A Brief Intro...

My name is Salvatore Thomas DiFrancesca III - but my friends and family just call me Tom, that sorta' keeps things uncomplicated. With a big name like that, I either sound like royalty or a member of the mafia - I assure you that I am not affiliated with either “family”. By the way, the name is Sicilian - not Italian - and definitely not french. I love to rattle off my whole name to new people that I meet and then tell them "But my momma's last name was Davis - and she was from Rome, Georgia."

I grew up in the military - you know, one of those “military brats” who moved around a lot. A lot as in about 13 times before I graduated high school. Born in Miami, Florida - I lived in mostly the southern parts of the country, except for three and a half years in Alaska.

I did manage to graduate high school - barely, in the northern part of Florida, in a town called Niceville. I'm not kiddin' - there really is a town by that name. Before the town was named Niceville - it was called “Boggy”.

After I graduated high school, I pretty much bummed around for a year - then I joined the military. I wanted to do something exciting, so I joined the U.S. Coast Guard. Excitement is exactly what I got - I got to coordinate encrypted communications between the military, the Drug Enforcement Agency (D.E.A.), U.S. Customs, and various Sheriff's departments- during major drug interdiction operations - I even got to spend some time in the Caribbean during that time and got to fly in every type of Coast Guard aircraft there was.

I also coordinated a lot of search and rescue operations in the Coast Guard, had my fair share of success stories (rescues) and a sad amount of failures - drownings, unrecovered victims, property damage from breakaway river barges, etc.

I got out of the military in 1987 - I was tired of the 70 hour weeks, and the ulcers. It was time to do something different.