Mark D. Tyszka has lived his entire life in Central Connecticut.  He was born in New Britain in 1954 as the second of what would become a family of five children.  Though both of his parents worked, money was always in short supply. Not long after he was born his family moved into a public housing project in Bristol where Mark lived until he was 24.  He attended most of his grammar school years at a Polish Catholic school in Bristol and then decided to move to public school in eighth grade and for his high school years.  College started out rocky but Mark found his footing and graduated with a Bachelor’s degree.  Like many young adults, he bounced around through a number of jobs and living situations in his 20’s until eventually finding a career, discovering he was gay, meeting the man of his dreams and settling down.  This is his story of those early years.  In it, Mark provides a glimpse of what it was like to grow up as an average kid in a blue-collar city in America in the late 1950’s and 1960’s and to come of age and find his own way in the world in the 1970’s.