To be honest, I thought I had removed all links to this page, so I'm not sure how somebody could find it. Maybe it's still in Google, and some combination of search items brought you here. So, congratulations, I guess. You've found an obscure page describing details of my life that few people would be interested in.
Wow, if you're reading this you're either really bored, really want to know more about me, or accidentally followed the wrong link somewhere. If you got here accidentally, why don't you try taking a look around the rest of my site. Some of it is pretty interesting. If you really meant to be here, read on.
I was born in 1978. My family was living in Amityville, PA, at the time. My full name is Jeffrey Richard Lewis. My middle name is the same as my grandfather's on my mom's side. My first name just fits the scheme. (My two older brothers have names that begin with "J", named after my dad and grandfather. Since their names started with J, mine had to, too).
When I was still too young to remember, my family moved to Walkersville, MD, just outside Frederick. I have a few early memories from there, but we moved back to Pennsylvania while I was still two years old. We moved back to the same house in Amityville. The town was so small that the post office was in the general store. But I really don't remember a whole lot from there, either, because we moved again before I started kindergarten. But this time, it wasn't very far. We moved about 15 minutes away to North Coventry, just outside Pottstown. It was a brand new house that my parents had built, and it was their dream house at the time. This is the house that I really consider myself growing up in. I lived there from the time I started kindergarten through eighth grade. We had two acres of land, with about a hundred acres of woods behind us. When we first moved in, it was just us, another brand new house on one side of us, an old farm house on the other side of us, and an empty field across the street with even more woods behind it. By the time we moved out, the empty field across the street had a few houses in it, and the woods behind them had a housing development, but we still had the hundred acres of woods behind us.
We were in the Owen J. Roberts school district. The school district was organized into several (I think 4) elementary schools, and then one middle school and one high school on the same property. I went to North Coventry Elementary, and then to Owen J. Roberts Middle School. I played soccer, wrestled, was in the marching band, and tried a season of long distance running for the track team. Outside of school, I played intramural soccer, and was in Boy Scouts (Troop 95). Scouts was probably one of my favorite activities. The troop I was in went camping every month, and that's what made it worth while. If it hadn't have been for the camping, I probably would have dropped out of it. But they did do the camping, so I went on to get my Life badge before we moved away. I was also inducted in the Order of the Arrow (Octoraro Lodge #22).
The same time I started high school, we moved back to Maryland again. Not back to Walkersville, but to a different town about 20 minutes away, Mt. Airy, which was still just outside Frederick. I lived there for the four years I was in high school (Linganore High, for those that wanted to know). To tell the truth, this was probably the period of my life where I was the least social. Don't get me wrong- I still had friends that I hung out with, but I didn't have that many close friends. And I didn't go out of my way to make them, either. But, I did make a handful of good friends (I continued to hang out with them in later years, so that in college I actually knew more people from my high school than I did in high school). And I still did do stuff in high school. I played soccer, wrestled, and was on the academic team, and lettered in the latter two (the academic team letter still seems a little weird, though). I stuck with scouts (Troop 268) and ended up earning my Eagle. I also had friends outside scouts that went camping. High school was when I first started backpacking (my other troop only ever did car camping), and I've been doing it ever since, albeit not quite as often. I even got my parents started on backpacking. High school is also where I picked up the name Fatboy, which stuck with me all the way through college. My good friends still call me that, but I introduce myself as Jeff, now.
After graduation, I went to the University of Maryland to study Aerospace Engineering. There was really never any debate in my mind as to what I was going to study. One of my earliest memories is throwing a toy helicopter out a second story window, and then wondering why it didn't fly. I was only one or two at the time. I'm not going to say that that was the start of it all, but it's pretty indicative of how much I loved aviation. The only debate I had was whether I wanted to specialize in aviation or space. I guess because of the accessibility of it, I decided to go with aviation. I joke that who wants to study rocketry- anybody could put a big rocket on a pointed cylinder and shoot it into space, but I still do like it. And with space planes being a real possibility in the future, I may end up getting to get into space flight, too.
At Maryland, I was selected to be a part of Gemstone, a division of the Honors Program. Gemstone is a rather new program at Maryland (I was part of the first class to participate in it), taking students from many disciplines and putting them into research teams of about a dozen students per team. Starting in the sophomore year, the teams begin a research project that will last three years. The team I was on was called the Outerspace Team. We looked at building in situ propellant production plants on the moon and on Mars, to reduce the amount of fuel that would need to be launched from Earth, resulting in cheaper space flights to the planets. I also spent a semester on the Human Powered Sub project, which payed for half of my SCUBA training and certification. My senior year I participated in the AeroDesign© East competition. Our team placed 13th out of 40.
My first summer break in college I decided that I didn't want to go back to work for KFC. I went over to the local airport and asked all the different places there for a job. So, I spent the summers of '97 and '98 working at Control Aero at Frederick Airport. I worked as a line boy, fueling planes and giving a hand in repairing them, and also spent time working in the office. I took advantage of being at a flight school and took flying lessons. I first soloed on July 1, 1997. After two summers of flight training, I finally got my private pilot license on August 6, 1998. If you want to read it, here's a short essay about how I learned to fly.
After a year of kindergarten, 5 years of grades school, 7 years of middle and high school, and 2 and a half years of college, I had had just about as much school as I could handle. I can't pinpoint the exact time I started to hate school, but I can remember not wanting to go as early as second grade. So to suffer through 12 and half more years was pretty tough. I needed a break. I also needed money, and job experience so someone would hire me once I graduated. So I applied for a co-op. During the spring semester and summer of '99, as well as the following summer and winter break, I worked for Lockheed Martin, on the Solid Rocket Motor Disposition in Russia Program (SRMDRP). I stayed in College Park, so I had to ride the Metro to D.C. every day. The program was designing a system to contain solid rocket motors in a firing chamber, and capture all the gases released during the burn. The gases were then sent through scrubbers, so that there was no bad pollution. The program was originally a part of Lockheed Martin Energy Technologies, but Lockheed got rid of that company and it became Energo Tech. We were the only division of Energo Tech that made any money, but unfortunately, the program didn't work out. There is a .pdf file on the House of Representatives website explaining why (mainly political). But, it was a good job for an undergrad student, and it gave me the break from school that I needed. My grades had started to slip before the co-op, but after it I went back and got 4.0's every semester until I graduated.
After graduation, I went to work for MTSI (Modern Technology Solutions, Inc.) The company does aerospace consulting for the government. I started with the company in June of 2001, and did most of my work on the Ballistic Missile Defense Program. I still stayed living near College Park for that job, actually in Greenbelt. Since the job was in Alexandria, I had to commute half an hour each way. But for the D.C. area, that's pretty good. The only place where I got tied up in traffic was trying to get across the Wilson Bridge. And once I adjusted my hours to going in a little later and leave around 6:30, I hardly hit any traffic at all. I enjoyed the job, especially the people I worked with, but like I said, I like airplanes, and I've always wanted a job doing actual design work.
In the summer of 2003, I moved yet again, this time to Wichita Falls, Texas. I started working for CarterCopters, a company designing a new type of rotorcraft that ought to be able to fly as fast as fixed wing airplanes. I've been learning a lot about design engineering at this job, and I've really been enjoying myself.
While I was at Maryland, I spent a semester playing rugby. It was pretty fun, and I was starting to get the hang of it. I just didn't have enough time to be on an organized team and get my school work done (it gave me much more appreciation for what student athletes do). But, one of my friends played pickup roller hockey, so, so as not to be completely sedentary, I started going out there with him. I couldn't skate, so I played goalie in my sneakers. It's not as bad as it sounds. A lot of guys that could skate still played goalie in their sneakers, to keep from tearing up their skates on the asphault. I did that for a while, going down to the rink whenever I got a chance. Both of us played one season in the Maryland Intramural Roller Hockey Club, but then went back to playing pickup. One day, after I had already graduated, we had just finished up playing a pickup game, when a group of guys out there came up to us and asked us to play on their team in a few of the leagues around the area. So we did, me still in my sneakers. Eventually, my team wanted to play in a league that required everybody to wear skates, so I did eventually learn how to skate. I really enjoyed the atmosphere of playing hockey on a team like that; you got to know your teammates really well, and you'd end up hanging out for a while after the games. I found a league down in Texas once I moved down there. It wasn't year round like the leagues in D.C., and the teams didn't stick together, so it didn't have the same comraderie. I ended up playing in that league for two years. I started playing tennis in the hockey off season to give me something to do to keep in shape when I wasn't playing hockey. I was horrible when I first started out, but now I've progressed to the point of just being bad (actually, I'm good enough now that the better players actually have to try a little bit when they play against me - it's not just a cake walk). I know tennis (to me at least), carries a bit of a snobbish implication, and it's not as "cool" as hockey, but it's a lot easier on the knees, and it seems like the type of sport I'll be able to play for years to come, so I think I'll stick with it.
Together with my great uncle, my family owns a 1947 Erco Ercoupe 415-D (If you don't know, that's a type of airplane). The tail number is N3888H. I got checked out in it in the beginning of the fall '98 semester and soloed in it that Thanksgiving break. It's a great airplane to fly. If you want to read more about it, click here. For more information on Ercoupes, follow some of my links.
On October 18th, 2002, I met a woman named Irma. We started off as friends, but one thing lead to another, and on June 5th of 2004, we got married (Wedding Photos). Our honeymoon was in French Polynesia, specifically Bora Bora, Moorea, and Tahiti. Irma had a daughter named Alex, who was 3 years old when I met them. I adopter her once we were married. I love the both of them, and I'm pretty sure that they love me.
Well, that's all I really feel like writing. If you still want to learn more about me, take a look at this site. It gives a good sense of what I like to do. My e-mail address is webmaster@jefflewis.net, if you want to aske me any questions.