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Stewart Ogilby, Sr.



The Ogilby farm in Hudson, Ohio


When there was work to be done on the family farm my brother and I handled it.

In my teens after passing senior life saving I became certified as an American Red Cross Water Safety Instructor. I taught swimming to beginners, intermediate, and advanced. I worked as a lifeguard close to home one summer and on a New York City beach the following summer.

The next summer I was appointed head lifeguard and waterfront manager at an Ohio private park (Tamsin), having been recommended for the job by the Red Cross manager in Akron, Ohio.

During the final months of my senior high-school year a war began in Korea and I received a draft card in the mail.

Rather than being drafted into the army, I enlisted at the Akron, Ohio Naval Air Station into the Naval Air's O-2 training program. After switching schools to accomodate a schedule, I was permitted to graduate high-school.

Members of the F4U Vought Corsair, Squadron VF22 were sent to Korea. My multi-engine, Squadron VR-651 remained in the USA. Navy planes in which I flew included the PBY (Catalina flying boat), TBF (Grumman Avenger torpedo bomber), R4D (Gooney bird), SNB (Expeditor), and the SNJ (North American T-6 Trainer).

I loved to fly and wanted to get my "wings" as a Navy pilot. College graduation was required for admission to Navy flight school. My Commanding Officer recommended me for a Navy college scholarship which was approved.

As an enlisted man from "the fleet", I was awarded a direct commission signed personally by Dan Kimball, U.S. Secretary of the Navy. Ordered to report to the Captain of the Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps unit at Ohio State University, at age nineteen I may have been the country's youngest man with a Navy commission. Students at the Navy military academy in Annapolis, Maryland, receive their officer's commission upon graduation.

After my second college year I was ordered to report for cross-training during the summer aboard the USS Iowa, one of the U.S. Navy's four huge battleships. After crossing the stormy North Atlantic Ocean south of Greenland, I had the opportunity to visit Edinburgh Scotland, London England, and Oslo Norway.

News regarding military action in far off Korea was confusing. I began to realize that, as a result of having grown up from eight years old during the Second World War, I held a previously uunquestioned military attitude that had developed as a result of four years of incessant wartime military propaganda.

The major change from my decision for a military career occurred aboard the USS Iowa. When returning across the Atlantic via Guantanamo Bay, Cuba to the Norfolk, Virginia Naval Base, I read books that I had bought from vendors at the entrance to St. Paul's cathedral when on shore leave in London. One was an English translation of Goethe's Faust. Another, that I still have, discloses a dilemma involving idealism and personal ethics.

When I returned from the summer's sea training, by exercising a clause in my contract I legally disenrolled from the officer training program. The understandably angry Navy captain reminded me that I was still in the United States Navy. He told me that he was going to watch me carefully. If I failed to be enrolled in college at any time in the future, I would be immediately ordered to the front lines in Korea.

No student ever had a greater incentive to remain in college. With my Navy pay eliminated, I struggled financially with various part-time jobs to pay for my college education. By the time I received my BS degree the Korean "war" had ended. After forty months from my enlistment I was mailed an honorable discharge.

Military action in Southeast Asia resumed twenty years later, escalating into a disastrous war with massive injuries and deaths for a generation of young Americans and Vietnamese. If I had the magic today to turn my age back to seventeen I would not enlist in the military. If drafted, I might have taken the trail blazed twenty years later by many of the brightest college students to avoid being obliged to turn Vietnam into a living hell for its farm families (Google "Agent Orange"), its other citizens, and my country's poorly managed loyal military persons.

Students headed to Canada rather than help the bankers, the Pentagon's career military men, and corporations having lucrative war contracts. The latter comprise what retiring President Dwight Eisenhower called America's "military-industial complex". Its willfully blind partipants support war criminals, including those who keep a low profile.

Eisenhower, a military major general, was responsible for deaths of up to ONE MILLION men and boys from Germany who peacefully surrendered at the end of World War2. They were put in prisoner of war camps for which Eisenhower was responsible. He deliberately had those specific camps reclassified to prevent The International Red Cross from being involved with them! That unpleasant fact has been vehemently denied, given "Ike"'s iconic image. I suggest that anyone curious about that well documented historical matter READ FULLY THIS LINK

The ranking military man, my Navy captain, could have ordered me sent to Korea or elsewhere. He enabled me to earn a college degree, something that neither of my hard working parents, growing up through the depression years, had been able to do.

When I graduated and received a BS degree, the "war" (they had the gall to call it a "police action") had ended. I then worked for two years in highly interesting but low paying laboratory research jobs.

To earn more money I drove a large GMC620 truck that is today considered to be a classic over the road for exactly one year.

After saving enough money, I returned to Columbus, Ohio and enrolled in graduate school. Thanks to having a high under-graduate grade-point average, I was unexpectedly offered a paid graduate teaching assistantship. I taught basic biological science, an elective course, to undergraduates for one full academic year while following my advisor's recommended path of study and independent research designed to earn me a PhD.

When that school year ended, after considerable thought and discussion with my brother who was enrolled in graduate school, his college costs being paid by an employer, I decided to leave academia permanently, bypassing a teaching career in favor of greater financial opportunity. I realized that scientific curiosity could be pursued throughout life as a hobby. It wasn't difficult, in those days, to find a job offering training, a company car, and a steady paycheck.

For the next twelve years I worked with corporations, learning as much as I could. Six years were spent with Lever Brothers Company, the U.S. division of Unilever LTD, one of the world's largest corporations. After working with the company in Ohio for two years, and having had two years of corporate sales training, I was promoted to New York City.

I spent the next four years with the company in key-account sales, sales scripting, new product introductions, and brand marketing. I bought a house in Cold Spring, New York above Hudson River's Bear Mountain Bridge. A trip to midtown Manhattan by train took an hour and a half each way.

After working for six years with Lever Brothers' consumer products, I decided to move into industrial sales. For the next six years I carved out a strong career in the truck equipment industry, handling distributor marketing, customer product development, and direct sales to the nation's leading truck leasing companies (Hertz, Avis, Ryder, Leaseway, National). Spearheading sales for two major truck-body manufacturers, I was recruited to turn around Lyncoach and Truck Company, which I was able to do in less than four months, saving the employees their jobs. The company is prospering to this day.

Having become a single parent of my twelve year old son, after researching Ohio's public schools I teamed up for roughly a decade in Worthington, Ohio (location of the state's top rated public high-school) with a professional nurse practitioner, a divorced highly responsible mother of three, including a boy my son's age.

I read a shocking booklet about life insurance, published by Consumer Reports Magazine. Needing to work close to home, I began a business by conducting two financial training seminars and one public seminar weekly. I created Unified Financial Services and Unified Data Systems.

Within three years my business had grown into three offices with over thirty licensed agents. Each office was managed by an agent trained by me to be a General Agent. I wrote Financial Recovery, expanding the documentation presented by Consumer Reports and scores of other consumer oriented writers.

After my son was married, working, and learning an important business, in order to reconnect with my younger brother who had earned his PhD in geology (Dr. Rock), I moved to Sarasota, Florida. Bob lived in Tampa, Florida. We had ten years together again before he died from cancer. I miss him greatly.

For six years I spent evenings at the Cook Library of Florida State University's nearby New College until its 1:00 a.m. closing time for the purpose of acquiring a comprehensive self-directed liberal arts education, augmenting my science background. What I learned in those six years changed my life completely.

When the public digital information revolution arrived in 1992 I bought a Personal Computer and spent hours figuring out how to operate it. Studying the book, DOS for Dummies. I created the earliest online social networking resource, The Email Club, for more than four thousand persons in over fifty countries.

Advancing information technology has historically been a catalyst for dissemination of ideas, knowledge, and progressive social values. Religious dogma, repression, and torture were challenged by the invention of moveable type by Johannes Gutenberg. The printing of books became too popular to remain totally controlled. Ancient wisdom, formerly laborously copied in monestaries, became available as printing businesses proliferated throughout Europe, particularly in Italy. The Western world's classics, the Hebrew Bible and later, writings by Voltaire, Diderot, Montesquieu, Robespierre, Paine, and others accompanied social revolutions for better or worse.

My country has produced brilliant responsible men and women. Even the best schools I attended, which my parents struggled financially to afford, taught me little or nothing, over years, about their lives and writings. I read biography to research history and to discover their associates' writings, values, ideas, and biographies. I realized that in order to coherently share my own interesting discoveries I needed to develop competent writing skills.

I read and re-read works of writers whose written language I most admired. There is an easy limpid prose (analogous to Beethoven's musical "lion's paw") of Randolph Bourne in his famous essay, War is the Health of the State. I love the humerous sarcasm of H.L. Mencken in his famous essay about democracy, and the cool rational analysis in Albert Jay Nock's masterpiece, Our Enemy, The State.

Following six years of independent study I decided to create something of educational value by using the new digital resource, the internet's Worldwide Web. After teaching myself to write HTML code I constructed The Big Eye, an educational website.

When the Netscape web-browser arrived, The Big Eye was listed in Newsweek Magazine's November 20, 1995 issue. It received even greater publicity as the result of a full page St. Petersburg (Florida) Times article that was syndicated by Scripps Howard to the major newspapers throughout the country.

I changed The Big Eye's original URL after selling the domain name. Today "The Big Eye" can be found at WWW.BIGEYE.ORG

Sadly, after retiring from her exemplary nursing career as oncology nurse specialist at Ohio State University Hospital, my former Ohio partner died, ironically, of cancer.

Easily passing FINRA's Series65 examination, I registered Wisebird Financial, LLC. Having studied Henry Abts' book, The Living Trust, and working with the business he founded, I placed online Estate Planning Documents

By studying Google's algorithms I was early to grasp what soon came to be called "SEO" (Search Engine Optimization). Promoting several product lines, I developed profitable affiliate marketing.

Using The Big Eye website and traveling throughout Florida, my assistant, Sherry, and I trained mortgage brokers for four years explaining HUD's HECM reverse mortgage to many financially struggling seniors, saving their homes for them from greedy "line of credit" (2nd mortgage) banks, and relieving them of disheartening lifetime financial struggles.

When the real-estate market crashed in 2008 I bought a tall-rigged sloop and spent the next four years day-sailing with friends. In the evenings I enjoyed reading, as usual, and worked on improving my writing skills.

As a consequence of certain articles written by me and placed on The Big Eye website, I was overwhelmingly flattered, recruited by Gordon Duff, the Senior Editor of Veterans Today, to write as one of their columnists.

Over ten years (2007-2017) that popular website published thirty-four of my columns. After many columns that I wrote for Veterans Today, including those written by others, were oddly deleted, I retrieved several of mine and placed them on a "sister" website that contains my personal and other esoteric articles, located at BigEyeBlog.com

My 80th birthday party, May 14, 2013  (archived by Google, wait for pages to load)

Finally, 100% RETIRED, May 14, 2025

Member, HealthFit, Clark Rd., Sarasota
Member, YMCA, Bahia Vista St., Sarasota
Member, Sarasota Senior Friendship Center


Having outlived nearly every close friend, I wish to meet others OF ANY AGE who are interested in discussing subjects addressed in videos placed on The Big Eye. I would also greatly enjoy meeting an unattached mature lady in the Sarasota area who loves classical music, has a sense of humor, and would value some civilized companionship.





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