Born and raised in the Sacramento area, Eric has always had a natural talent for expressing his creativity. Mostly on a visual level, but he has dabbled with writing and even music during his 55+ years of age.
A skill set of drawing and painting came naturally at a young age. He found his love for photography as a tweener when his father Glenn let him use his Olympus OM-1 (Eric still has that camera today) on the valley floor of Yosemite National Park. What better place to find a passion for photography right? From that point on he was hooked. In the early 90s, he regularly enrolled in photography classes at American River Community College so he could have easy access to a darkroom and Photo Enlargers. It was during that time he found his love for filmmaking, and then took a few classes in that field as well.
In 1997 the dot com craze was in full swing. Eric packed his bags and moved North to Alaska to help someone he met online operate a small private Internet Service Provider in Anchorage. It was a crazy time filled with opportunities back then. Once established in Anchorage, Eric took advantage of those opportunities by designing websites for local dial-up users. He also taught classes such as Introduction to the Internet and Introduction to Web Design at the company’s training center.
Within 2 years of living in Anchorage, Eric found himself working for the NBC affiliate KTUU Channel 2 Broadcasting. He helped design and develop a tourism themed website called inAlaska.com. At the time, it was the largest tourism website in the state of Alaska. Then came September 11, 2001 (911). The initial aftermath of 911 left a dismal short-term tourism numbers forecast for the state, and as a result… The project was scrapped shortly thereafter and the team was laid off. Including Eric.
Eric was unemployed for the first time in his life. After six weeks of collecting checks for job-searching, he landed a job at the Anchorage Daily News; a newspaper publishing company owned by the Sacramento based McClatchy Company. At the time, the company was working on a new project called Alaska.com. It was a tourism-based website with a highly coveted domain that was purchased for one million dollars by The McClatchy Company. The pressure was on! Eric and a team of highly talented people quickly created a comprehensive website that would become the second highest visited website in the state; right behind ADN.com. ADN.com was the Newspaper’s primary website. While continuing to help maintain Alaska.com, Eric made his creative presence known early on by creating online slideshows. Perhaps his greatest claim to fame in Alaska was the first creation of an interactive online map of the Iditarod Sled Dog Race. He first created the informative user-friendly interactive map with an application called Macromedia Flash. Some of you older techies reading this may remember that application. The app Adobe purchased from Macromedia and made Flash its own. It is a project Eric is very proud of because every online interactive Iditarod map you see, to this day, is a variation of the maps Eric first created in 2003.
After 11 very productive years in Alaska, Eric decided to move back home to California with his Alaska-born dog Boomer in tow. It was 2008 and the recession at the time made it seem as if the world was coming apart. Of course it didn’t and Eric and Boomer acclimated well to California life in no time at all. It was great to be closer to family again. Eric wasted no time at all getting a hustle going to pay the bills. He started designing websites and doing online marketing for local businesses to make ends meet. He also resorted to his love for photography to generate an additional revenue stream. Headshots, portraits, food menus, real estate and an occasional wedding here and there to strengthen his photography skills and purchase higher-end equipment.
Eric found love a few years after returning to California. He met Ashley in 2012 and married her in February of 2017. They both now live happily in Rio Linda, California. When they are not trying to improve their home, Eric and Ashley frequently travel.
Eric recently decided to loosen up his entrepreneurial hustle and get a big-boy job in 2019 by accepting a position with the State of California; hence taking his hustle back to a daily grind. A good decision to add some stability at that point in his life.
2019 was a very interesting year for Eric. He wrote a screenplay for a short film called Next Phase. Production of the film has unfortunately suffered from the pandemic caused by Covid 19. Of course there are a lot of hurdles on the road to completion, but that seems to be the way things go when working on a creative project. Estimated time-frame to get it completed is unknown (at the time of this update).
That is Eric’s life in a nutshell — so far.