I was born Theodore J. Richter, Jr. on October 27, 1961 in Mineola, New York just outside of Queens. After a year of living in an apartment, the Richter family moved east to a low cost Levittown-style housing development in Islip, New York. It was a non-union blue-collar neighborhood and all the houses had fake screw-in plastic shutters. I, the young "Teddy," grew up here with his two younger sisters. Pictured above is the house I grew up in...well, kind of. In the foreground I am doing a footplant off the family Ford Falcon station wagon, flying on my skateboard, wearing a cheap Halloween mask. Behind me, is the house across the street from my actual house, but since all the houses in the neighborhood were cookie-cutter identical, my house looked exactly the same.