In My Time: The Greatest Century of Change in the History of Man

Author Charles E. Willingham always said he would achieve millionaire status before he turns sixty years old. At the age of fifty-nine-one day before his sixtieth birthday-Willingham achieves his lofty goal. But it was a long, hard road.

Born in 1939, Willingham grows up in Texas picking cotton, feeding chickens, and graduating at the bottom of his high school class. But he soon catapults to the big time, becoming a U.S. Air Force Cold War spy, nearly getting shot down by Russian MIGs, and landing in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the building of the Berlin Wall.

After the Cold War, Willingham creates hardware at Cal-Tech to measure the cosmic microwave fields emitted from the theoretical Big Bang, and then helps develop the country's first weather satellites at Ford Aerospace. But it is when he enters the relatively new field of computer technology that he eventually makes his fortune working for computer software magnate Bill Gates.

With a host of laugh-out-loud escapades, In My Time is a classic rags-to-riches story and a vivid chronicle of one man's life in the twentieth century. A rollicking rollercoaster ride around the world and back, it is also a tale of Willingham's rugged individualism and hard-earned wisdom.

Charles E. Willingham has been a Cold War spy, computer pioneer, weather-satellite engineer, Microsoft support guru, sky-diver, windsurfer, and sailor with his own sailboat. He has traveled around the world.