CULLMAN — The first thing you notice when you meet David Perdew is how funny he is. His wit sometimes seems in contrast with his serious side — the man is a computer geek, after all.

Perdew grew up in New Castle, Ind. After serving three years in the U.S. Air Force, he graduated from Indiana University in 1978, with a major in journalism and a minor in art.

Then went right out and bought a newspaper. That’s pretty gutsy at the age of 26.

Even though he had received the top merit scholarship, he says he was too young, dumb and desperate to be scared of the undertaking.

“I inherited a staff who had been at the Henry County News-Republican for a long time. They weren't impressed that I was fresh out of college and was now their boss," he said.   

“It was real work, running a paper,” he admitted. 

He brought two I.U. journalism classmates along for the ride, and at the end of nine months they had improved the circulation of the paper by 130 percent, winning several awards and making a name for themselves along the way.

At the age of 27, Perdew sold the paper and went to work as a photo-editor with Gannett, a world-wide newspaper group, in Rochester, N.Y. While there, he founded the Rochester magazine and became an in-house consultant to many of the Gannett newspapers. “When I arrived in Rochester in 1979, again the youngest on a staff of 16, I walked into my new office and found a box of diapers on my chair,” he laughed.

On March 15, 1984, he got a phone call from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution with a job offer. As he spoke to the person on the other end of the line, he was looking out the window at 33 inches of new-fallen snow, which lay atop a previous 60 inches — a total of 93 inches of snow.

“What’s the temperature down there?” he asked the caller.

“It’s 72 degrees. Why?” came the puzzled reply.

“I’ll be there,” he answered.

He walked into the offices of the Atlanta-based paper, through doors frequented by such noted news men and women as Ralph McGill, Joel Chandler Harris, and of course, Lewis Grizzard, who was still there at the time. “The newspaper community is really very small, when you get right down to it,” he said. “When I open a copy of National Geographic now, I see the names of folks I came up through the ranks with.”

The life of an editor left Perdew unfilled in some ways. In 1989, he left to strike out on his own. He created a stock photo business called “Stock South,” which he later sold just in time. “I’d been hearing about digital photography since 1975, and now it was here,” he mused. “That was the beginning of the age of digital photography, and it would have cost me a fortune to retool, so I sold out to a company in London, called ‘Pictor’.”

He landed on both feet, this time as a contractor with    Anderson Consulting Team. At the age of 44, he was no longer the youngest guy in the building. “My boss was 24, and it was common for my co-workers to ask me research questions like, ‘David, when did the U.S. leave Viet Nam?’ or ‘What year did the Beatles come to America?’” he laughed.

He was entrusted with more and larger projects. “One thing I’ve found about larger companies is that they move so slowly, sometimes you can actually hide until you learn what to do,” he chuckled. “At one point someone asked me to write a financial reporting tool in Microsoft Access, so, not knowing the first thing about programming, but of course, accepting the job anyway, I went out and bought a book and taught myself how to program in about three weeks.” The company used his program for the next 10 years.

Perdew and his wife, Charlsa, were living in Smyrna, Ga., at the time. He was 27 miles from his office. It took him an hour and 15 minutes to make the commute. “It made me crazy,” he confessed.

In 2002, the couple made the decision to leave the city and move to Alabama. “Again, I was too dumb to be scared of leaving a secure job,” he said.

“I’ve heard it said that you will leave when the pain of staying is greater than the pain of leaving. It was time to leave,” he said.

So they did.

“I didn’t have a clue what I was going to do, but I had faith,” he said.

They sold practically everything they owned and put the rest of their possessions in a little storage building.

He got a call not long after they were in Alabama from Cingular, offering him a temporary consulting position back in Atlanta, so for a while he commuted between Hartselle and Atlanta.

Through a chance meeting with an elderly family friend, they stumbled on the opportunity to buy 95 acres of raw forest land complete with four streams, a 60-foot waterfall, and a 12-acre pasture in Eva. They jumped at the chance.

He hired Cullman contractors Terry Poole and Ricky Frost to build a road, run the utilities and dig a foundation. “I stood there in that hole looking at what seemed like a tiny area with no idea how to build a house and said, ‘Holy Mackerel, what have I gotten myself into?!’”

Nine months later, after a lot of hard work, the couple had their dream home, a 2,200 square-foot log cabin built with David’s two hands. “It was the most fun I’ve ever had in my life,” he says.

He started yet another business, Niche Affiliate Marketing System, Inc. Using his journalism, consulting and teaching skills, he has created a training program for teaching people how to build online businesses. With workshops twice a year in Atlanta that have grown to more than 300 attendees, he has recruited a group of 40 experts who teach people everything they need to know about running an Internet business.

“Some of them, but not all, have a storefront business, and they want to expand into eCommerce, so we do workshops to help them navigate those waters,” he explained.

Asked how he made the transition from city life to country boy, he laughed. "It’s actually country boy (from Indiana) to city boy to country boy, but one of the first lessons Charlsa taught me was that I should pop my index finger up at oncoming vehicles, just to be neighborly.”

He doesn’t miss the traffic at all. “Now I commute from upstairs to downstairs,” he grinned.

“I use to whiz down the freeway at 85 mph in bumper-to-bumper Atlanta traffic. They were so close I could have reached out the window and touched another vehicle, but now a traffic jam consists of getting stuck behind a tractor on a two-lane road.”

He loves the food. “In Indiana we ate mashed potatoes, roast beef and corn. In Rochester I learned a lot about ethnic foods. I’ve loved learning about other cultures, and have visited five of the seven continents, and about 45 countries. I’ve spent time in Africa, China, South America and Europe, but coming to Alabama has been a real cultural experience.”

His whole perspective on having a conversation has changed drastically. “When we started the house a guy pulled up in a flatbed truck with a load of materials,” he recalled. “After we unloaded it I signed the invoice and started to walk away. He just leaned up against his truck and started talking. An hour later we were still talking. I wasn’t used to that. Didn’t know him, hadn’t seen him before, haven’t seen him since, but for an hour, we were good friends.”

“Now, when I go to Atlanta, everyone seems so anonymous. People never look you directly in the eye, and there is no personal contact. Here, everyone looks you in the eye, smiles and speaks,” he commented. “I like that.”

Being from Indiana, Perdew was all about basketball. He even traveled with Bobby Knight and the team in 1976, to the national championship in Baton Rouge, as the photographer for the student paper.

Perhaps his biggest change has been converting from a Hoosier basketball enthusiast into an Alabama football fan. His wife, Charlsa, had a lot to do with that.

“My nephew asked me: Who do you go for? Alabama or Auburn? I asked why I had to choose, and he said, ‘You just have to,’” he laughed. “So I chose Alabama  and now I don’t miss any games and have attended both the 2009 and 2011 BCS National Championships — which we won if you haven’t heard,” he joked.

Perdew has come to love Cullman. He and Charlsa work out at the Wellness and Aquatic Center and he loves hanging out at Berkley Bob’s Coffee Shop. “Bob and I have had many discussions about Eight Mile Creek, which starts out as a spring just off our property and becomes a feeder stream for Lake Catoma."

“Cullman is home now,” he said. “Other friends like Jeb Williamson, Tim Compton, Sister Lynn McKenzie and Joe Holmes, have made sure that we were welcome and have made us feel at home here. This is a wonderful place to live.”