I was born in New Orleans and spent most of my early life in central Louisiana under the quiet and careful guidance of the nuns at Sacred Heart Grammar School in Pineville. It was terrifying. To this day, I will not allow my wife to wear a black and white dress. I then attended Holy Savior Menard Central High School (seriously, that’s the name) where I learned to fear men with the honorific “Coach.” Having learned that lesson and survived to graduation, I went to LSU in Baton Rouge and managed to graduate with a BS in Zoology and a minor in Chemistry in just five and half short years. It was one of the worst mistakes of my life. Not the college or the degree—the graduating from college. I had no idea how much fun I was having until I was no longer having so much fun. If I had known what I know now, I would still be attending the university, having amassed roughly 10,000 undergraduate hours and several million dollars in student loan debt.

After graduation I began living the American Dream: Got married a few times, got divorced a few times minus one, got several jobs, quit several jobs and despite all that, found that I didn’t have quite enough stress in my life, so I started my own business. And that, as we like to say in the industrial detergent business, corrected my pathetically anemic stress levels.

I now live in Hernando MS, a small town just 20 miles south of Memphis. In spite of my best efforts at sabotage, my business in Memphis is still thriving, and, at the age of 72, I still go to work every day to shake my fist and yell at the workers. They smile and say, “Yes sir, Mr. Gregg,” and then completely ignore whatever I said. We have a system, and it’s working.

I have a small house with a large greenhouse on several acres way back in the woods where I live with my wife, two cats, not nearly enough dogs, twelve chickens, an unknown number of mice (the cats are lazy and arrogant) and a few tropical fish. The fish are almost no trouble at all, and the dogs occasionally pay attention to me. It's a life.