Occupation: I’m the general manager for the Five Guys restaurant on South Main Street in Newtown.

Family: My wife is Dorothy, and we have two kids. Kimberly is 21 and Kurt is 17, a senior at Newtown High School.

Pets: We have some interesting pets. We have one cat that is about to have her “sweet 16,” Elizabeth. We have a t3-year-old bearded dragon names Sparko. And we have a rescue tarantula, Rosie, a rose-haired tarantula. She looks almost purple when the light hits her. She’s the easiest pet of all to take care of — all she needs is some water and a cricket once in awhile.

How long have you lived in Newtown? I’ve lived here for ten years. We moved to Newtown from Brookfield, so it wasn’t a huge change.

What do you like to do in your free time? Twice a week, I play full-court basketball with the Police Athletic League in Danbury. I race 16-foot catamarans all over the country, mostly in the Northeast. I’ve been doing that for over 30 years, and have numerous North American championships, and I’ve been to three world championships, as well. I work out two to three times a week to keep in shape for racing. I also race model sailboats, a sort of scaled down version of the America’s Cup Boats. Last year I won the national championship in the Sea Wind class with the model boat. I do sail them a little bit on Ram Pasture pond in the spring, when there are no weeds.

Do you have a favorite place to sail? Probably Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island, for pleasure sailing. There are four places in the US with the thermal effect — where the bay is warm and the ocean cold — and that is one of them. So on a nice day, Narragansett Bay has great winds and flat waters.

Do you have a favorite travel destination? We used to go to Wildwood, N.J., a lot, especially when the kids were smaller. There are nice beaches, fishing off the back of the boat, and we grill outside the motor home. It was so much fun. We tend to go to Rhode Island now, because we have a house there and can launch the boat just five minutes away from the house.

What is the best thing about Newtown? It’s nice that I can sail my model boat on the pond nearby, and I like that I can jog down the road without someone running me down. We love walking down Main Street, too, and around the center of town. There’s a great feeling you get, being in this town.

Do you have a personal philosophy? There are no problems, only solutions. I say it all the time.

What is the craziest thing you have ever done? I didn’t think it was so nuts, but my wife did… I was helping to build a suspension footbridge up at my dad’s cabin in Pennsylvania, and someone had to walk across the cable we had strung from one side of the ditch to the other, about 30 feet up, in order to start hooking up the slats to walk on. That was me. I was dangling by a wire. Dorothy couldn’t watch. I’ve also been out in some pretty high wind weather on the ocean, with ten-foot waves when I’ve been racing. It’s hard to say which is crazier.