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Tuesday 18 October 2011

Michael J. Mason

Mike was born at 6.00 a.m. on May 26th, 1940 to a modest middle class English family in the small village of Amblecote in the West Midlands of England. By coincidence this was his mother's 26th birthday. He saw little, if anything at all, of his father until the termination of hostilities at the end of WWII. His education started off in a modest way, until in 1950 he was packed off to boarding school, a never to be forgotten gesture by his maternal grandfather, Blockbuster Brooks, who gained his nickname from the bombs he designed and built during WWII.

After his schooling Mike, who had failed to make the grade that would have enabled him to enjoy a career in medicine, tried his hand at banking and laboratory work, the latter in the field of solid fuel rocket motors. He later settled on an early career in the armed forces, in which he became a successful air warfare and air weapons instructor. After serving in the Fleet Air Arm in Buccaneers for a little over eight years, Mike emigrated from the UK to what was then Rhodesia, remaining in the field of aviation, specifically in Air Traffic Control.

After Rhodesia became Zimbabwe and started the downhill trend under the new ownership of Robert Mugabe, Mike took his family, now consisting of a wife, a stepson and a daughter, to South Africa. This was after a brief stopover as SATCO at Biggin Hill Airport, the UK's busiest general aviation airport. Mike spent further time in ATC in Johannesburg and Abu Dhabi before becoming involved in computers, a field in which he has been involved in, one way or another, since 1972. Today Mike has a new wife, Liz, an American from North Carolina. He is semi-retired, and spends his time writing content for the Internet and designing websites. Mike and Liz plan to relocate to NC as soon as they have sold their Martindale, EC, Farm. Mike's own websites include mikescopywriting.com, info-nc.com, news-splash.com and The Masons.


© Michael J Mason 2011