My wife Nancy is owner of Nettis Insurance Agency which sells Property and Casualty Insurance and is housed in our own office building in West Long Branch. Nancy is very active with our pigeons sometimes clocking and going to the club.

My daughter Tina is Office Manager at a  Sporting Goods Manufacturer and lives in nearby Bricktown with her husband Dennis. Tina and Dennis have trained our young bird team through 20 miles to ready them for the training truck.

My son Tom who is a doctor of Chiropractic and just married in June 2004. Tom has offices in his own building in West Long Branch with living quarters on the second floor. He was active as a junior flyer and then high school and college kept him too busy being very active in sports. Then college and now his own business, but you never know if the bug will reignite his interest later on.

Last but not least is our career girl Sheri who lives in Hoboken and works for A.M. Best Co. Sheri does a lot of traveling for her job but she does come home for a weekend here and there and when she travels we get to dog-sit her precious dog "Mandi". Sheri was always a busy girl and never involved with the pigeons except to take them to school for "show and tell".

I always get asked "was it my father who ran a business in the Garment Center in New York", so to set the record straight, NO, it was me. This is what I did prior to Financial Planning. I was President and partner in a women's fashion manufacturing firm in New York Garment Center with factories in Long Island, Florida and Georgia. Our show room was on Broadway in Manhattan and we had sales reps in Dallas, Atlanta, Miami and Los Angeles. It was my job to design the line and setup for the sales reps for the various shows throughout the year, so I was on the road a lot. This also enabled me to visit lofts around the country and through this I made a lot of new friends.

When my son became interested in sports (Pop Warner Football) at 8 years old I decided I didn't want to miss any of it by traveling 2 weeks a month so I sold my share of the business and eventually got into financial planning and here we are.

My dad (Tom Sr.) was always very active in the sport with me. He never missed a club meeting or shipping night, and just enjoyed being around the guys. Training was his thing and if I got lazy I would hear it from him. When we didn't do well he would say pack them up for two tosses a day. When I was working in Manhattan and traveling a lot I bought a small Toyota pickup truck and had baskets made for the back of it. It also had a cap. I rigged up the door of the loft with 8 holes with sliding doors that matched up to the doors on the crates on the truck. All he had to do was back up to the door, match up with some help from my wife, then go inside the loft through the back door, slide open each hole and tap a stick and the birds would run in with Nancy helping him on the outside to shut and open each hole. Then off he went usually 30 to 50 miles.

He liked to sit in Washington Crossing Park with his coffee and newspaper and let them go 2-3 at a time. The highlight for me was when I took him to England and Belgium and saw how he enjoyed meeting my many friends that he had only heard me talk about and now got to meet them. I'm sure he is still watching me on race day.