About Stevie G. Davis

I grew up in deep poverty in rural Alabama, in a world where “cheap houses” weren't an investment strategy or a television renovation project. They were simply the places we could afford to live.

Some had no indoor plumbing. Some barely kept out the winter cold. We moved often, from one cheap house to another, while my family did whatever was necessary to get by.

I didn't grow up with money, connections, or a carefully mapped-out future.

But I learned early that where you start does not have to determine where you finish.

That idea is at the heart of this website.

From Rural Poverty to the United States Air Force

At 17, I joined the United States Air Force.

The Air Force gave me something I had rarely experienced growing up: structure, opportunity, responsibility, and a path forward.

I began my military career in medicine, working in hospitals and eventually serving with the 9th Aeromedical Evacuation Squadron at Clark Air Base in the Philippines. As an aeromedical evacuation technician, I flew missions throughout the Pacific and Southeast Asia, helping move sick and injured patients aboard military aircraft.

Over the course of my Air Force career, I accumulated thousands of hours aboard aircraft including the C-9A, C-130, C-141, C-5, KC-135 and others.

My career eventually moved from medicine into Medical Information Systems, just as computers were beginning to transform the way hospitals and the military operated.

In 1992, at the Medical Information Systems Symposium in Denver, I was selected as the U.S. Air Force Medical Information Systems NCO of the Year.

For a kid who had once lived in houses without indoor plumbing, that was a long way from where the story began.

From the Air Force to Corporate Technology

After leaving military service, I continued my career in information technology.

I worked for Electronic Data Systems (EDS) and later Hewlett-Packard, eventually working as an Enterprise Cloud Services Architect.

My career included enterprise networks, servers, data centers, cloud computing, firewalls, routers, switches, load balancers, systems architecture, troubleshooting and automation.

I never followed the traditional path into technology. I did not begin with a four-year computer science degree or a carefully planned IT career.

Much of what I learned came from curiosity, experience, self-study, and a willingness to keep learning when technology changed.

That has been a recurring pattern in my life.

Sometimes the next opportunity doesn't look anything like the road you thought you were traveling.

Why I Write

After retiring, I began writing more seriously about poverty, technology, work, aging, opportunity, failure, success and the lessons accumulated over a lifetime.

This website isn't about pretending that poverty can be solved with a motivational slogan.

Poverty is complicated.

It affects the opportunities people see, the choices they make, their education, confidence, expectations, relationships and even the way they think about money long after their financial circumstances improve.

I know because I lived it.

I also know that escaping poverty financially doesn't necessarily mean leaving all of it behind emotionally.

That is why I write about both sides of the experience.

Some articles here examine the practical realities of poverty. Others deal with perseverance, perfectionism, careers, technology, scams, artificial intelligence, retirement, growing older and the ways our past continues to influence us.

I don't write as an academic studying poverty from a distance.

I write as someone who remembers what it felt like to live it.

Cheap Houses: A Memoir of Poverty and Reinvention in Rural America

Much of that story became my book:

Cheap Houses: A Memoir of Poverty and Reinvention in Rural America

Cheap Houses tells the story of growing up poor in rural Alabama, moving from one cheap house to another, surviving circumstances that seemed ordinary at the time because I didn't know anything different, and eventually finding a way forward.

It follows that journey from childhood poverty to military medicine, aeromedical evacuation, information systems, corporate technology and retirement.

But Cheap Houses isn't simply a story about escaping poverty.

It is also about what poverty leaves behind.

You can leave the cheap house.

You can build a career.

You can earn more money than you ever imagined earning as a child.

And parts of that childhood can still travel with you.

That is one of the central ideas behind both the book and much of what I write here:

Leaving poverty behind isn't necessarily the same as leaving it within.

Cheap Houses is available in Kindle, paperback and hardcover editions on Amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HJFF56NJ/

More Than One Story

Poverty is an important part of my story, but it isn't the entire story.

I've been an Air Force medic, an aeromedical evacuation technician, a medical information systems specialist, a corporate IT professional, a cloud architect, a motorcycle rider, a blogger and now an author.

I've watched computers move from something most people rarely encountered to devices we carry in our pockets.

I've watched artificial intelligence move from science fiction toward something capable of changing entire industries.

I've watched careers begin and end, technology transform the workplace, and people struggle with many of the same questions about money, opportunity and purpose that existed when I was young.

At this stage of my life, I'm interested in writing about those experiences and what they might mean to someone else.

Why steviegdavis.com Exists

This site is where I write about the subjects I find worth thinking about.

Sometimes that means poverty.

Sometimes it means technology, artificial intelligence, retirement, careers, personal responsibility, mistakes, opportunity or something from my past that still has something to teach me.

I don't expect everyone to agree with everything I write.

That's not the point.

The purpose is to think about these subjects, tell the stories as I remember them, and perhaps start a conversation with someone whose experience was different from mine.

If something here makes you remember your own childhood, question an assumption, reconsider a decision, or simply stop and think for a few minutes, then the writing has accomplished something.

This Is Where It Begins

My life did not begin with many advantages.

But the beginning wasn't the ending.

That's one of the lessons I keep returning to, whether I'm writing about poverty, careers, technology or life itself:

This is where it begins. Not where it ends.

Thank you for reading.

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