freelancing. I eventually was hired as an editor for three separate Boston-area weekly newspapers.
The "What's-it-all-about" Phase.
In 1983 I was able to interest an angel investor from Natick, MA into funding NewsWest, a weekly newspaper startup that at its height had a circulation of 114,000. After 4 years the paper was sold to a competitor and I went to work for The Boston Globe where I was employed in a wide variety of positions including strategic planner and director of online classifieds at boston.com. I worked at several dotcom startups afterwards, and eventually joined The New England Journal of Medicine as director of recruitment advertising, retiring after 13 years. Denise and I have two children and live full time on Cape Cod.