Growing up Under Communism – My Father the Mentor

My father was 28 years old when I was six. He had a small business repairing industrial electric motors for the factories in my home town. These motors were large enough for me to play inside the motor core at that age. He had several people working for him, while he was studying at two universities simultaneously to get his mechanical and electrical engineering degrees. He did get both degrees and became a professor at the local university.

When I was eight years old, my father found a collection of adventure books, translated from English, hundreds of them (weekly publications). These stories were so engrossing, that I would go and hide on the roof of my house to read them. His intent was to develop in me a thirst for reading. It worked.

At about the same time, my father purchased for me a projector and dozens of movies (silent) such as Charley Chaplin, Harold Lloyd and others. I set up a private movie theater in my bedroom for my friends, and they loved it.

My father was an intellectual as well as a handy man. He had tools and could fix anything in our house. He tried hard to instill all that in me. We had a syringe in the house and my father explained to me how to use it in an emergency. I never had to use it. Nobody got sick in our house. He also trained me how to prevent or put out fires. That is because I almost set our house on fire twice, when I was much younger.

By the age of 15 I had a dark room and the knowledge to develop photo film and make hard prints. Of course I had a camera. This was an incentive to explore photography. In the same time span, my father gave me the tools and motivation to build a radio receiver from scratch. The most difficult part of the project was building the chassis from a plain sheet of aluminum which I had to be bent and formed into a case to hold the rest of the electronic components. Crafting the aluminum case was the most difficult element of the whole project because had to be perfect, and the radio worked. I was only fifteen and did not even know how important that simple exercise was. I eventually became an electronics design engineer.

I was eight. At Christmas time, Santa Claus brought me a pair of small skies. Next day I got up at five o’clock in the morning, went outside, pitch dark, put my skies on, all alone, and went down the steep street. By the time my parents woke up, I was already home and happy that I mastered how to turn and stop on my skies. My parents did not even know I had done that. I eventually became national ski champion.

One day, I was waking down the street going home. I must have been 12 or so. We still had horse drawn carriages in my home town. I noticed my father riding in one of those things with a bicycle right in front of him. I ran and jumped in. He was surprised to see me. The bicycle was supposed to be a surprise. I did become a national bicycle champion.

Presently, Tr Cojoc is retired in California and he is advising clients in financial matters, on how to preserve capital as well as high risk investment strategies such as trading foreign currency or FOREX.

You can find out more at     Financial Adviser