It’s a slow day at work here at work so I decided to go ahead and put together a biography of what’s happened with me since Will Rogers.After high school I attended Oklahoma State for 6 years and got my bachelor and master’s degree in Industrial Engineering. During my master’s degree I thought I was going to get drafted so I joined the ROTC and spent 6 fun filled weeks at Fort Knox. Turns out I had a high lottery number and decided the army life was not for me. <BR>I had 3 or 4 job offers after college but decided to take the only one that was in Tulsa which was with Amoco. I worked there for a couple of years but was worried about getting transferred to Chicago. Like any good Tulsan I went to work for Williams Companies in a small Industrial Engineering group that they had just started. I worked at Williams for about 10 years, had various jobs within Williams and ended up in a systems development group. My boss at Williams left for another Tulsa company, Reading and Bates and I followed her (yes her) to that company where I stayed 5 years. Reading and Bates was part of the oil bust so in 1989 I found myself foot loose and fancy free with no job so out of panic my former boss and I started a company called Mersch-Bacher Associates (MBA) Inc.<BR>Not to overlook my family, right after college I married Linda Hutchens. Linda attended Barnard, Wilson and Central so some of you may know her. She is an active realtor with Coldwell Banker – so if you’re dying to move back here, call Linda. We have 3 children, all grown and 3 grandchildren.Mike (32) works with me at our current company and has one sweet child (Georgia (1)), Brian (29) is an energy trader for C. S. First Boston in downtown NYC and has 2 rowdy boys (Gavin (3) and Cole (1)) and last but not least we have a beautiful daughter, Andrea (22) who is starting her 3rd year of pharmacy school at the University of Oklahoma.<BR>Back to the work story. Mersch-Bacher Associates floundered along for a few years and began developing operational software for a computer IBM sold called the AS/400. Long story short IBM liked the software and decided to market it world-wide. IBM later came to us and bought one of the software packages which made us very happy. As I like to say a little money to IBM was a lot of money to us. In 1996, due to my son Mike’s urging, we started an Internet company we named WebZone. I really didn’t know much about the Internet but I learned as we gathered 13,000 customers by 1999. In 1999 we decided that we would cash in on the companies and sold MBA to some private investors and sold WebZone to a public company out of Denver. Within 2 years the public company fell prey to the dot-com bust and was bankrupt. We bought the Tulsa and OKC assets back from them for pennies on the dollar and started our current company TulsaConnect.<BR>I am active in First Baptist Church here in Tulsa and various other civic and business organizations around town. I used to play racquetball regularly but after several trips to the emergency room decided that golf was perhaps a better way of getting my exercise.</P><BR>I plan to work a few more years at TulsaConnect and then hopefully retire here in Tulsa with wife, children, grandchildren and golf That ought to keep me busy.<BR>My email is tonyb@tulsaconnect.com<BR>
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