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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 I became certified as an American Red Cross Water Safety Instructor. I taught all levels, beginners, intermediate, advanced, and senior lifesaving. I worked as a lifeguard close to home one summer, on a New York City beach the next summer, and the following summer I was head lifeguard and waterfront manager for an Ohio private park (Tamsin), having been recommended for the job by the Red Cross manager in Akron, Ohio.

During my senior high-school year a war began in Korea. Rather than being drafted into the army, I enlisted in the Navy's O-2 program at the Akron, Ohio Naval Air Station. Volunteering to fly, I collected what were called "five dollar flight skins" (worth a lot more today), a great way to make extra money. 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).

The personnel (pilots and ground-crew) attached to the F4u Vought Corsair Squadron; VF-22, were sent to Korea. My multi-engine Squadron, VR-651, remained in the USA. I wanted to get my "wings" as a Navy pilot. The problem was that college graduation was required for admission to Navy flight school at Pensacola, Florida. Looking back on it, I realize that an immature penchant for flying totally obscured and precluded sound analysis and judgement that I ought to have had regarding my values.

Recommended by my Commanding Officer I was awarded a government (U.S. Navy) college scholarship with pay. That opened the door to a college education toward graduating with a four-year degree. It was a wonderful unplanned opportunity for a farm boy from a "land poor" family.

Recommended from "the fleet", I was given a direct commissionm signed personally by Dan Kimball, U.S. Secretary of the Navy and ordered to report to the Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps (NROTC) unit at Ohio State University. At age nineteen I may have been the country's youngest man with a Navy commission.. Students at Annapolis, Maryland's military academy receive their commission upon graduation.

After two years of college I was ordered to report for cross-training 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 reports from Korea and Washington regarding a military action that would not be called a "war" were contradictory, confusing, and increasingly critical. The more that I heard and read, the less surprised I was to discover that by growing up in the USA, my military understanding had been manipulated by means of a combination of warfare propaganda and misinformation.

Today I am unable to recognize myself as that young man with largely unexamined ambitions for a military career. The major change from my decision for a military career occurred aboard the USS Iowa. During spare time 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 the dilemma between idealism and practical ethics. When I returned to college I disenrolled from the officer training program by exercising a legal clause in my contract.

The understandably angry Navy captain reminded me that I was attending college thanks to the United States Navy and 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. By the time I received my BS degree the Korean "war" had ended. It returned as a real war with massive injuries and deaths for a generation of young Americans twenty years later.

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 a trail blazed twenty years later by many of the brightest college students to avoid beimg obliged to create horror in Vietnam, a living hell for its farm families (Google "Agent Orange"), its other citizens, and my country's poorly managed but loyal young military persons. Students headed to Canada rather than help the bankers, the Pentagon's career military men, and corporations having lucrative war contracts, the war criminals referred to by outgoing President Dwight Eisenhower as "the military-industial complex".

That ranking military man, my Navy captain who could have ordered me sent to Korea or elsewhere, had enabled me to graduate from college, something that neither of my hard working parents had been able to do, growing up through the depression years. 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 interesting but low paying laboratory 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 money, I returned to Columbus, Ohio and enrolled in graduate school.

Thanks to having a high under-graduate grade-point average, I was unexpectedly given 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.

After reading a shocking booklet about life insurance, published by Consumer Reports, and 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 with over thirty licensed agents in three offices, each managed by an agent trained by me to become a General Agent. I wrote Financial Recovery, expanding material presented by Consumer Reports and scores of others.

After my son was married and working, 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 with the objective 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 networking resource, The Email Club, for more than four thousand persons in over fifty countries.

Advancing information technology has historically been a catalyst for dissemenation 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 pupular to remain totally controlled. Ancient wisdom, formerly laborously copied in monestaries, could be purchased. 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 fascinating associates, their writings, work, values, ideas, and biographies. Following six years of independent study I decided to create something of educational value using the new digital resource.

After teaching myself to write HTML code I constructed The Big Eye, an educational website. When the Netscape web-browser arrived, The Big Eye appeared in Newsweek Magazine's November 20, 1995 issue. It received more publicity as the result of a full page St. Petersburg (Florida) Times article that was syndicated by Scripps Howard to the nation's major city newspapers.

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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