Gary's experience with audio and communication goes back to an intercom system he and his best friend Mike wired between their houses back in 1959 at age 10. Wow! There was Mike's voice, any time they wanted to talk, without the telephone! Throughout high school and college (Loyola of Chicago), he pursued the complementary paths of ham radio for engineering, and broadcasting at the school radio stations for creativity. High school teachers report he pursued little else.

Then followed a brief side-track into the world of video (they called it television back then) for about 27 years. Gary learned the editing trade at Editel, and worked as a video editor at several Chicago post-production companies and at NBC's WMAQ-TV. He reminds us that half of any video production is audio, so he never left his roots in sound behind. And he recalls an old audio man once telling him that "nobody ever walks down the street whistling the picture."

In 1990, he moved to Raleigh, and continued video editing for Franklin Video. Much of that time was spent with an Avid Media Composer. Now and then they'd spring him for a field producing job on programs like Inside Edition, America's Most Wanted, and Court TV.

In 2002, Gary finally saw the light (or stopped seeing the light, as the case may be) and returned to pure audio at SoundTrax. He claims to love working with the fun people and first class tools.

That ham radio thing has stuck around, too. You'll instantly recognize Gary's car in the parking lot. Peek in the window - it looks like a mini-Cape Canaveral control room in there. Or a State Police car. Not many people pass him out on the highway. There's more stuff at home. His callsign is KN4AQ.

Gary met his wife, Cyndi, through ham radio shortly after moving to Raleigh. Already holding a BSEE from NC State and running computers systems for big area companies, Cyndi enrolled in a ham radio class, and Gary stopped by with a video camera to shoot part of a documentary (he'd call it "home movie") he was making about the radio club's activity. His first memory of Cyndi: that's a very cute young lady studying Morse code. Cyndi's first memory of Gary: I wish that annoying man with the video camera would go away. They were married in 1998, and emerged from the church through a makeshift arch of ham antennas.

Gary's merged his media experience and ham hobby into being the head Public Relations person for ham radio in North Carolina for ham radio's national organization, the ARRL (www.arrl.org), and for the local radio club (www.rars.org) and emergency communications group (www.wakeares.org). And he's been dabbling in the print world, too. After editing club newsletters and web sites, he's taken on a full-fledged regional ham radio magazine, the SERA Repeater Journal (www.sera.org). It's way too geeky for the average human, but if you're interested, we keep a current copy around the studio somewhere.

Oh, yeah. Every once in a while he does that "talking to people around the world" ham radio thing. But he's more interested in local communication and being part of ham radio's backup link during disasters when regular communication channels go down.

And the Buddha?

That was Perry's idea. Maybe it refers to the way Gary remains calm and centered when everyone else is racing around in a deadline-induced frenzy. Or maybe it's just that he couldn't find a better picture and got tired of looking. Gary says he appreciates all religions equally.