WHS 30 year Bio for John Legh-Page

My life over the past 30 years has been very good. In fact exceptionally good and I feel very lucky and privileged to be where I am today. I hope I get see the next 30 years, but I will leave completely satisfied if I only get another 30 months. 

In 1969, during my senior year, I left Wheeling HS to get married at age 17. My pregnant bride to be, Evelyn and I had to drive to Missouri with our parents for the wedding because we were too young for Illinois to allow it and abortions were illegal back then. I went to work at the Weber BBQ manufacturing plant in Arlington Heights making BBQ pits for $2.20 an hour during the day and worked nights and weekends pumping gas at the local Amoco station. We had no medical insurance, and no car, so we lived upstairs at my in-laws house while we saved the money to cover the hospital birthing costs. I rode the Chicago & Northwestern train each morning from Palatine to Arlington Heights to go to work. In August 1969, we had a beautiful baby girl named Sherry who brought an incredible amount of joy into our home. 

My in laws, Horst and Erna Dettmann, were German immigrants. Really good, kind, salt of the Earth people with an excellent work ethic. They took me in like the son they never had and finished raising me into adulthood while at the same time I was trying my best to raise a new family without having any clue as to how it was all supposed to work; children raising children. My kids had to learn my rules to avoid this same pitfall when they got to high school; you can't get married until you graduate from college and you can't have kids until you're thirty. My kids have all grown up now and got married after college and started having babies at age 28, so we came pretty close.

Once I turned 18 and was old enough to work elsewhere, I went to work for Continental Airlines at O'Hare Airport. I worked with Continental's Air Cargo operation and learned the airline business from the ground up. After a few years I went to work under contract managing KLM Royal Dutch Airlines cargo operations at O'Hare. I attended technical training classes each year in Holland with KLM and met some interesting people from all parts of the world. 

One of the big airline benefits is cheap travel, so my family and I got to travel every year to Europe to visit my wife's relatives. We spent a lot of winters traveling to Florida, Texas and California to thaw out from those cold Chicago northerns. A first class roundtrip Continental employee ticket to Hawaii was only $30, so Hawaii also became a favorite winter destination for us. In 1972, I bought my 1st new car, a 72 Chevy Vega for $2000. In 1973 we were blessed again with a 2nd beautiful baby girl, Nadine. 

In 1974, my mom passed away from ovarian cancer and we started thinking about moving to a warmer climate. We looked at California, Colorado and Texas and considered job offers in each state. In 1975, I got an offer from Airborne Express to help them startup their own cargo airline operation and we moved to Houston. We bought our 1st home, a new brick 3BR ranch style on a half-acre lot in the woods just north of Houston. The property was surrounded by east Texas piney forest land froth with fresh water creeks, white sandy beaches and abundant wildlife; a great place to raise kids. We bought our 1st boat and got into some good fishin' and huntin' on the weekends.

In 1976, I fell out of a tree blind while deer hunting in the forest just behind our property and impaled my guts on a sapling tree stump. I went into emergency surgery, died on the operating table and spent the next week in coma. I swear I must have also suffered brain damaged after I returned from the dead, cause things got crazy that year with my wife Evelyn and we had a lot of marital difficulties. She ran off with another man and I became a single parent with my two girls for the next few years. I stayed with Airborne until 1979, and then managed a couple of other airfreight operations. During this time I got to travel on business to Europe, the Middle East, Mexico and the Caribbean.

I met Liz, a nurse, a native Texan and my 2nd wife, in the summer of 1980 while my kids were in Germany visiting relatives. I took a 30-day around the world business trip that same summer and stopped off in Berlin to pay a surprise visit to my girls. That 30-day around the world trip also allowed me to see places I had only seen in travel magazines like India, Australia, New Zealand and Fiji. The next year, my new wife and I were blessed with a beautiful baby boy, Jahn Christopher. We came to call him Chris and when he reached the terrible twos, we started calling him Rootin Tootin Cowboy Chris. My stepdaughter, Michelle also came to live with us and of course her dog, Sandy so we had 3 girls, a boy and a dog.

In 1982, I bought a franchise license from Pilot Air Freight and opened my own shop in Houston. With the airline experience I had, the business quickly took off, and I bought another, then another until I had 120 employees at 12 Pilot Air Freight franchises operating from Texas to Colorado. My dad managed one of the franchises for us until he had a quadruple bypass and semi retired. We moved to Dallas, Denver, Colorado Springs and back to Houston, starting up and managing new franchises while annual sales grew to over $6million. We worked long, hard hours and played equally hard with ski vacations in Colorado as well as the Swiss, Austrian and Italian Alps.

In 1985, my little brother Rob was graduating from University of Texas in Austin with his degree in Computer Science. On a visit to my Pilot franchise operation in Austin, Rob and I talked about a little company called PC's Limited that his friend Michael Dell had started out of his UT college dorm and how well Michael was doing with his new business. PC's Limited (since renamed to Dell Computers) was one of my better airfreight clients in Austin, so we stopped by to discuss the PC opportunities with them. After that meeting, we decided that we would jump into the PC business and use my airfreight operation to import and distribute PCs coming out of the Pacific Rim.

We started a little family PC business with my brother Rob called Micro-Pilot. We brought my dad out of retirement to join us and I took off to the Far East to line up contracts with PC motherboard, add on card, case and power supply manufacturers. We setup contracts in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Seoul and Tokyo and started importing container loads of PC parts. We paid college student interns to assemble the parts into computers in my Pilot Air Freight warehouses and sold them to PC consultants in the local markets. The PC business became so lucrative that we sold all of the Pilot Air Freight franchises and we put all of our efforts into running Micro-Pilot. We built Micro-Pilot into a wholesale PC distributor with $10million in annual sales.

In 1986, my little sister Cherelyn started up a 10 acre farm in Alvin, a rural town just south of Houston with her husband Alvin Smith (we called him Alvin from Alvin) and their 5 kids. Cherelyn raised every kind of farm animal I've ever heard of there, so it was a great place to take the kids to learn about things I couldn't teach them. It seemed kind of like a petting zoo farm with ponies, sheep, calves, pot belly pigs, geese, chickens, tractors and gardens. They had a half acre pond stocked with catfish and bass and a great swimming hole for the kids to play in. We spent a lot of fun weekends at the farm with the kids.

In 1990, I traveled to Russia and Armenia just after the Soviet borders started opening up and landed a 5-year contract worth $125million for Micro-Pilot to supply PCs and technology to the former Soviet marketplace. We sold Micro-Pilot that same year in a deal worth $5million total with $1million in cash at the closing. As it turned out, the buyer got greedy on us and reneged on the balance of payments. We had to sue the buyer and Micro-Pilot in Court and eventually pushed Micro-Pilot into receivership pursuing our money. As an unsecured creditor, we ended up in the Court action only getting to keep the original $1million in cash plus enough extra monies to cover the attorney's fees. 

In 1991, we opened a 12,000 sq ft retail outlet called Computer & Office Warehouse or COW as it was affectionately called. COW ran full-page newspaper ads and late night TV ads to bring in the customers. My brother Jimbo flew in from Chicago to produce the TV ads for COW. My sister Kathy, an accountant, handled the bookkeeping. In the first couple of years we ran $10million in sales, but we really disliked the whole retail business and put COW out to pasture the 1st opportunity that the lease space came up for renewal. We had always sold PCs to professional resellers at Micro-Pilot, so we didn't enjoy working the long retail hours and dealing with the general public at that level. 

In 1993, I went to work in a contract network engineering position with Air Routing, an aviation related services company that specializes in the corporate business jet industry. I found it very enjoyable mixing my computer knowledge with my aviation background and creating solutions for the AR group of companies and their clients. For the past several years now, I have managed ARGIS, the IT division of AR. We are a Microsoft Solution Provider developing vertical software for the aviation industry. We support a 24x7 international flight operations group and weather center with 60 meteorologists and another 200 flight support personnel. We develop and host over 600 aviation, security and weather related web sites for AR's Fortune clients like GE, Texaco, American Express, etc. 

In 1996, Kevin Costner, Don Johnson, Cheech Marin and Rene Russo filmed a romantic comedy in Kingwood about a wayward golf pro trying to win the US Open in a movie called Tin Cup. I was cast as an extra in the film and got to spend a few weekends on the set participating in my 15 minutes of Hollywood fame and hobnobbing with the rich and famous. Most of my best takes ended up on the cutting room floor, so you probably won't get to see me recast in another major Hollywood flick anytime soon. 

In 1997, Liz, my wife of 17 years passed away. A year later to the day, my dad fell asleep in his recliner watching football on TV and never woke up. During my dad's last year with us, I met my 3rd wife, Luz, an ex banker and a lovely native of Colombia who was raised in the Bronx. Luz has become the love of my life and I am amazed at how much joy she brings me. Luz's only daughter Yanin is about to graduate from the University of Houston in May. Yanin's fiancé, Justin joined our company, went thru our intern training program and has now moved on to become an MCSE network engineer for BSI in Houston. Their wedding is planned for next December since of course Yanin has to graduate from college before she can get married and can't have kids till she's thirty. 

Meanwhile, my kids have all grown up also. Sherry, my oldest daughter graduated from Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Illinois. She met her husband, Mark at NIU and they now are both living in DeKalb and working for NIU. Mark is a local DeKalb boy who grew up across the street from DeKalb's celebrity claim to fame, Cindy Crawford. Sherry blessed us with our 1st grandson, Austin 4 years ago and just had their 2nd boy, Alex this summer.

Nadine, my 2nd daughter, graduated from Western Illinois University where she met her husband Tim. Nadine and Tim settled in the Galesburg/Peoria area where they both teach at the High School level. Nadine teaches Special Ed and Tim coaches baseball and basketball. Nadine just blessed us with our 3rd grandson, Ben this summer.

Michelle, my stepdaughter from Liz, graduated from Sam Houston State University with a finance degree and works as a pipeline accountant for Texaco. She lives with her fiancé, Dave who manages Unix based Internet firewalls for Chase's online bank in Houston. Dave is a former national water polo team player who had to drop the sport due to shoulder injuries. Of course, Dave was an avid fan during the recent Olympics watching his former teammates on TV compete for the Gold in Sydney.

Jahn Christopher, my son and the youngest of the litter, graduated from Kingwood High School in May. He scored a 1250 on his SAT and is now a fulltime student at University of Houston. Jahn (named after the Hindu god of Peace) is an intelligent (takes after his mother), good looking boy (takes after his father) and accomplished athlete who works out at the gym everyday and looks like he belongs on the cover of GQ magazine. 

We travel to Illinois at least twice a year to visit the family. After a recent trip to Illinois late this summer I had my annual physical and was diagnosed with stage 2 bladder cancer. I underwent two surgeries and they removed my right kidney, ureter and three tumors in the urinary track. I am back at work again and will finish my weekly chemo treatments just prior to Thanksgiving. My outlook is very good. Instead of me traveling to Illinois this holiday season, the kids and grandkids are all coming to Texas to visit.

We are extremely grounded in family activities and get togethers and schedule some kind of excuse to meet every month for family pool parties, dinners, birthdays, etc. Luz and I host a lot of the dinners and it's not unusual to have 20 people at a time. (I have 7 brothers and sisters, 28 nieces and nephews and 3 grandsons.) 

My sister Debbie lives with her family in Colorado, so we usually find an excuse to go skiing in the winter and hiking in the summer every couple of years. For two Christmas seasons, we reserved 4 log cabins at Rocky Mountain National Park and held Legh-Page family cross country ski vacations. My little brother Jimbo, the television producer who lives in Lake Zurich, Illinois, edited the videos from the trips, added sound tracks and made little family movies for everyone to keep and enjoy. 

Last year we rented a 60-foot houseboat on Lake Powell and had a little family get together with ski boats and wave runners. We have a 5 bedroom home rented on the North shore of Oahu for a couple of weeks in mid January for a little Legh-Page family get together. My brother, Jimbo, his wife Shelley and I have a 2-week trip to China booked for May. Jimbo and Shelly are adopting their 2nd baby girl from Nanjing in China and I am going on the trip as their nanny. 

Last weekend, I took the boat out and went fishing for bull redfish in Galveston with my little brother Rob who lives in Dallas. I have started working out at the gym again after my surgery to get back in shape for water skiing again this spring. 

So how has life unfolded for me. Well I am as happy to be alive as any man I know and hoping I get to stay that way for a little while longer. I love a lot and am loved a lot in return. Life has been exceptionally good and we have been very blessed. I didn't expect to have to deal with cancer at this early a point in my life, but I am happy that I caught it when I did and hope that I get to put it behind me. I still have a lot more livin I would like to do, if I am fortunate enough to have the opportunity. If not, I have no complaints. 

I have traveled the world and been successful professionally without the benefit of a good college education. I raised some exceptionally wonderful kids into successful and loving adults. I have seen the next generation of Legh-Page boys sprout up and this is mighty fine looking crop of youngsters. The family is thriving and financially grounded. Everyone has exceptional morals and are genuinely good human beings. (Legh-Pages are known to be givers, not takers.) Life is good; thanks for asking.