Bio

Philip was born in Kenosha and grew up in Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin, the only child of a truck driver and a housewife.  Both parents had rural 8th grade educations. From ages 6-14, during summer school vacations, he worked on his uncle’s dairy farm in Marinette County.

A folksinger since 1963, he has opened folk festivals and played at ski resorts and coffeehouses. Despite not being able to read music notation, Corps Director (now WRJN radio personality), Lou Rugani, let Philip march in the Wisconsin Class B Champion, Our Lady of the Holy Rosary Queensmen Drum and Bugle Corps, Kenosha, WI. Philip was equipment manager for O.L.H.R. Queensmen Winter Guard, for their 1966 Midwest Color Guard Championship. Philip then played contra bass bugle (tuba) and marched for then 11-times National Champion, Chicago Cavaliers Drum and Bugle Corps, 1967-68.

After graduating from G.N.Tremper High School, his girlfriend was accepted into one of Wisconsin’s party schools, and his father demanded rent money. With his forehand on his forehead, Philip joined the U.S. Marine Corps and received orders to Vietnam. He survived Marine Corps boot camp and trained as a “Fortified Area Assault Infantryman,” (plastic explosives, flame throwers, rocket launchers, grenades, and 106mm recoilless rifles) but during cold weather mountain training in Mt. Fuji, Japan, he escaped sleeping in snow banks by becoming his Battalion’s Chaplain Assistant in Headquarters and Supply Company, 9th Marine Regiment. Aboard the LPH-USS New Orleans helicopter carrier, he spent four months on and off the coast of South Vietnam.

He was promoted and became the 9th Marine Regimental Chaplain’s Assistant and when he returned to the states, became the 2nd Marine Division’s Chaplain Assistant. After leaving the Marine Corps, he booked rock bands into high school dances and bars in Southeastern Wisconsin and Northern Illinois for well-known Kenosha businessman, Frank Carmichael. Philip helped Happenings Magazine (weekly entertainment and TV listings) transform from black and white to full color with glued binding. Happenings Magazine is still successful today.

It seems like a stretch but his next big job was as a laboratory technician in the Institute for Microbial and Biochemical Technology inside the USDA Forest Service’s Forest Products Laboratory. Along with his Supervisory Microbiologist, Thomas W. Jeffries, Ph.D, Philip was co-inventor of U.S. Patent 5,126,266 “Xylose Fermenting Yeast Mutants” (awarded 1992).

Newspapers were his obsession and he worked for Racine, Wisconsin’s Journal Times daily newspaper. He also worked for the Boscobel Dial, of Boscobel, Wisconsin, The Independent-Scout of Gays Mills, Wisconsin, and a weekly shopper. He mastered Apple Macintosh as well as PC’s in the desktop publishing revolution that transformed print media.

After graduating with a B.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies in 2006, from the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, he lived there many years until going back into the Forest Service as an Information Technologist/Network Administrator, for Curlew Job Corps Center, Civilian Conservation Corps, in Colville National Forest near Curlew, Washington, where he retired with 20-years of federal service, the last day of the Obama administration. ~9/1//2026