Written in 1997

Richard A. Bird
P. O. Box 332
South Thomaston,. ME 04860

A brief narrative seems to me to be in order if anyone who does not know me is reading this, and is trying to figure out who and what I am.

I am a "Military Brat" who has deep roots in the South, and particularly the State of Georgia. After graduation from Georgia Tech in 1963, I started working for Curtis 1000, Inc., a subsidiary of what is now American Business Products, a large NYSE printing company. I spent two years in an intensive management training program, before taking on the task of centralizing and automating the graphics and typography departments of the entire company (ten remote divisions producing $50 million of printing sales at the time, now in excess of $600 million).

We successfully converted the company from the old molten lead and rubber plate process to the electronic and photographic processes still evolving today. As such I was a pioneer in the graphics arts conversion of what today is known of as Desktop Publishing. We worked primarily in machine languages and paper tape driven devices which eventually turned to the desktop computers of the 90's, but the fundamentals of good design remain constant.

I also spent two years in production management with full production management responsibility for an envelope imprinting plant and a continuous business forms manufacturing plant, each employing 75+ employees.

In 1971, driven by the confiscatory 70% federal income tax bracket, I started my own company involved in resort real estate; hotel, motel, and restaurant property management; and oil and gas exploration and production. The common thread to these ventures was the income tax advantaged nature of the capital investment.

In 1975 I associated with a group in Dallas, Texas, Geochemical Surveys, Inc. In 1981 we moved to Denver, Colorado, and merged with US Mineral and Royalty Corp. In the 13 years that I was involved with the companies, we raised over $20 million dollars in drilling capital from over 200 investors and participated in over 250 successful drilling ventures as well as 40 dry holes. Although the company was sold in 1988, I continue today to handle the accounting and investor reporting for the remaining properties covering 16,000 acres in the Rocky Mountain region of the US.

The company used a proprietary method of near surface soil sampling and analysis developed by the Soviets and used as their primary search tool in oil exploration. We maintained a database of over 60 million acres of petroleum exploration records, and did business with the DOE, the governments of Mexico (PEMEX) and Norway, several major oil companies, as well as large individual investors.

In 1981 I bought the earliest IBM PC (16k memory, a cassette player and a 320k floppy for storage, a 300 baud modem, and running DOS 1.1, VisiCalc, and a database program), and wrote all of the programs for general well accounting, well reservoir determination, and investor tax reporting. I either had to teach a computer person the oil business or learn the computer business, and I choose the later.

In 1988, I along with two partners, started Translink, an ARC Travel agency with six agents in large Western Ski Resorts, providing the resorts access to the airline databases, and agents selling package air travel arrangements. I developed PC based applications to interface with the airline database systems, and to handle communications between the main office in Denver and the remote resorts. This venture has evolved into a current project, rewriting the existing software in Oracle, and marketing to 1-800 marketers.

I have become expert and consult regularly in PC based windows systems. I decided in 1990 that the world would eventually follow Bill Gates and Microsoft, and that proved to be correct. I work regularly with clients setting up complete small networked systems and provide training and support later.

In 1995 I decided to go a different direction and open the Black Pearl, now called simply The Pearl. It is a 140 seat restaurant and lounge on the harbor front in Rockland. That project is now dead.. You can read the latest about it from the above link or from my web page.

Keeping up with birdsnest.com and the dozen or so other domains I am webmaster for keeps me pretty busy nowadays.

Added in 2008

I now list my occupation as retired, though that is hardly the case. I continue to prepare tax returns for a few dozen clients, help several fishermen with onboard computers and GPS systems, design and maintain a few websites and Internet domains, and generally consult and help friends and clients with computer related issues. I managed to hold on to oil and gas royalty interests in Wyoming that provide me with a modest income stream, and I am drawing Social Security Retirement benefits and am covered by Medicare, so I appreciate all of you who continue to work and pay into that system to support me.

Go to Top of Page
Return to Home Page