For four generations Steve's family has been rooted in the U.S. aerospace and aviation industry. In 1972 while working on his Master's Degree in history at UCLA he discovered that there were no jobs for history professors anywhere in the U.S. Following in his mother's footsteps he earned a lifetime K-12 + Adult School degree and became an elementary school teacher in Burbank, CA. After four years of no raises, his wife begged his Lockheed Skunk Works brother-in-law to get him a job at Lockheed Burbank. One interview later in 1979 Steve was hired as an entry-level administrator in Lockheed's International Trade Development organization where they handled activity they called "Offset" in Canada, Australia, The Netherlands, and Portugal. Thus began the long journey to the true-story scandal infamously known as "The Letter Bomb". After twenty years at Lockheed, Steve went on to work for Boeing for eighteen years before retiring out of the Washington D.C. corporate office in 2020.