From Soldier to Speech Therapist

Not every path to a vocation is straight. Mine crossed a war zone, a philosophy department, a computer lab, and decades of clinical practice before it arrived at SpeechTherapy.org.

The common thread through all of it was this: a belief that every person deserves to be understood — and that understanding requires patience, presence, and the willingness to meet people exactly where they are.

What follows is that story. Not a resume. A life.

In 1967, as the Vietnam conflict intensified, three friends from Immaculate High School made the same decision by different routes.

Like many young men of that era, we believed service mattered. The country called and we answered — each in our own way.

We landed at Tan Son Nhut under darkness and rocket fire. Combat was immediate and relentless. The 101st Airborne near Hue became home — and Echo Company became family in the way that only soldiers under fire understand.

In February 1969, I returned home. The war was behind me. But what it had taught me — about discipline, endurance, loss, and the fragility of human life — would shape everything that followed.

After returning home I enrolled at Fordham University, graduating cum laude with degrees in English and Philosophy. I approached my education with urgency and gratitude — the kind that only comes from having seen what can be taken away.

My early career after Fordham began in computer programming at Prudential. A background in technology that would prove unexpectedly valuable later. But volunteer work with individuals with disabilities redirected my path entirely.

I left programming to work in pioneering group homes in New Jersey — some of the first of their kind in the state. Working alongside people with significant disabilities, I discovered what I had been looking for without knowing I was looking for it: a way to make meaning through service, and to restore something essential to people who had lost it.

Drawn by philosophy’s questions about knowledge and meaning — and by a growing conviction that communication was the most fundamental human need — I pursued a Master’s degree in Communication Science at Montclair State College. I graduated in 1981 and began my career as a speech-language pathologist.

In 1981 I began clinical practice at Christ Hospital Home Health in Jersey City — and from the first week it was clear this work would never be routine. The patients were diverse, the conditions complex, and the need was always immediate.

Jersey City’s cultural diversity deepened my perspective from the start. Communication is never merely technical — it is cultural, emotional, and deeply personal. The same words mean different things in different lives. That truth has informed everything I have written and every evaluation I have conducted since.

At Welkind Rehabilitation Hospital I worked within a true interdisciplinary team — physicians, physical and occupational therapists, psychologists, social workers — all focused on the same patient from different angles. It strengthened my understanding of stroke, traumatic brain injury, neurodegenerative disease, and complex medical conditions that affect communication across a lifetime.

My background in computer programming — from those early years at Prudential — turned out to be far from a detour. It led directly to one of the most formative roles of my career.

This work shaped my enduring commitment to augmentative and alternative communication — a field that has grown enormously since those early days but whose core purpose has never changed: giving people a way to say what they need to say.

In 2002 I joined Sunny Days Early Intervention and shifted my clinical focus entirely to young children — the population that would shape the final decade of my practice and the orientation of this entire site.

Early intervention was profoundly meaningful work — and it confirmed something I had long suspected: the earlier support begins, the more it matters. Young children, with structured support and deep family involvement, can make remarkable gains in windows of time that close if left unused.

Working with parents became as central as working with children. The strategies a parent uses at home every day — how they pause, how they model, how they respond to a communication attempt — have more cumulative impact than any hour of therapy. Teaching families to be communication partners became the most important thing I did in those years.

That conviction is why SpeechTherapy.org exists — and why the clinical guidance on this site places families at the center of every recommendation.

The origin of this website is not a business story. It is a curiosity story.

What began as curiosity grew slowly alongside clinical practice — and became something I could not have predicted in that computer store. Families searching for answers about their child’s development. Adults trying to understand a new diagnosis. Caregivers looking for language to explain what they were seeing to a doctor who had only a few minutes to listen.

Every page on this site reflects that mission. The design system, the clinical notes, the parent-facing language, the early intervention guidance — all of it is built on decades of sitting across from families who needed information they could actually use.

Across decades of practice — from infants to nonagenarians, from jungle to clinic to living room floor — one truth has remained constant.

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