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Jerry F Pillarelli
Jerry F. Pillarelli was born in Chicago, Illinois. At the age of twelve, he moved with his family to Tucson, Arizona, where he attended the University of Arizona for one year before enlisting in th...view moreJerry F. Pillarelli was born in Chicago, Illinois. At the age of twelve, he moved with his family to Tucson, Arizona, where he attended the University of Arizona for one year before enlisting in the U.S. Army. During his four years of service, Pillarelli spent a year stationed near the 38th parallel in South Korea, where he worked on helicopters as an avionics specialist and doubled as an M60 machine gun door gunner. He transferred to North Carolina, where he had deployments to Panama and Alaska, and then moved to Stuttgart, Germany, for his remaining service working on the OV1 surveillance aircraft. While based overseas, Pillarelli toured sites throughout Europe including a thirty-day backpacking train trip through the Continent, working his way through the likes of Rome, Paris, Athens, London, and Amsterdam.When his enlistment ended, Pillarelli joined a local Tucson aviation company where he worked on biplanes for the movie The Pursuit of D.B. Cooper, starring Robert Duval and Treat Williams. After a year, he returned to the University of Arizona to pursue a bachelor's degree with a double major in accounting and management information systems (MIS). Upon graduation, Pillarelli moved to Houston, Texas, to take an MIS job with Shell Oil Company. Next, he moved to Atlanta, Georgia, to become a stockbroker with Raymond James & Associates for one year before going back into computing with Stockholder Systems, Inc. (which later became Servantes and Fiserv). Over the following seven years, he would hold several management positions with Mirant Corporation before returning to Fiserv. During his twenty-two years in Atlanta, Pillarelli would also hone his photography skills as a sports photographer for the Georgia Institute of Technology. In 2015, a cancer diagnosis inspired him to retire early and move back to Tucson, where he set up his current life as a full-time RVer, traveling the country visiting and photographing national parks. While on the road in 2017, in La Grande, Oregon, he escaped a 3 a.m. RV fire and had to put his life back together to complete his goal of photographing all fifty-nine (at the time) national parks. Since 2015, Pillarelli has traveled the U.S. from Alaska to American Samoa, Maine to Florida, and many points in between, visiting national parks in all fifty states and several U.S. territories. Motivated by Pillarelli's love of photography and national parks, this book is a compilation of his lifelong experiences as a traveler, whether interesting, poignant, embarrassing, or simply too amusing not to share. Although he is an experienced and published sports photographer, and has designs on developing travel and sports photo books in the future, Spectacular in a Losing Effort is his first written book.view less