When I was born, I was a baby, but it didn’t last. I did my first drawing as a wee lad of two years of age. I told my mother that it was an astronaut floating in space. She still believes it. I don't believe there were any astronauts floating free in space way back in 1963.

As a kid, I enjoyed drawing pictures. I have included a couple of those pictures here. I also liked to play with Lego and couldn't resist teasing my sister, Jessica. I particularly loved fourth and fifth grade at the Beechwood School in Mountainside, New Jersey.

By seventh grade though, I'd pretty much given up drawing.  I had set my sights instead on a career playing for the NBA.  After doing a bang-up job keeping the bench from floating away during my freshman high school basketball teams season, I released that dream. I just let it go one day and simply put, it did not come back.  Freed from the pressures of the NBA, I spent a good amount of time during those years fishing and working with our town’s EMS team in the ambulance, planning to ultimately go into some kind of medical profession.

Art had other plans for me though. Late in high school and through college at Bucknell University, drawing and I resumed our acquaintance. We’ve stayed friends ever since. I really discovered how much I loved to draw and that, even better, that I wasn’t half bad at it.  Putting my plans to be a doctor or dentist aside, I shipped off to art school at the Philadelphia College of Art.

Do you want to know what happened after that?  Since you have read this far, I’ll tell you. I met Rona, the beautiful and patient woman who would become my wife and I went to dental school. This actually coincided with the production of my first book, Piggie Pie which was written by the hilarious Margie Palatini. While studying anatomy and physiology and all the other stuff you need to be a dentist, I finished the illustrations for Piggie Pie. Piggie Pie is a lovely tale about a hungry witch and the creatures who don’t want to be her lunch. One book led to another and as I am writing this little story about myself, I have now illustrated fourteen children’s books with more to come. And guess what? I practice dentistry, too. Every day, I get to help people smile two ways: I help them have healthy teeth and my books give them a reason to grin.   It’s all working out great!  Sorry, NBA.   

 I also have three children, two chinchillas, two gerbils one gerbil and a smelly, but, loveable dog, Lucy. All three children like to draw. Lucy doesn’t like to draw very much.